The Tyler Woodward Project

I’ve been thinking about the one cable that can take a whole station off the air, and it’s usually the cheapest fix that gets ignored. The studio to transmitter link. Everyone assumes it just works, until the day it doesn’t, and when it fails, none of your fancy equipment matters. I’ve seen systems from the 80s still humming along because nobody touched them, and when I ask about backup, there usu...

Plex changed its subscription model and a lot of people who thought they owned their media server setup found out otherwise. This episode is about what running your own media server actually costs in 2026, in money, time, and patience. I walk through the real tradeoffs of self-hosting, why demand for actually owning your media keeps climbing, and I close with an install guide for anyone ready to t...

iHeartMedia laid people off again, and every round of cuts makes local radio a little less local. This one traces how we got here: the Telecommunications Act that opened the floodgates, the private equity money that followed, and the consolidation that turned hundreds of local stations into one playlist with different call letters. I also get into where the live human voices went. Some left for po...

I was driving around La Crosse and my radio started showing a Minneapolis station. That's HD radio hijacking, and it's a real thing with real consequences for small stations. This episode covers how it works technically, actual examples of it happening, and why the current rules leave LPFMs and stations without digital signals holding the short end. The regulations were written for a different era...

HD Radio was supposed to be terrestrial radio's answer to the digital future. Better audio, extra channels, data services. Twenty-some years later, most listeners still don't know it exists, and the ones who do mostly found it by accident in a rental car. I go through the history: what was promised, why adoption stalled, what the internet did to the whole plan, and where AM-HD fits in. There's a r...

Broadcast radio ratings get independently measured. Streaming numbers come from the platforms themselves, graded on their own homework, with no outside verification. That difference matters more than most people realize. I dig into how platforms decide what counts as a stream, how they classify and price plays, and what happens to royalty pools when a platform quietly reclassifies premium subscrip...

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 shutt...

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...

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. Note: All opinions a...

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 writi...

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 governm...

Ted Turner died on May 6, 2026, at 87. The tributes will focus on CNN, the Gulf War coverage, the billion dollars to the UN. All real. But from a broadcast technology perspective, the most interesting thing he ever did happened on December 17, 1976, at a satellite uplink in Atlanta, when he beamed a struggling UHF station up to RCA's Satcom 1 and turned local television into something the industry...

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 ho...

The public file used to be a dusty binder in the lobby. Since 2018 it's a searchable, date-stamped online record that anyone can dig through, and every missed report, late political ad, or gap in the issues list is on the permanent record. The political file alone has produced some of the biggest enforcement actions in radio history, with fines running into six figures. I go through where most vio...

Moving a file three feet shouldn't require a round trip to a distant server. LocalSend is a free, open source app that moves files, folders, and text directly over your own network with end-to-end TLS and no accounts, ads, or tracking. If you live with a mix of Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS, it's the rare tool that treats every platform like a first-class citizen. I start with the famili...

You walk into a big box store with full bars and walk out to a flood of missed notifications. It's not your phone and it's not your carrier. It's physics and congestion colliding. Buildings act like leaky shields, and crowds create digital traffic jams. I break down both forces. The structure: metal roofs reflect and absorb radio waves, concrete and rebar soak up what's left, steel racks and coole...

Your phone call might have traveled 22,000 miles through space with zero protection, and someone with an $800 satellite dish could have heard every word. A new study from UC San Diego and the University of Maryland intercepted real, unencrypted satellite backhaul: voice calls, text messages, login credentials, and DNS queries, all spilling out across geostationary footprints using consumer hardwar...

Local stations are going dark across the country, and blaming streaming only tells half the story. Media consolidation, voice tracking, and corporate cost cutting hollowed out AM and FM from the inside. Strip out the local DJs, local news, and community connection, and you're left with a zombie facility running a cookie-cutter feed from another state. Then everyone acts surprised when listeners le...

FM coverage maps look bold and confident, but the actual audience listens six feet off the ground, weaving between buildings and hills where signals get chewed up. That's where audio turns fluttery and listeners quietly tune away. And the old "just add a booster" fix can make things worse in the overlap zone. MaxxCasting, built by GeoBroadcast Solutions with GatesAir hardware, is cellular network...

The FCC put foreign-manufactured consumer routers on the covered list, and if your facility is running one of those boxes in a mission-critical spot, it's time for a hard look at the rack. I break down what the new rules actually say, what's still unclear for brands that design in the US but build overseas, and why the real risk isn't the policy. It's what happens when that budget router dies duri...

I stopped waiting for the "Ugly's Electrical Reference" of networking and built my own. When you're standing in front of a switch at 11 p.m. and need the exact Cisco IOS command, a clean Wireshark filter, or a subnet answer right now, generic documentation and endless search results are a trap. I came up through audio, video, transmitters, and signal chains, then had to learn IP networking later w...

A nearly 100-year-old radio news network is going dark on May 22, roughly 700 affiliates are affected, and the radio news team is gone. This isn't a relic being retired. It's a working system being switched off because it stopped fitting a spreadsheet. The top-of-hour newscast is infrastructure. Local stations build their clocks, staffing, and listener habits around it. When it's reliable, it make...

I hit a point where rereading the same sentence three times stopped being funny and started being exhausting. I'm almost 40, and I finally decided to get evaluated for ADHD and autism, because "just try harder" is not a plan. I go back to school, when neurodivergence was poorly understood and kids like me got parked under vague labels like "specific learning disability" without real answers. Then...

YouTube Music blurred the words to your favorite songs and called it premium. This episode digs into the decision to cap free lyric views and sell the unblur, and why charging for basic comprehension is the wrong kind of innovation. A working feature got downgraded to manufacture demand. There's a name for that pattern, and we've all watched it play out before. I lay out the business logic, licens...

Canada is shutting down Weather Radio Canada, and the timing could not be worse. Those 162 MHz VHF transmitters are a quiet 24/7 public safety backbone, and the replacement plan is apps, websites, and phone alerts. Anyone who has lived through a multi-day outage knows how that goes: power drops, towers drain their backups, backhaul fails, and suddenly the "widely available technologies" aren't ava...