• My Account
  • Your Profile
  • Member Archives
Saturday, June 10, 2023
Cart / $0.00

No products in the cart.

Fybush.com
  • Home
  • Archives
  • Subscribe
  • My Account
  • Store
    • Cart
    • Checkout
  • About/Contact
    • Scott Fybush
    • Copyright Information
    • Privacy Policy
  • Fybush Media
  • Links
No Result
View All Result
Fybush.com
  • Home
  • Archives
  • Subscribe
  • My Account
  • Store
    • Cart
    • Checkout
  • About/Contact
    • Scott Fybush
    • Copyright Information
    • Privacy Policy
  • Fybush Media
  • Links

No products in the cart.

No Result
View All Result
Fybush.com
No Result
View All Result

Site of the Week 7/31/2020: San Antonio’s New iHeart Studios

Scott Fybush by Scott Fybush
July 31, 2020
in Free Content, Texas, Tower Site of the Week
0

Text and photos by SCOTT FYBUSH

Spending a little over a day in San Antonio didn’t make me an expert on the Alamo City’s development, but just driving around gave me at least a pretty good sense of one thing: a lot of the growth in this fast-growing urban area has been up on its north side. The sprawl long since outgrew the I-410 loop around the city, and these days it pushes well beyond Loop 1604, the huge outer loop around the metro, too.

KABB/WOAI-TV offices
KABB/WOAI-TV offices
KABB/WOAI-TV studios
KABB/WOAI-TV studios

Looking for San Antonio’s TV stations? You’ll find several of them up here on the north side, including three right on the frontage road along 410 just west of the big interchange with I-10. This is the longtime home of Sinclair’s Fox affiliate KABB (Channel 29, named for original owner Alamo Broadcasting), as well as its shared-services partner KMYS (Channel 35, once KRRT for its city of license, Kerrville.)

More recently, this complex of buildings (business office on the left, studios on the right) has also become home to KABB’s duopoly partner, NBC affiliate WOAI-TV (Channel 4); in 2014, channel 4 left its longtime downtown home at 1031 Navarro Street to move up here.

KENS-TV
KENS-TV

An earlier move from downtown happened in the 1980s, when KENS-TV (Channel 5) left the complex of its then newspaper owner, the Express-News, for a state-of-the-art new building off Fredericksburg Road, half a mile northeast of the Sinclair stations.

Cox on Datapoint
Cox on Datapoint

Continue north on Fredericksburg just a couple of lights and you come to the office parks that line Datapoint Drive, named for a pioneering computer company that foundered in the early 1980s before it could occupy its new headquarters skyscraper here.

The building would go on to house several radio operators over the years: there are still FM bays on the roof, a relic of when San Antonio’s first public radio station, KPAC (88.3) began broadcasting from the rooftop here before eventually joining sister station KSTX (89.1) out at the Galm Road site we showed you last week.

Today, KPAC and KSTX are part of Texas Public Radio, located in a different office building down Datapoint Drive, while Cox Radio’s San Antonio stations make their studio home in the original Datapoint building.

iHeart's new building
iHeart’s new building
iHeart lobby
iHeart lobby

The north side of San Antonio is also where Clear Channel’s explosive growth happened, or at least where it was based. As the company grew into one of the biggest station owners in the country, it made its headquarters at 200 E. Basse Road, a nondescript office building off US 281 south of Loop 410. Its local cluster of stations operated from a different location, a two-story building on the I-10 frontage just south of 410, almost within walking distance of KABB and KENS, if anyone actually walked on this tangle of busy arterial roads.

After Clear Channel became iHeart and much of its corporate leadership became based in New York, it consolidated its spaces here in San Antonio. By late 2018, both the Basse Road offices and the “6222” building had been emptied, with corporate offices and the local stations all relocating up to the Stone Oak area, way up north along 281, even beyond the outer reaches of the 1604 loop.

Lobby studio
Lobby studio
Lobby studio
Lobby studio

This is a very different studio facility even from most of the other new cluster studios we’ve shown you in recent years. With so much of the programming on these stations – sports “Ticket” KTKR (760), news-talk WOAI (1200), classic country KRPT (92.5 the Bull), top-40 “Now” KXXM (96.1), country KAJA (97.3), AC KQXT (101.9) and Spanish hits KZEP (104.5) – either being tracked or arriving from other markets, the facility was built without dedicated studios for any individual station.

There’s a showcase studio right off the lobby where each station puts its most prominent shows: the WOAI morning show, KTKR’s late-morning sports talk, “Latino Hits” in the early afternoon and so on, with the digital signage on the walls changing for each station and the Wheatstone consoles seamlessly reconfiguring as each station takes over.

WOAI control room
WOAI control room
iHeart newsroom
iHeart newsroom

Behind the lobby studio, WOAI is the lone station with a dedicated control room, adjoining a newsroom that feeds it and other iHeart stations across Texas.

Keep moving down the hallway here and you’ll pass a programming bullpen area with a handful of enclosed offices – and then turn the corner and you’ll find another open office area lined with studios.

iHeart programming bullpen
iHeart programming bullpen
iHeart studio bullpen
iHeart studio bullpen
iHeart studio signage
iHeart studio signage

Who’s in which studio? You’ll need to look at the video screen by each studio door to see who’s reserved the room, and for which station – any of these studios can easily be put on the air live on any station, or can be used to track a station or feed out to a station or network somewhere else.

As with the showcase studio up front, these rooms each have Wheatstone consoles that can switch on the fly to handle the needs of whichever talent and station is using the studio. The video walls switch, too – and speaking of video, there are lots of cameras in each room so that talent can originate video content as well as audio.

 

Another back studio, for KTKR
Another back studio, for KTKR
One back studio, for WOAI
One back studio, for WOAI

There’s another row of smaller studios on the opposite side, specifically for production and tracking. There’s a big data center on the other side of the building, mostly for iHeart corporate but with a couple of rows of racks of gear for the local stations (no pictures here!), and upstairs, past the iHeart corporate office space, a smaller room handles all the microwave feeds to the transmitter sites all over the area.

We’ll show you a few more of those, and another surprise studio visit, as we wrap up our look at San Antonio (including, yes, a stop at the Alamo) in next week’s installment.

Thanks to iHeart’s Jason Fernandez for the tour!

CALENDARS ON CLEARANCE

If you don’t have your 2023 Tower Site Calendar yet, now is the perfect time to get it. Because we have lowered the price to just $14.

The calendar has great photos of broadcast sites near and far (everywhere from Navajo Nation on the cover to Boston to Toronto to Texas, and beyond), plus a lovely “centerfold” you can keep on your wall for 2024.

It’s still shipping regularly, and you can have yours in just a couple of days!

Order your copy and you’ll see what we mean.

If you have already ordered your calendar, make sure you check out the other items in the store, too!

And don’t miss a big batch of South Texas IDs next Wednesday, over at our sister site, TopHour.com!

Next week: One more installment from San Antonio

Share this:

  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • Pocket
  • Email
  • Print
  • More
  • Facebook
Tags: KABBKAJAKENSKMYSKPACKQXTKRPTKRRTKSTXKTKRKXXMKZEPWOAIWOAI-TV
Previous Post

NorthEast Radio Watch 7/27/2020: Ed Ansin, 1936-2020

Next Post

NorthEast Radio Watch 8/3/2020: The Weirdest Sports Summer Ever

Scott Fybush

Scott Fybush

Editor/Publisher, NorthEast Radio Watch and Tower Site of the Week

Related Posts

NorthEast Radio Watch 4/10/2023: Audacy Sells in Buffalo
Free Content

NERW Extra: A New “Star” in Buffalo

Townsquare picks up Star brand, hot AC format in Buffalo

by Scott Fybush
June 9, 2023
WBTK transmitters
Free Content

Site of the Week 6/9/2023: Richmond, VA 2022

A quick stop in Richmond for some baseball and radio

by Scott Fybush
June 9, 2023
NorthEast Radio Watch 7/6/2020: Flips for the Fourth
Free Content

Top of the Tower Podcast #057: Dr. Donna Halper, Hall of Famer

A conversation with the newest inductee into the Massachusetts Broadcasters Hall of Fame, Dr. Donna Halper

by Scott Fybush
June 8, 2023
NorthEast Radio Watch 6/5/2023: Toucher Comes Clean
Free Content

Top of the Tower Podcast #056 – Previewing RadioDays North America

A conversation about the upcoming RadioDays North America convention in Toronto

by Scott Fybush
June 7, 2023
Next Post
NorthEast Radio Watch 8/3/2020: The Weirdest Sports Summer Ever

NorthEast Radio Watch 8/3/2020: The Weirdest Sports Summer Ever

Log In


Join Now | Lost Password?

Get Fybush.com Updates

Get Fybush.com updates emailed directly to your inbox!

Fybush.com Twitter List

My Tweets

© 2023 JNews - Premium WordPress news & magazine theme by Jegtheme.

No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Archives
  • Subscribe
  • My Account
  • Store
    • Cart
    • Checkout
  • About/Contact
    • Scott Fybush
    • Copyright Information
    • Privacy Policy
  • Fybush Media
  • Links

© 2023 JNews - Premium WordPress news & magazine theme by Jegtheme.

 

Loading Comments...
 

You must be logged in to post a comment.