The ink is barely dry on NAB’s lawsuit attacking the FCC’s new enhanced programming disclosure requirements, but already BroadView Software Inc. has a program to unveil at NAB2008 which it says will largely handle the reports. It’s simply a matter of adding a bell here and a whistle there to existing programming and traffic software already in use at most stations.
"Some fear that meeting the new Form 355 report will require adding staff and significant resources, but our tools accomplish this with a few minor additions to the existing workflow," said BroadView’s Michael Atkin. "Our specialty is combining separate threads of information from traditionally stand-alone programming and traffic systems, to meet larger business and management information needs, and this approach is ideal for addressing the new FCC requirement."
The Canadian company has experience producing such reports for broadcasters north of the border.
RBR/TVBR observation: The Form 355 solution is being offered for television use. The trick, we suppose, will be to translate software designed for television’s block-programming set-up to radio’s more fluid formatic structure. But it probably can be done.
The question will still be: So what? The FCC will have a huge mountain of data to play with, but no laws, rules or regulations of any type giving the agency the power to punish a station for running whatever it wishes to run short of programming material which is actionably indecent.
If we bought a station, we would be perfectly within our rights to affiliate with a network 24/7, arrange a JSA with somebody, and then make sure we fulfill or FCC license holder requirements. It would be pathetic, but we could do it, and it would be legal, and if something this pathetic is legal, then there is no point in pretending it is a crime and spending millions of dollars gathering useless evidence.
