NorthEast Radio Watch 4/15/2024: Broadcasters Gather in VegAIs

In this week’s issue… AI, virtualization hot topics at NAB – WBAI faces second site eviction – CBS Sports Radio affiliates rebrand – New morning show at Y108 – Remembering Mister Cee

By SCOTT FYBUSH

Jump to: ME – NH – VT – MA – RI – CT – NY – NJ – PA – Canada

*LAS VEGAS – As more than 60,000 broadcasters gather once again for the NAB Show and all the conferences and meetings that surround it, there are two letters that define this year’s event.

It’s the year of AI, not just in broadcasting but seemingly everywhere – and if you, like your editor, tend toward skepticism on that topic, you’ll find plenty to be skeptical about on the show floor. There are lots of vendors this year who’d love to sell your radio station some sort of AI-driven (or at least AI-adjacent) disembodied voice from the cloud that will take the place of a live or voicetracked human. Some of them are even reasonably convincing.

But just because it can be done, is it worth doing? There aren’t a lot of broadcasters who seem to be asking that question, and perhaps they should. After all, broadcast radio already has an identity and visibility crisis. We spent some time on the show’s first day talking with Xperi and other vendors about the challenges radio faces in remaining front and center on auto dashboards, an increasingly important connection point in a world when few listeners are buying standalone radios for home or portable use.

We’re a long way from the days of five pushbutton presets and two knobs. Rent a car now and it can take several menu layers to even find the radio at all, never mind how to navigate to HD subchannels. What’s going to drive listeners to continue to want to go to that trouble, and to tell car dealers they still need radio in their dash? I’d bet that it’s the kind of actual human contact and content that radio still excels at, when it wants to. Are there plenty of applications for AI when it comes to things like captioning, running traffic systems or any of the other offerings on display here at NAB? Certainly – but only as ways to enhance, not replace, human-created content.

Speaking of things for which there’s no replacement for a human, another theme we’re taking away from NAB this year is the continued urgent need for more broadcast engineers. It’s been a running theme in conversation after conversation: while groups such as SBE and the Association of Public Radio Engineers are trying hard to provide mentorship and training opportunities for would-be engineers, the aging out of the profession still represents a looming crisis that needs a bigger, industry-wide effort to fix.

We’ll be talking more about that in the months to come, and we’ll have more NAB wrapup next week when we’re back on the ground in NERW-land.