Television and Radio |

In flush times, television stations are accustomed to 30 to 40 percent profit margins. But the recession is goring even these cash cows with a 14 percent drop in advertising revenue in the first quarter of this year compared to last at Bay Area TV stations, analysts say.

Ad revenue took an even bigger tumble at Bay Area radio stations, with a 27 percent decline during the same period.

The main culprit is the imploding auto industry, which provides from 20 percent to one-third of the advertising revenue for broadcasters. With General Motors and Chrysler announcing plans last week to close 1,900 dealerships during the next year, it will take years for advertising levels to recover at TV and radio outlets. “And when it does return, it will be different,” said Robin Flynn, senior analyst at SNL Kagan, who recently conducted a nationwide study of advertising on radio and TV stations and projected the 14 percent TV decline.

“All advertising-driven media have been hit hard by the recession, not just newspapers,” Flynn said. “So companies are really trying to get creative to make up for that revenue.”

Spot TV ads drop

Broadcasters in top-10 markets like San Francisco are generally still profitable, Flynn said. Outlets in large markets are more dependent on national advertisers, so they’ve taken a bigger hit than broadcasters in smaller markets. In the first quarter of 2009, spot TV advertising by the top 200 Bay Area retailers dropped to an estimated $58 million from $62 million the year before, according to regional TV estimates by TNS Media Intelligence. And Bay Area radio stations – which collectively reach 5.5 million listeners a week – saw advertising revenue decline 27 percent in the first part of the year, according to a regional study by Miller Kaplan Arase Co.

“Never seen it this bad. Never,” said Mickey Luckoff, president and general manager of KGO-AM, who has been at the station more than three decades, much of that time with the news-talk broadcaster on top of the ratings chart. “It’s as close to a depression that I’ve seen in my lifetime.”

The downturn is even hitting new-media sites, with advertising down at some political blogs nearly 50 percent in this post-election year, and 10 to 20 percent at entertainment blogs, analysts said.

For the past 75 years, the vast majority of televisions have been built around the same technology: the cathode ray tube (CRT). In a CRT television, a gun fires a beam of electrons (negatively-charged particles) inside a large glass tube. The electrons excite phosphor atoms along the wide end of the tube (the screen), which causes the phosphor atoms to light up. The television image is produced by lighting up different areas of the phosphor coating with different colors at different intensities

Cathode ray tubes produce crisp, vibrant images, but they do have a serious drawback: They are bulky. In order to increase the screen width in a CRT set, you also have to increase the length of the tube (to give the scanning electron gun room to reach all parts of the screen). Consequently, any big-screen CRT television is going to weigh a ton and take up a sizable chunk of a room.

A new alternative has popped up on store shelves: the plasma flat panel display. These televisions have wide screens, comparable to the largest CRT sets, but they are only about 6 inches (15 cm) thick. In this article, we’ll see how these sets do so much in such a small space.

If you’ve read How Television Works, then you understand the basic idea of a standard television or monitor. Based on the information in a video signal, the television lights up thousands of tiny dots (called pixels) with a high-energy beam of electrons. In most systems, there are three pixel colors — red, green and blue — which are evenly distributed on the screen. By combining these colors in different proportions, the television can produce the entire color spectrum.

The basic idea of a plasma display is to illuminate tiny, colored fluorescent lights to form an image. Each pixel is made up of three fluorescent lights — a red light, a green light and a blue light. Just like a CRT television, the plasma display varies the intensities of the different lights to produce a full range of colors.