There's this page three-type of story brewing, which might move up to page one next week, and be a remarkable slam on the radio station industry in Germany. N-TV (commercial news network of Germany) lays out the basic story.
Most Germans use FM for their radio needs. It doesn't matter if you are talking about usage via a car, or just listening around the house. What's developed around Germany over the past couple of decades is a country-wide commercial network who owns regional antennas, and they rent out 'space' or 'coverage' to individual radio stations.
So you could be sitting in your car while in Hamburg.....traveling south for the day....and hear one single network over the six-hour journey. This is how national radio stations (commercial in nature) survive and make money. For years, it made sense.
This company that runs the antenna network? Well....at some point recently, it was sold off to an investor group. The new owners basically want to dramatically (one radio network suggested that they were facing a 50-percent increase) increase the cost factor for individual radio stations to broadcast via their antenna system. The radio stations? They are suggestions that they might go silent next week, and refuse to pay the new levels of cost.
What N-TV says is that roughly ten million German listeners would be affected on Wednesday, if this shutdown goes to reality. Oddly enough, even public radio networks are in the middle of this (like NDR, MDR, and Deutschlandradio.
Numbers from the statistics? Well...eighty percent of radio listeners in Germany.....get their service via FM. It's a hefty number.
What'll happen? My belief is that some last-minute 'relief' will be laid on the table by the antenna company for some period of time (figure 60 days). All of this will be geared to get people back to the table. The 50-percent increase is probably now viewed as impossible to achieve, and whoever did the numbers for the new investment group and figured they could gouge the radio stations.....probably guessed wrong. In the end, I suspect there'll be some two-step increase allowed....maybe a 7-percent increase for this year, and another 7-percent toward the end of 2019.
The problem here? There is no real competition on the antenna business. Everyone bundled their service into a simplified deal, and after years of effort....it's mostly all a one antenna operation.
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