The Tyler Woodward Project

The conversation explores the resurgence of physical media, particularly vinyl, CDs, and cassettes, and discusses the growing consumer preference for ownership over subscription models. It highlights the unique position of radio in the media landscape and suggests that radio can learn from the revival of physical media to enhance its relevance.

Meta's new Muse AI agent handled a Facebook Marketplace sale for a guy named Matt Rob, and it gave a complete stranger his home address without asking first. The guy shows up expecting to buy a keyboard, and Rob has no idea any of this happened until there's a knock on his door. That's not a hypothetical risk, that's a thing that actually occurred, and it happened because of one "allow always" per...

A low power FM station in Valdosta, Georgia has a real interference problem. Instead of accepting the engineering explanation, they decided to accuse broadcast engineers, large radio conglomerates, and apparently the atmosphere itself of running a coordinated campaign against them. I break down what's actually happening with Supra 89.7 and WFA GLP, and why the answer was sitting in front of them t...

Kids are not going to stop talking to each other just because you blocked an app. I get into the story of how a group of teenage girls turned NPR 's podcast comment section on Spotify into a full blown underground group chat, complete with its own routing system, and why they picked the most boring, least popular corner of the internet to do it. I walk through how this traces back way further than...

Radio loves patting itself on the back for showing up during hurricanes and tornadoes. I grew up in Florida watching cones of uncertainty aim at my house, so I get why that story feels good. But building your entire pitch around being useful only when everything else breaks is a terrible way to run an industry, and it's exactly what radio has been doing for years. In this episode I get into why th...

Diesel prices are all over the news right now, but everyone's talking about it like it's just a trucking story. It's not. I'm a broadcast engineer, and I'm here to tell you diesel is the thing keeping radio transmitters and cell sites alive when the power goes out, and right now that backup power is getting brutally expensive. I break down what diesel actually costs to run a generator at a radio s...

On November 17th, every radio and TV station in the country is going to interrupt whatever you're doing with that awful screeching tone. I'm breaking down what that nationwide Emergency Alert System test actually is, how a warning message travels from a federal agency all the way to your car radio, and why the FCC and FEMA bother running this drill every few years instead of just hoping the system...

Radio keeps trying to beat Spotify at being Spotify, and it's losing, because that was never a fight it could win. I lay out why the actual advantage terrestrial radio has always had isn't the music or the transmitter, it's the human relationship, and why chasing efficiency has quietly stripped that out of most stations. I get into the research backing this up, including a Jacoby Media tech survey...

There's a box on my basement wall where light turns into internet, and most people paying for "fiber" don't have anything close to it. I break down the term "fiber powered," why Spectrum is selling coax as if it's the real thing, and how the FTTH, FTTN, FTTC alphabet soup exists to hide exactly where your fiber connection actually stops. I also get into the AT&T versus Spectrum lawsuit, becaus...

Everyone repeats the line that the cloud is just someone else's computer, and then keeps handing over their whole life to it anyway. I get into what that actually means once you stop laughing at it: they write the rules, they change them whenever they want, and they can lock you out of your own photos and emails without warning. I walk through what Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Apple actually do wi...

That lossless badge on your music app feels like a promise, until you realize it's probably not reaching your ears at all. I break down what lossless, lossy, and high res audio actually mean, why almost every pair of Bluetooth headphones including AirPods can't deliver a true lossless stream no matter what tier you're paying for, and how a format called MQA got exposed for basically faking the thi...

Tyler digs into why phones, earbuds, and even video games are suddenly going backward, dumb phones, wired earbuds, and vinyl are all trending up while smartphones and streaming keep getting more bloated and expensive. He walks through the polling data on Gen Z and millennials wanting simpler tech, then connects it to something bigger: the licensing traps hiding underneath your music, movies, and g...

Ever notice your chip bag feels lighter but somehow still costs the same? Tyler's had it with companies calling that inflation when it's really just shrinking the product, keeping the price, and quietly banking record profits. This episode walks through real examples from Doritos to Gatorade to General Mills, breaks down corporate profit margins and the growing gap between CEO pay and everyone els...

Tyler takes a trip down memory lane through video rental stores, sparked by a random Nova Scotia reunion and his kid watching a video store simulator game on YouTube. He walks through the whole Friday night rental ritual, the smell, the ps2 sleepovers, the late fee arguments, and then breaks down what actually killed Blockbuster, and it's not what most people think. Turns out the most hated part o...

Tyler breaks down why running a small internet radio station went from a fun hobbyist project in 2009 to a legal and financial minefield today. He walks through what changed after the small webcaster provisions expired, why licensing now means dealing with multiple performance rights groups plus SoundExchange, and how the math stopped working for anyone who isn't a billion dollar streaming company...

Tyler digs into the one MySpace bug that accidentally taught a whole generation how to code: that infamous About Me box that let you paste raw HTML and CSS to completely override your profile. He walks through how millions of teenagers turned copy-pasted glitter code and stolen snippets into a real (if chaotic) education in web design, and how that kind of hands-on customization quietly disappeare...

Tyler hits pause on the usual format to explain why he's blowing up the show again. He walks through the moment he realized his supposedly personal podcast had quietly turned into a second shift of his day job, and what that means for where the Tyler Woodward Project goes from here. Send a voicemail to the show!

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...