What are the biggest challenges that directors of engineering are dealing with these days?
I had the opportunity to sit down with several DOEs in separate conversations at the spring NAB Show. What I heard sheds light on the real-world impact of the trends we cover in RW throughout the year.
For one thing, they’re overworked. You might be tempted to pull out the world’s smallest violin when I say that, but look, cutbacks in engineering staff over many years, combined with the streamlining of engineering roles at the very top, means that these folks bear a great deal of stress that may have little to do with the reasons they got into radio engineering in the first place.
Some indeed have been tasked with filling the shoes of highly experienced and nationally visible technology leaders who had mentored them but then left those roles, willingly or otherwise.
These engineers now are the ones interacting with the CEOs in a very challenged industry. Those CEOs may in turn have just come out of very stressful interactions of their own with investors, boards of directors or bankers. And you know what they say about stuff flowing downhill.
Among major issues weighing on these DOEs is real estate management. (Whose Elmer ever taught them that?)
On the RF side, fewer companies own their own steel now, and costs of leasing antenna and tower space keep escalating. With bosses pressing them to find cost savings, lease negotiations with tower owners get more intense, and the pressure builds to find facility moves and opportunities for creative combined transmission facilities.
Meanwhile on the studio side, as you know, radio groups continue to downsize their physical footprints in local markets. More and more I hear the phrase, “Our local studio is now just a sales office.”
And maybe not even that. One DOE told me, “Our company is reviewing every market lease. And we’re discontinuing some of them.”
As a result our industry is turning more and more to distributed workflows. That is an interesting technical story in itself, but it challenges the traditional way of doing radio. “Major-market stations now may be run from a NOC hundreds of miles away,” one leader told me.
Meanwhile, big radio enterprises also are now more likely to contract out key administrative functions to offshore resources. These might include traffic, accounting and the IT help desk. That’s a big change to how broadcast companies are run.
Engineering leaders also must be skilled in video. Studios are being designed from the outset with video capabilities that go well beyond what radio has been doing visually for the past 20 years. This may also mean becoming knowledgeable in how video can be purposed for various platforms, including social media cutups.
Further, another round of consolidation is on the horizon. If the FCC removes local ownership caps as I fully expect it will, we reasonably can expect a surge of buying and selling. This in turn will probably mean further reimagining of clusters.
One engineer encouraged me to think about that process not so much as a lot of companies buying stations, but rather of major groups finding swapping opportunities. A company like Audacy or EMF might feel that it is relatively weak in Market X so it could trade those stations to its local competitor in order to become even stronger in Market Y.
Oh, and cybersecurity. If anything would keep me up at night as a technology leader, it would be worrying about the almost infinite number of ways a bad actor could do harm to my employer’s internal systems and data.
And DOEs now must also be conversant in the cloud.
In fact this was perhaps the top theme of the radio exhibit hall, with numerous new products offering broadcasters options in automation, scheduling, AI content generation, network distribution, talkshow systems and other key functions.
The impact of cloud technologies is a story we’ve been telling for some time, but I felt that things really stepped up at this convention. As one engineer told me, managers now see that these tools “are making it possible to do audio seamlessly from anywhere.”
That’s powerful. But it’s also stressful. I heard about a recent meeting in which a top executive at a major group told his head of engineering: “We need to move to the cloud. Now.” That single conversation will affect the technology backbone at hundreds of stations.
One experienced exhibitor, a self-described cloud skeptic, told me “radio isn’t ready for the cloud,” because of infrastructure implications and concerns about operational resilience. I know several software companies that would disagree strongly. But another person, a director of engineering, said that when it comes to the cloud, “There’s no sheriff. There’s no equivalent to an AES67 standard. It feels like the Wild West.”
None of this is intended to paint an overly negative picture.
I have a lot of respect for engineers who have taken on roles that demand so much expertise in so many disciplines. The directors of engineering I spoke with remain excited to be working in this medium. They seem to embrace their responsibilities. They understand that the decisions they make affect a lot of people and help shape the success of their employers, even if they can’t get their hands into the back of an equipment rack as often as they used to.
What challenges are radio technical leaders facing in their everyday jobs? Email me at [email protected].
PS: Perhaps the best tech tip I heard at the show came from an engineer whose transmitter was acting up and he wasn’t sure why. He hated the idea of having to ship anything to the factory. So he simply dumped the transmitter manual into his AI platform and then asked a question. And presto, it delivered the technical answer he needed.
Sometimes the solution is right there in front of us.
Comment on this or any article. Email [email protected].
