December 2013 Archives

GENIUS AT WORK

A long time ago, I worked for a guy named Bob McAllan, then the President of Press Broadcasting in New Jersey. Bob had one of the most brilliant minds I've encountered, always several steps ahead of everyone, especially the FCC. While I worked with him, we managed to do stuff like reallocate the TV dial in Central Florida to end up with us having the best TV signal in the market, 5 million watts in the main Orlando antenna farm on channel 18, and buying a Trenton FM, turning it into a statewide powerhouse, and figuring out how to let out the directional pattern so that we could cover even more territory. He was, and is, an amazing broadcaster.

And he's still at it. It was unsurprising that he managed to find an FCC TV regulation that remained on the books after the digital transition and used it to buy two rural northern Nevada TV stations (total value: practically nothing) and move them clear across the country, reallocating them to Middletown, NJ and Wilmington, DE, and putting their antennas smack in the middle of Manhattan and in Philadelphia's Roxborough antenna farm, respectively. Here he is pushing the button to launch the new Channel 2 Wilmington/Philadelphia:

The play with low-band VHF digital stations is, of course, to get must-carry positioning on cable systems. That, I hear, has been accomplished in Philadelphia, where the new KJWP-TV is being added to Comcast/Xfinity on channel 2. And that means that for the price of a rural Wyoming TV license, legal and engineering fees, a lease on the tower and in the transmitter building, and the cost of a used transmitter and antenna, Bob managed to pull off owning New York and Philadelphia full-market TV stations, all because he read the laws and understood them, and the FCC, which tried to deny the moves and was ordered by a judge to comply, didn't. I'm proud to have worked with Bob in the past, and I'm proud to see him still making brilliant moves and driving the FCC crazy in the process. In case you haven't followed my career, driving people crazy is kind of my thing, too.

There's more about the move by ace communications attorney Harry Cole here.

OH, RIGHT. HI.

Yeah, 'course I'm still here. Well, not specifically here. I'm here and here and here, but not here. You know?

Best intentions aside, it really has been difficult to find time to write things other than the ones for which I'm paid. Even in the past few weeks, which have ostensibly been "vacation" weeks in part (off from All Access, not from Nerdist), have been filled with work. I still WANT to write other things -- there's no room for my sports and historical pop culture musings on the other sites, save for the occasional belch buried in the usual radio or genre television/movie/book stuff -- but I just haven't had time to do it. There's a 2014 resolution for me in there someplace.

Well, this is a start. It's been, what, ten months? So this is as good a time as any to throw stuff on here. I've been kinda missing this place. Feels like home.

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Who?

    Perry Michael Simon. Talk radio guy. Vice President and Editor of the News-Talk-Sports section at AllAccess.com. Editor and writer at Chris Hardwick's Nerdist.com. Former Program Director, Operations Manager, host, and general nuisance at KLSX/Los Angeles, Y-107/Los Angeles, New Jersey 101.5. Freelance writer on media, sports, pop culture, based somewhere in the Los Angeles area. Contact him here for general matters, here for Nerdist matters, here for All Access/radio matters. Copyright 2003-2013 Perry Michael Simon. Yeah.

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