The Infinite Dial

You don't hear much about large-market broadcasters pulling their radio station streams these days, but Pittsburgh Radio & TV Online reports that two of Renda Broadcasting's local stations, Adult Standards WJAS and AC WSHH, have done just that. Clicking WJAS' "listen live" link gets you a notice that "due to escalating royalty fees," the streams have been discontinued since the first of the year.

Renda also owns stations in Jacksonville and Fort Myers, Fla., and Oklahoma City and Tulsa, Okla. Clicking the Listen Live link at WWGR Fort Myers gets you a similar note. At KHTT Tulsa and KOMA Oklahoma City, stations that were streaming within the last year, there is no longer a readily apparent Listen Live button.

Renda's move should be a reminder that the music royalty and AFTRA issues that held streaming back for so long, and until relatively recently, are hardly resolved. And even with their trepidation about split ratings credit for on-line listening, broadcasters besieged by other issues seem to have just given up on fixing the AFTRA issue, and would rather run a separate stopset for the Web.

By the way, if you think that problem -- on-line stopset content -- is resolved, you should know that I've been monitoring a top 10 market today and on the first two stations I heard, there were problems with the Web stops, both involving major group-owned stations. On one, the Web-only content periodically stopped in the middle, was interrupted by bits of fill music, then resumed; conversely, there was also a Web-only song that played for about 45 seconds and was truncated by a promo. On the other, I heard the on-air spot and the Web-only substitute play simultaneously, twice. Later, I punched over to that station's sister in an even larger market and heard the same problem.