Intelligence Briefs

In the mid-1950s, the transistor revolutionized radio. Gone were the “portable” tube radios with bulky, expensive batteries

The situation has become an all too familiar one. The station has been on the market for the last five years. Few offers have come in and none of those could be thought of as being remotely attractive or credible. In some cases, the proposed purchase price was laughably low. In other cases, the purchase price was attractive, but the buyer’s financing was suspect. The buyer even wanted the seller to finance a large portion of the deal by issuing seller paper. Finally, however, the seller receives an attractive offer. The proposed purchase price is a good one. The buyer supposedly has its financing in place. Nevertheless, the seller has a lingering doubt about the buyer. The buyer has no track record of closing broadcast deals. In fact, the buyer – having made most of its money in real estate transactions – is new to the broadcast industry. Given the length of time that the station has been on the market and the attractiveness of the proposed purchase price, however, the seller wants to explore the opportunity and see if the buyer’s proposal is for real.

Several state broadcast associations have made forays into law changes that would permit a more flexible and robust method of publishing notice ads. Our proposed model in Maine called for a centralized statewide website run by an independent third party, with rates deeply discounted from print-ad rates (no overhead or circulation costs, remember) to save some of the taxpayers’ hard-earned, and with a daily “snapshot” of site content delivered to the state archives as proof of publication. It also called for a widespread, ongoing mass media campaign (think radio and TV ads) to create awareness and drive people to the website. Unfortunately, despite support from our Governor, the idea ran up against the press juggernaut and was ultimately unsuccessful.

A mobile-TV viewer pays closer attention when viewing video on a smartphone as opposed to a larger device. This may not surprise you. What may surprise you is just how much we have been able to learn about the attention the viewer pays to that smartphone.

I attended CES recently with 150,000+ others including an estimated

Over the last few years, consumers have increased, not decreased, the time they spend watching television content. This might sound like good news for advertisers, save for two important caveats. First, while attention time dedicated to TV content has been rising, this is not the case for people actually paying attention to the ads on the screen. Second, when consumers are watching TV they are increasingly dividing their attention between the TV set and other devices, particularly tablets and other mobile devices. A 2011 Nielsen Co. survey showed that as much as 40% of time watching TV is spent on such media multitasking activities, and it’s likely that this behavior has accelerated over the past three years. While many advertisers are rightly nervous about multitasking, there could be new opportunities to benefit from this trend. My recent working paper with researchers Jura Liaukonyte and Kenneth Wilbur tries to pinpoint what, exactly, these benefits might be – and how they can be achieved.

John Poray, Society of Broadcast Engineers Executive Director, presented a paper at the NAB in 2012, which cited the “age bubble” as one of the greatest challenges to the broadcast engineering profession. In his paper titled, “The Shortage of Broadcast Engineers – is there, or do we just need to know where to look?” he compared 2001 SBE membership statistics to 2011. Poray’s paper indicated that in 2001, 33% of SBE members were between ages 45 and 56 while only 16% were between ages 55 and 65. At the end of 2011, 32% of SBE members who were currently employed were between 45 and 56 years of age. SBE members between 45 and 66 years old made up 65% of membership at that time. Only 8.4% were under age 36.

With the number of natural disasters and other large-scale emergency situations on the rise around

Answer my quick quiz… Who are the two US Senators from your state?

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is considering an end to the regulatory support of

The A&E Network just announced that they were lifting their suspension of Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson and bringing him back less than a week after suspending him for remarks he made in GQ in regards to homosexuals and African-Americans (as I had predicted they would last week). One could hear echoes of Claude Rains’ famous quote in Casablanca of ‘I am shocked, shocked, shocked that gambling is going on (after pocketing his winnings) with the announcement. Nobody is shocked. The decision was inevitable. Duck Dynasty is the network’s number one rated show and in many ways there is no network without Duck Dynasty. This crisis showed totally the power of social media.