Lenders have until Tuesday to sign the deal, which would cut its $2 billion debt to $760 million. Shareholders would see their ownership stake wiped out.
So let’s see if you kept your Citadel Broadcasting stock (CTDB: trading at $0.041 per share) because you thought it might go above $1.00 per share again, you are screwed. Notice, 60% of the debt is just going away. Amazing! How do they do that? If I decided that I didn’t want to pay my mortgage, would the bank entice me to start paying again by reducing it by 60%? No, they would not. They would simply send me a foreclosure notice and eventually some guy would stand on the county courthouse steps and read my foreclosure warrant out loud to the passers-by. If I am lucky, it will be lunchtime and somebody might actually hear it.
No, what happens when a lender writes down $1.24 billion in debt is it gets passed on to all the other bank customers in higher interest rates, larger fees, etc. After all, the CEO needs to make his margins to earn that end-of-year bonus.
To recap, shareholders are losing everything and we all are going to pay more because Citadel Broadcasting Corporation overpaid for a group of radio stations, then ran them into the ground. Fuck us all.
Internet Neutrality has become a big topic among some groups. The fear is that some ISPs will filter internet users’ content, arbitrarily excluding whatever items they want without explanation or disclosure. The temptation is too great for some ISPs (Verizon, Comcast, ATT, et. al.) not to block certain IP addresses, say for example, that of a competitor.
This amounts to corporate censorship. If I have a Verizon account and I want to research other telephone companies, will I get accurate results? What about some potential regulation change that the company didn’t want to have Congress pass? How about adverse rulings about Verizon from the state public service commission?
In light of the NBC/Universal – Comcast deal announced last week, those concerns appear to carry even more weight. If the internet is going to replace radio, TV, and newspapers as some suggest, access must be unfettered. Any member of the public should be able to search through any ISP’s infrastructure and find all relevant data.
There have been FCC hearings on the matter, there is a NPRM, a web site has been set up, and there is a wikipedia entry. Recently, senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) have come out against the idea of Net Neutrality, although I cannot imagine why.
I decided to do a little experiment myself. At my official job, we have to ISPs, each on a separate T-1 line. The first ISP is a local company, Best Web. The other ISP is Verizon. On the Best Web circuit, I did a Google search for some innocuous term, with safe search turned off. I then used the same search terms on the Verizon circuit. I was surprised to see different results for each search. I did specific searches for items based on a geographical location, e.g. “widgets, Washington DC.” In each case, the Verizon search results were missing some of the pages that the Best Web search results had. This is going through Google. I have Verizon at home also and noted the same differences there.
By this relatively brief research, it would seem that Verizon is filtering out some pages they don’t like. It is difficult to say why, and if I didn’t go through the trouble of changing ISPs and repeating the search, I would have never known about it. Clearly, most people don’t understand:
This is already happening!
This is one of the key problems with the “internet” future. Access to data can be very easily controlled by programming firewalls and gateways at the IPS’s data center. Users searching for items will never know what they are missing. Having a diverse broadcasting industry has fostered freedom of the press and advanced our democracy. Loosing that will put us on a slippery road to Corporatocracy if we are not already there.
We have a few stations that are currently encoded with the Arbitron PPM encoders. I did a little research on the encoding method since it is not immediately apparent how they are transmitting their data.
Arbitron PPM encoders
According to Wikipedia, which can sometimes be relied upon, Arbitron used Martin Marietta to help develop the technology. Martin Marietta (now Lockheed Martin) is mostly known as a defense contractor, they have helped develop several complex military communications systems over the years.
There are no fewer than 39 US patents that cover the technology used in the PPM. The most significant of these appears to be 7,316,025 which describes the psychoacoustic masking technique employed.
It really is pretty slick, using a sample rate of 8.192 kHz, it transmits 4 bits per second in the 300-3000 Hz range by hitting specific frequencies in that range at varying intervals, adapting to the audio levels to keep the encoding below the programming content. 4 BPS is very slow and thus very robust. After all, I believe the only formation transmitted is a six-digit encoder serial number. I did not read all 39 patents to see if anything else was changed in the encoding method, so it may be slightly different.
This type of system would have fairly low overhead, not adding to the station’s bandwidth which is a consideration for FM stations, and in the correct frequency range for most AM receivers on the market today. Some people have said they have heard the encoding on one of our stations, most notably during silence or very quiet programming. Perhaps, especially in a dead air situation, one might hear in nearly imperceptible low frequency slow fluttering sound.
If anything, the encoding is perhaps too robust.
Now for the deployment of the monitor technology, which has so many up in arms. As with other Arbitron ratings methods, the main bone of contention seems to be the size and distribution of the sampling hardware. Minority groups feel they are underrepresented because the PPM is unevenly distributed.
Rating samples always seem to skew one way or another. The data samples themselves seem to be too small to accurately predict a station’s listenership. One anomaly and the entire month or quarter can be thrown off. The PPM seems to correct some if the issues with keeping an accurately written diary. One problem with the PPM however, it can also pick up incidental background noise and count it as time spent listening (TSL).
Think of the cubical environment where somebody several cubes away might be listening to a radio station. To the PPM wearer, it is unintelligible background noise, however, because of the perceptual encoding, the PPM picks it up and it counts as several hours of TSL.
A broader sample would dilute this with other more accurate representations of radio listening. A broader sample would also alleviate some of the complaints from the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council (MMTC). First-year physics students would recognize that not enough sample data can make results wildly inaccurate. Or, as one emergency room doctor stated while washing my knee out with a liter of sterile water after a dirt bike accident, the solution to pollution is dilution.
In one of the better TV shows about radio, newsman Less Nessman reports live on the “WKRP Thanksgiving Turkey Drop give away”
Happy Thanksgiving – WKRP Turkey Drop – kewego http://www.sharkhost.com Happy Thanksgiving from Sharkhost.com! This is a blast from the past, WKRP in Cincinnati Famous Turkey Drop. Sharkhost does not own any copyright to this material. Web host, web design, marketing and promotion.
