The spanish-language sports Network ESPN Deportes is closing down according to this story
https://awfulannouncing.com/espn/espn-deportes-radio-will-close-this-fall.html
Eventually people in American radio will catch on that Spanish language speaking immigrants have no money to spend, and what they do have they send back home to Mexico.
The first article says, “ESPN is closing it this fall, instead emphasizing podcasts and TV content from ESPN Deportes.”
I think that is the bigger story. Moving to stream on demand, no need to pay for transmissions that virtually no one listens to on an AM radio. Disney (the owner) did the same with the Radio Disney. As I write this, Radio Disney is streaming “Katy Perry – Never Really Over” online.
I finally have been in contact with somebody from the HD radio service, and they hope to offer me a list of the HD channels that I can incorporate into the database in the website. Radio Disney quietly was re-added to some HD2/3 sub-channels, but right now I could not tell you where.
I just revisited every conservative talk radio station, and along the way it became apparent just how pervasive the “saving AM radio” FM translators have become. My guesstimate is 85% of AM stations carrying conservative talk now have an FM translator. Somewhat atypical, WBT has an actual full power FM simulcast, but that’s just because they’re not very smart. Many AM/FM combos are being split apart, with the AM station now paired with an FM translator, and the FM station going off on its own playing some music format.
The loser in that arrangement is people who started to listen to the FM simulcast out in the Fringe area. The FM translator is not going to provide the same coverage, but the bulk of the people advertisers want to reach live in the center city or nearby. But even that is temporary – virtually every radio station is now streaming, and 5G on the horizon to the stream in the car, over-the-air radio is in serious trouble long-term.
Maybe a month ago Pluto TV, which is owned by Viacom, showed up on our Roku. 150ish free channels of “stuff”, but after a week or so, it is apparent this is going nowhere. It is built on the 1990s cable TV model with scheduled shows. Why would I want to watch the 24 hour Gordon Ramsey channel (no relation to Dave) showing me an episode that I cannot pause, rewind, or fast forward, when the same content is on free YouTube – I can watch any episode when I want, leave early, hit pause if the doorbell rings, and a much lighter commercial load.
I have said from the beginning that the survival of radio depends on producing content where is important that the show is live and not just podcast fodder. But that requires creativity, hard work, and a commitment to pay humans to produce the content.
I need to retract the lighter commercial load part. A typical video on my Amazon tablet now gives me two advertisements before the video, two advertisements after the video, and advertisements every few minutes. Some of the advertisements are 5 minutes long if you don’t stop them ahead of time.
Way to suck Google!
Wow, way to take a knee, ESPN
I started going through the list of sports radio stations, and ESPN affiliates are dropping like flies. Now I understand the pressure from above for the ESPN sports hosts to shut the f up about politics.
I have to applaud the ‘ way to take a knee comment’ Ha Ha L, I mean ha ha ,
great,
ESPN sux , Nike sux, Kapernick, well he just sux immensely also ! They all suck and I don’t purchase Nike or Levi’s, nor do I recommend that you purchase either.
Best
Parrott
So one of ESPN’s hosts named Dan le Batard decided that he was going to defy his bosses at Disney and go into a screed about what a racist President Donald Trump is.
Mr. Le batard spent 16 years writing for the Miami herald newspaper and more recently as a local talk guy in the Miami area and was hired by ESPN as a full-time host in 2015.
If he were a slightly smarter man, he could have made his attack on the president devastating instead of just lobbying out the “R” word. Miami has a huge Cuban immigrant population that either arrived here by getting onto the beach and bypassing the entire immigration process, or part of the Mariel boatlift under Jimmy Carter. The only reason the Cuban immigrants aren’t illegal is because Republicans wanted them to be legal for their voted. So as long as they reached the sand, they acquire automatic permanent residence status.
The Cuban vote being mostly Republican means they often determine the outcome of elections in Florida, which can translate into the outcome of national elections. If it was not for the Cubans Al Gore might have been president.
The Cuban community in Little Miami probably is very sensitive to the notion of “being sent back home”. In most respects, those Cuban immigrants are no different from the Central American immigrants, other than that they are allegedly anti-communist. His parents are Cuban immigrants.
Mister Le batard got a timeout on Friday and was not present during the first hour of his show.
The rally where the “send her back” chant broke out spontaneously(?) Was held in Greenville North Carolina (not to be confused with Greenville South Carolina). Greenville is located fairly close to the ocean on the tidal plain. It is the location of East Carolina University. For those who have not experienced eastern North Carolina, much of it is desperately poor, many of the residents are The descendants of the slaves who were liberated by the Republicans in the civil war. It was a somewhat peculiar place for this chant to show up. You don’t typically think of university towns or black people being Trump supporters, but that is the bulk of the people that live in Greenville.
So Mr. Le batard was MIA on Monday. I am unhappy about this, not because I suddenly like sports or I hate Donald Trump.
Talk radio is dying from this kind of self-censorship. People are afraid to talk about anything except potato salad recipes (Rush Limbaugh reference). Sports talk is all about combat in a very male context. You say things you believe, and maybe even some you don’t believe. You push, other people push back, and hopefully you determine who has the stronger idea. But you don’t hold yourself back because you think you might hurt somebody’s feelings on social media.
Back in my AOL days in the mid-1990s, I was very frustrated because of the groupthink that “we don’t talk about politics on AOL” This was used to stifle any interesting conversation other than talking about gay rights, which of course is not political. If I were to say something like “Hey, the employment report was very good today!” that would be attacked as being political, but only because other people might want to say that the president is great or the president sucks.
The reality was, the suppression of speech was due to the person with the shiny silver volunteer badge and the mute button having no interest in current events or anything that required thinking. Eventually I concluded that there was no hope, and I needed a venue where I decided the topics. We see how well that worked out!
Univision Deportes (not ESPN) now directs people to
https://www.tudn.com/
Most of the content concerns Soccer teams in Mexico, not Football or Baseball. There is not even a facade that their listeners are Americans.
It seems like they are mostly pushing having an app on your phone, not listening to a radio station.
Only slightly related, I learned that one of the reasons for HD radio failing was if you took a portable radio to a sporting event (or maybe watching TV but listening to radio), you have the delay necessary for digital broadcasting to buffer, so you hear what is going on in the event maybe 30 seconds later. To prevent that from happening, radio stations had to deliberately disable the HD signal during sporting events, however very few sporting events are actually broadcast on radio. I would assume that SiriusXM has the same issue.
Not owning an HD radio, I realize now that I did not understand the issue. In order to keep the HD signal synchronized with the analog signal in the situation you lose HD coverage – that means the analog signal has to be delayed. That means even if you are in the stadium with an analog transistor radio, it becomes useless because you hear about the home run you just watched in person 30 seconds after it happened.