"D Peter Maus" wrote in message
news

$100k is a Cap item. The couple of thousand is recurring.

But the cap item depreciation hits each year and quarter. Granted, it does
not impact EBITDA, but if you are a non-public corporation, that would not
matter... it is money out of pocket.

When we bought into the new combiner on the top of the Hancock and
upgraded our antenna, we dropped more than $1.3M and no one batted an eye.
But we were still reusing the toner in the copy machine, and bitching
about the airconditioning bill in the summer. No one blinks at the Cap
item when it can result in recurring savings.

I guess some companies look at it that way. I wish I had a huge capex budget
like that!

Especially when use of the analog stream falls below the use of the HD
stream, and with as many distribution outlets many stations are
investigating, a GM will get a real itch to shut down the analog stream,
and save that outflow for something more profitable.

I am an HD supporter, but I can nrealistically see this tipping point int he
next 5 to 7 years. Can you? I don't even know if AM will survive.


I think that may be a bit optimistic. Given the rate at which radio use
in general is declining, (and this has been a fairly recently documented
phenomenon...even as late as last year, the numbers suggested that things
were only off slightly..

The decline in cume is very small. 2% since '65. The listening time is off 2
hours off a base of 21 for the average listener, and that is since 1988. So
we have nearly 10% or a rate of nearly a percent a year. However, the
erosion is mostly in non-servable demos, teens and 55+ with some 18-24, but
far less. There are so many reasons for all this that it is not easily
analyzed.

.Bridge has been reporting sizeable erosion for the last two quarters, now)
and given the difficulty, at least from where I sit, in listening to AM
signals, and the lack of options for retrieving some content once the IBOC
hash blots out the available signals, I don't expect things to remain
viable for analog AM for anything near a decade.

Bridge really lacks credibility to me. They use a marketing model of
Awareness - Trial _ Usage and not a broad sample nor much ethnic sample
(they apparently have no Hisanic interviewers, as far as I know) and the
data is suspect. Arbittron has a lot of data on the website, with immense
samples over a million a year.

Let me give you an example...where I am, far north suburbs of Chicago,
about a 3 wood from Waukegan...I've got two AM's, one Milwaukee, one in
Chicago, that carry Rush Limbaugh. If I want to consume that content,
those are my choices. There is no local station offering that content. As
the IBOC rash spreads, those stations, WISN and WLS will become closed to
me. They're nearly impossible to catch some days, anyway, due to noise.
The Din of iBiquity would close them entirely, as it has a number of other
stations formerly available here. And you know I'm no slouch when I want a
signal. But even I can't pull content out of the noise where IBOC is
concerned.

This is more an AM probem in current noise level environments. we find we
can not get diaries in LA with under 15 mv/m, and 20 is better.

Agfian, Am may not make it. News talk is migrating to FM now, including DC,
tallahassee, Phoenix, Salt Lake, etc. This may be inevitable. AM analog
sucks.

Eventually, the conversation about terminating analog AM will extend
beyond the coffee bars between GM's and into much higher places where
things get decided in earnest.

Maybe if nobody is making money, we will go all digital. I see this as a
beyond 5 year issue.