The Tribune

By NEIL HARTNELL

Tribune Business Editor

nhartnell@tribunemedia.net

A top regulator yesterday said concerns about the Bahamian radio broadcasting market being over-saturated “will always be around even if we had 50 percent of the stations we have now”.

Carlton Smith, the Utilities Regulation and Competition Authority’s (URCA) chief executive, told Tribune Business that it was seeking to balance “competitive pressures” with facilitating new entrants in a “free market enterprise system” despite previous research having shown The Bahamas has more FM radio stations than New York city.

He was responding to questions from this newspaper on what had convinced URCA to remove the previous moratorium on new FM radio licences in New Providence, and seek bids for new broadcasters to use the 90.7 MHz or 105.7 MHz spectrum frequencies, especially given previous concerns that existing stations’ signals were causing “harmful interference” for each other’s transmissions.

Acknowledging that it was “a legitimate question”, Mr Smith said the March 2019 implementation of Technical standards for FM Radio Broadcasting in The Bahamas appeared to have cleared up, and addressed, the interference issues based on feedback from industry players themselves.

Subsequently, he added that URCA’s “technical team” conducted a “spectrum occupancy survey” which concluded that the two frequencies now subject to competitive bidding were available for use “under strict technical guidelines.

As a result, Mr Smith indicated that the communications industry regulator felt justified in lifting the moratorium on new licence applications that had been in place since March 2014, when it issued a public notice on the “exhaustion and unavailability of frequencies in the spectrum band 88 MHz to 108 MHz for use in New Providence”.

“URCA, recognising the need to address the harmful interference in the FM broadcasting spectrum, determined it would develop technical standards and implement those standards for compliance by the FM radio broadcasters,” Mr Smith said. “Those standards were established, and URCA gave the industry 18 months to adjust to the new standards.”

That deadline passed last year, and the URCA chief said the regulator subsequently conducted a spectrum occupancy survey “to determine if there was still harmful interference by radio stations.

“On completion of the spectrum occupancy survey, our team did an assessment... to determine if there was any additional availability, and our team determined there were two frequencies available for use under strict technical guidelines,” Mr Smith added.

“Prior to that, before going to the licensing process, we gave FM broadcasters the opportunity to confirm or disprove what URCA knew from the technical assessment. We received responses from a number of broadcasters indicating they were experiencing no large harmful interference. Under the advice of the technical team, we decided it would be useful if we made those two frequencies available for competition.”

Mr Smith said the market will “have reached the limit in terms of frequencies to be issued” once these latest two are awarded, and added that URCA faced a balancing act between facilitating competition and new market entrants and ensuring FM broadcasting was not over-saturated.

Asked whether the FM radio market was too crowded, with too many players chasing too few listeners and advertisers as indicated by research, the URCA chief replied: “That’s a realistic observation except it’s a free market enterprise system and we try as best we can to manage the competitive pressures as effectively as possible.

“One of the reasons we are adding special criteria for these particular licences is we don’t want a repetition of some of the genres of programming on the stations.” In this way, URCA is hoping to create differentiation and distinction between the new licencees and existing stations.

Research conducted for Tribune Radio Ltd suggested that The Bahamas’ FM radio broadcasting market is already unsustainable, with its 47 stations chasing 377,374 potential listeners - a total that equates to 8,029 listeners per station.

By contrast, New York’s 42 stations equate to 388,000 stations listener, while in Jamaica, Trinidad and Barbados - all of which have between five to 35 licencees - the average listeners per station range from 38,074 to 78,852.

However, Mr Smith said of the seeming over-saturation: “I think these concerns will always be around even if we had less stations than we have now. If we had 50 percent of the broadcasters we have now there would always be these concerns.

“For any number of reasons local stations consider the market saturated, and that’s one of the reasons why we’re taking steps to reduce the replication of programming and see if we can encourage a greater level of programming diversity.”