A Pai with a plan

On October 29th, the FCC published a set of guidelines it hopes will “revitalize further the AM band by identifying ways to enhance AM broadcast quality and proposing changes to our technical rules that would enable AM stations to improve their service.” There are six core proposals in the FCC’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM 13-249): the first is to allow AM broadcasters an exclusive opportunity to file for an FM translator — that is, to take their existing signal and rebroadcast it into the more widely consumed FM band. Easy enough to understand.

The AM band may simply be too big of a hassle for Americans to both produce for and listen to

The remaining five address some very technical economic regulations.

In its first 50 years, AM was a large enough player in the media landscape that it required lots of technical regulations to keep stations from interfering with one another’s signals while simultaneously serving their communities with adequate signals. Advertising money was pouring in, and business was big enough that it could support a large and robust engineering workforce to ensure compliance with all those regulations. Now that its audience is relatively microscopic and competition is low, those regulations need to be relaxed to make AM a viable medium, especially for minority and rural (read: small-budget) broadcasters to be able to effectively serve their communities.

If the FCC doesn’t adopt these rules, or something like them, the AM band may simply be too big of a hassle for Americans to both produce for and listen to. In a comment filed on the FCC’s proposed guidelines, Leigh Ellis, the owner of WAKE 1500AM in Porter County, Indiana said: “As helpful as some of these proposals in the NPRM might be, they may not … achieve … a noticeable change in the AM services long-term.”

Ellis is one of the many small-market station heads that filed official comments in support of the proposed changes to the AM band itself, but he’s also resigned to the fact that their businesses will probably be untenable if they don’t get an FM translator as well. Even if every AM listener in the country could hear any local station they wanted to perfectly clearly 24 hours a day, the fact remains that there just aren’t very many people hitting the “AM” button on their tuners these days, and there’s almost nothing anyone can do to change that trend. So what we end up with is proposed legislation that mostly aims to aims to enhance the AM programming band by turning it into FM programming.

Digital, or “HD” AM transmission is something we’ve been hearing about for more than a decade — but most of us have never actually heard it. Like digital TV, it sounds better, but requires stations to buy new transmitters and listeners to buy new receivers — and unlike TV’s transition to digital, there are still legal barriers to rolling out all-digital broadcasts. The National Association of Broadcasters commented on their ongoing experimentation with digital AM broadcasts, but pointed out inherent regulatory challenges: “Deployment of all-digital AM radio service would require a change to the commission’s rules.” After spending so much time in technical and legal beta, digital AM seems more like an expensive, niche destination than a viable alternative to its analog ancestor.