Why/when did the broadcast regs change so KATV could call itself The Spirit of Arkansas? Plus use that as a primary URL instead of call letters? I’m pretty sure tv & radio everywhere has made this switch.
Growing up life with radio and tv was simple. They repeated their call letters at least twice every hour. I’m pretty sure its a broadcast reg. They still do those call letter promos.
Any five year old child could tell you channel 4 is KARK. 7 KATV 11 KTHV
Those 150,000 call letter promos you heard gets drilled into any adults brain forever.
They just can’t leave a good thing alone.
now we have Arkansas Matters for 4, The Spirit of Arkansas for 7, todays thv for 11. They even used this junk for their web site names.
Thankfully the call letters work. katv.com, kark.com but they are DNS redirects. kthv.com often fails and it takes a couple tries before the DNS kicks in.
They are still KATV, that’s still their official FCC call sign. They are still required to broadcast a station identification every hour which shows the call sign and community of license like they always have.
Whatever else they want to call themselves is entirely up to them, but it’s nothing official having anything to do with the FCC.
But, the tv stations are constantly referring to themselves as “The Spirit of Arkansas” or “Arkansas Matters”. They only mention the call letters in the call letter promo that’s required by B. regs.
<shrug> up until 20 years ago it seemed like they always used call letters anytime they referred to themselves. It was their name.
I always type in katv.com because its so much shorter than their long winded phrase.
The FCC only required you give the call signs at the on the hour, and at half-past the hour. That’s been the policy since pretty much the beginning. They never had any rules about what you called yourself at any other time.
Radio and TV stations still go by this today (listen on the hour; the “on the half-hour” requirement may have been dropped).
So the reason for the change is that the stations decided to use other names – primarily so that listeners filling out rating books can remember the station. Call letters are much more easily forgotten than “The Spirit of Arkansas,” which is an acceptable answer.
Another thing is that as the viewer, I really don’t care what the station’s call letters are. If, for example, I’m in New York, I just need to remember Channel 2 for the CBS affiliate, 4 for NBC, etc. Beyond that, the call letters or phrase is just marketing.
Radio and TV stations identify themselves for two reasons. One is the FCC requirement. The other is to get their watchers/listeners to identify who they are. The FCC only requires that they identify on the hour (and half hour? not sure). Most stations will identify themselves much more often than that, although they will often use a more memorable phrase (Spirit of Arkansas, for example) so that it will be easier for their viewers/listeners to remember. This identification is all about brand recognition and has nothing at all to do with the FCC or anyone else.
URLs will usually be tied to the brand name not the call letters, in my experience.
All along you only were really mandated to issue an official callsign-city ID every X minutes (by the 80s it was at least on the hour; not sure if noncommercial and commercial had different schedules).
However, at that time, recorded media was physical and kind of bulky. Promos, spots, ads and “bumpers” were recorded on tape carts (looked kind of similar to an 8-track tape, but containing barely a few minutes of recording) that you’d keep at the ready in one or more of the decks, ready to punch whenever you needed to buy some time in between show segments, correct a miscued record, etc. and then swap for a fresh cart for the next pause. For the sake of making things easy, a bunch of those bumpers would contain both a promotional blurb AND the legal ID – on the back of the cart the helpful production engineer would have printed something like: “Promo for Folk Saturdays - legal station ID”. Those you’d shelve close to the cart machine, so that when you noticed it was about to be the top of the hour you’d just reach for whichever “legal ID” promo was closest at hand and pop it in. That also means it seemed like at least every other promo contained an ID.
Now that you can program your legal ID’s to get broadcast automatically by the computer system, and everything is digitalized, you do not need to have your promotional bumpers contain your legal ID, and it fell out of fashion to do it that way.
that’s exactly what I remembered from junior high through college. The call letters were repeated constantly. They were the brand name of the station back then. As I said they are tattooed in my brain forever.
One that I recall seeing a lot from YouTube is “The Spirit of Texas”; IIRC, KHOU (Houston CBS station) and WFAA (Dallas ABC station) used that a lot. Why would two different Texan stations use that same slogan?
Many stations now combine their mandated station identification with other content, e.g. a “sneak peak” at a news story (“More at 11!”) or a quick weather update, or an ad for other upcoming programming (“Watch Jeopardy! here every night at 7!”).
Since TV is a visual medium there’s no need to vocalize the station ID, they can just put up a graphic on the screen along with other content; you may not even notice the graphic of the station’s call letters and city, but it’s there and satisfies their FCC requirement.
Completely different markets, so, there’s no reason not to. They’re about 250 miles apart, and over-the-air TV signals don’t travel nearly that far. Thus, Dallas viewers would rarely, if ever, see the Houston station, and vice-versa.
IIRC the FCC requirement for call letters was to identify stations that were interfering in other markets. Maybe the transmitter freq was off a little or too much power.
The bad station could be identified and the problem fixed.
Even today short wave enthusiasts keep a log of radio call letters they receive from great distances.
all radio transmissions (except like in family band radio, USA) have to include an ID either in a transmission (like that of two way communication) or at timed intervals. if you needed a license to transmit then you have to ID is pretty much it.
in shortwave radio callsigns, schedules and frequencies are important because the frequencies in use, where the signal is beamed and language will change throughout the day. and shortwave listeners are just a bunch of nerds anyway so many keep logs.
one thing popular with shortwave listeners was to make a short diary of what you heard on a radio station and send it in to the station. they might then provide you with a QSL card acknowledging your reception. this was kind of a nerd trophy which depending on where, when (time of day, season, sunspot cycle) could be a sign of luck, quality of equipment, quality of listening skills.
those cards were called QSL (confirm reception) because of the Q codea used in radiotelegraphy. often known in reference to ham radio operators where all the above about equipment, propagation and skill are really big issues and make these even more premium nerd trophies for ham communications.
these QSL cards, at least in the past, could be obtained for AM, FM or TV with the proof of reception by a short diary of what the audio was or photo of station ID for tv.
these are trophies that depend on equipment, skill and knowing natural phenomena in very much the same way a fisherman might have to be to do trophy fishing.
Pretty much as has been said. The FCC requires a call sign as near the top of the hour as possible, followed by the city of license. Anything else is branding. Marketing the station has become a valuable and necessary tool as more channels proliferate on cable/satellite. It’s all about standing out from the others.
Now that the question has been answered, I’d like to say that “Today’s THV” is one of the worst slogans I’ve ever heard. It means nothing and it’s hard to remember. I remember how startled I was when they started using it.
You think that’s bad-- WTSP in Tampa, FL (CBS station) had (IIRC) “10 Connects,” and worse yet, they used that in their news title at one time (“10 Connects News”)! What kind of lamebrain idea was that, not only to have another one of the worst slogans in local television history, and worse yet, to use it in the news title! Fortunately, they changed it to “Tampa Bay’s News Leader” and renamed their news to simply “10 News,” and as such, I think they learned the error of their ways.
