Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Q Radio takes transmitter tower owners to court - But will they win?

Flashback to July of last year when two unrelated fires in FM masts in the Netherlands seriously disrupted FM radio reception.



On Tuesday, the Belgian-Dutch owners of the Q-Music network announced they are to take legal action against the owners of the mast infrastructire. In a press conference to explain their annual report, the Pergroep noted a reduction in turnover from 913 to 900 million Euro. 78 percent of that turnover comes from newspapers. The rest from radio, TV and web interests. Q-Music claims that they lost 1% in market share and the revenue from advertising revenue went down by 7.8 percent, both as a result of patchy FM reception for several months. Lopik only came back on full power a few weeks ago. It will be August before the FM mast in Smilde (Northern part of the Netherlands) is fully operational. 


Personally. I think it is going to be very difficult for them to prove a direction connection between reception on FM and loss of revenue. The station is also audible on cable and via streaming on the web and both these were unaffected. As another broadcast colleague points out. Sky Radio was as much affected as Q Music in the North of the Netherlands. Yet their market share in the same region around the Smilde tower has increased over the same period.





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