by James Careless
NAB DAILY NEWS

Will Hoyt

The Broadcast Management Conference wraps up today with some heavy-hitting sessions.

Triton Media, ATV Broadcast, The Switch and Cobb Corp. are sponsoring the conference.

Top guns from the Radio Advertising Bureau (RAB) will be on hand for "The Radio Revenue Road Show." Their goal is to teach attendees how to make more money for their stations and broadcast groups. This is the first time that the RAB has presented such an intensive half-day course in conjunction with the NAB Show, 9 a.m.–noon.

"We will tackle the key barriers to revenue growth within markets 25-125," says Sheila F. Kirby, the RAB's senior vice president of Professional Development. She will be presenting the session with RAB vice presidents of Training Brandeis C. Hall and John Potter.

"We are going to be providing turnkey training for radio executives who want to assess their market and station revenue needs."

The topics to be covered read like a 'must-have' shopping list for profit-minded broadcasters. They include "The Seven Steps to Selling Success," "Qualifying Prospects to Sell Bigger Schedules," "RAB Resources that Save You Time and Make You Money," "Branding Yourself as a Marketing Professional," "Integrated Campaign Ideas That Sell" and "Digital 2.0 and Beyond."

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For those not attending the Radio Revenue Road Show, the session to see is "Next Generation EAS: The Final Stretch" at 9 am. This panel discussion will consider the Emergency Alert System (EAS), including FEMA's new Common Alerting Protocol that allows identical warning messages to be delivered over a variety of media.

The session will also look at progress towards an Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS), new FCC rules to govern the next generation of EAS, and plans to launch nationwide EAS testing in 2011.

One hour later, it is time for the session "Television Music Licensing: Defining 'antitrust' and 'reasonable rates.'" This is a topic broadcasters need to know about, and one with a lot of news to be discussed.

Specifically, "we will bring people up to date on the class action antitrust suit that local television stations have brought against SESAC," says Will Hoyt, executive director of the Television Music License Committee LLC. The nonprofit committee acts on behalf of full-power commercial TV stations in their music performance rights dealings with ASCAP and BMI and, in the past, has acted on their behalf with SESAC.

"We will also update television station operators on the current status of licensing with ASCAP and BMI," Hoyt says. "Industry-wide interim annual blanket license fees for BMI are currently set at $85 million pending the outcome of a pending copyright rate court proceeding that will set industry-wide blanket and per program license fees retroactive to 2005." ASCAP industry-wide interim blanket fees are currently set at $94 million while the TMLC and ASCAP negotiate final licenses retroactive to 2010.