The Tyler Woodward Project

HD radio hijacking happens when a distant station's digital signal takes over a local frequency the moment that local station's own HD signal goes dark. Tyler breaks down how this happened to him on his commute, why small and low power FM stations have zero regulatory protection against it, and how outdated FCC rules let bigger broadcasters with more transmitter power dominate the dial. It's a case study in how spectrum rules built for analog radio quietly favor consolidation over local, independent stations.

HD radio was pitched as the FM upgrade that would save terrestrial radio from satellite and streaming, but two decades later most listeners have never heard of it. Broadcast engineer Tyler Woodward traces the FCC's 2002 approval, iBiquity's royalty driven business model, and how media consolidation left stations with no incentive to actually use their HD2 and HD3 channels. It is a story about broadcasting infrastructure and what happens when corporations stop investing in the tech they were handed.

Spotify decides what counts as a stream and there is no outside auditor checking the number that decides how artists get paid, unlike broadcast radio which uses Nielsen ratings and portable people meters. This episode breaks down how a 30 second play counts as a full stream, how one guy ran a years long AI bot fraud scheme that pulled in millions, and how Spotify quietly reclassified its subscription bundle in a way that shrank royalty payouts to songwriters. It is a plain look at what happens when a platform counts its own numbers and grades its own homework, another gap in tech accountability.

For over 40 years, a radio signal in the UK has been quietly switching household heating systems on and off. It's called the Radio Teleswitch Service, and it's one of the best examples of hidden data riding on broadcast signals that most people have never heard of.

I explain how RTS works, how the UK approach compares to what we do in the US, and what it means that the whole thing is finally shutting down after four decades of just working.

The entire podcast industry runs on one tiny XML tag that nobody owns. The enclosure tag is why podcasting stayed open when everything else got platformed, and it's also why measuring an audience is so much messier than anyone admits.

I cover where RSS and the enclosure tag came from, how Spotify spent big trying to control the medium anyway, why a download is not a listen, and what Podcasting 2.0 is doing to extend the open standard without breaking it.

There's a tiny data protocol still riding inside FM signals after all these years, and it's the reason your car's dashboard knows what song is playing. RDS and its US cousin RBDS are quietly holding up more than most people realize.

I cover where the standard came from, how it actually works at the technical level, and why it still matters for modern radio and modern vehicles.

Cable news channels have the staff, the brand recognition, and news gathering operations most radio stations can only dream of. Instead of building real audio products, they route the 24/7 TV feed to a streaming platform and call it done. CNN on TuneIn, Fox on SiriusXM, MSNBC's linear feed. You can technically listen. That doesn't make it radio.

Real audio assumes you can't see anything. The writing accounts for it, the pacing accounts for it, and when something visual happens, someone describes it. TV assumes you're watching, so when the anchor says "as you can see here" and a map fills the screen, audio listeners get silence. That's not a small problem. That's the whole product.

The proof it can be done is right there. WTOP in DC has run commercial all-news radio since 1969 and consistently ranks as the highest-rated station in the market, period. The BBC and CBC built radio as its own discipline. MSNBC's podcast operation shows they know how to produce for ears when they choose to. What's missing isn't talent or content. It's the decision to treat the live feed as something other than a TV byproduct.

The fight over AM radio isn't really about whether you listen to it. It's about what happens when the land under a tower is worth more than the station on it. Licenses keep declining, copper theft keeps getting worse, and the push to pull AM from new cars is only part of the story. I get into the infrastructure side: why towers are worth more as real estate than as signals, why the federal government and emergency managers still call AM vital, and why the bills to protect it are sitting in Congress waiting for a vote. When the internet goes down, AM is still on. That's not nostalgia, that's the design. AM isn't dead yet, but if nobody pays attention to the infrastructure, the decision gets made by default, one parking lot at a time. All opinions and views expressed in this episode are my own and do not represent my employer or any affiliated organizations.

Ted Turner died on May 6, 2026, at 87. Most tributes will focus on CNN and the billion dollars to the UN. But the moment that mattered most for broadcast history happened on December 17, 1976, when Turner beamed a struggling UHF station up to RCA's Satcom 1 and invented the superstation.

WTCG was a money-losing Atlanta station running old movies and Braves games. Turner's lawyer found a gap in FCC policy nobody had bothered to close, and within two years, over two million cable subscribers were watching a local station from cities that had never heard of the Braves. That gap is where cable giants like ESPN, MTV, and The Weather Channel came from.

Most of America's radio stations no longer have a chief engineer, and nobody notices until a tower goes dark or the FCC fines start piling up. One station sat silent for six months because no one knew the transmitter had failed. That's not an accident. That's what happens when the people who keep the signal on the air get replaced by remote monitoring and a maintenance budget line.

I break down how deregulation, consolidation, and years of low wages hollowed out the engineering ranks. SBE membership is shrinking, the median age keeps climbing, and the people coming in aren't keeping pace with retirements. Meanwhile tower theft and aging infrastructure keep raising the stakes.

This isn't just a staffing problem. Chief engineers are the reason the signal stays clean, the emergency systems work, and the station stays compliant. Lose them and you lose the reliability the whole public safety layer depends on.