NPR to get $36M in settlement to operate US public radio system
23 comments
·November 18, 2025jrochkind1
Note that the CPB probably won't exist anymore in three years, for next renewal.
And because of congressional action not executive, so probably legal.
> The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the conduit for federal funds to NPR and PBS, announced on Friday that it is beginning to wind down its operations given President Trump has signed a law clawing back $1.1 billion in funding for public broadcasting through fiscal year 2027.
> The announcement follows a largely party-line vote last month that approved the cuts to public broadcasting as part of a $9 billion rescissions package requested by the White House that also included cuts to foreign aid. While public media officials had held a glimmer of hope that lawmakers would restore some of the money for the following budget year, the Senate Appropriations Committee declined to do that on Thursday.
https://www.npr.org/2025/08/01/nx-s1-5489808/cpb-shut-down-p...
giancarlostoro
Call me ignorant but isn't it drastically cheaper to run an internet radio station? Then let others, including other radio stations repeat your internet stream over radio. I'm genuinely curious.
Stealthisbook
The justification for many of these stations is emergency preparedness. They're maintained for the ability to receive and transmit emergency alerts despite power outages or transmission line cuts. The daily programming is mostly incidental beyond maintaining listenership
jcrawfordor
A major reason for the enduring use of satellite in radio distribution is that, for live events like sports or (more common in NPR's case) political events, the satellite system provides appreciably lower latency than distribution over the internet. Reduced jitter also allows for generally higher reliability, you never hear the radio station buffering. There are options for low-latency land-based connectivity but at the scale of PRSS, the satellite system is cheaper to operate.
Most stations can also receive this programming over the internet, another reason for the satellite system is that it provides a completely redundant path for programming delivery. This is important for general reliability but especially so in an emergency.
Historically, radio networks distributed their programming over leased telephone lines. Satellite took over because it was cheaper. That gap has probably narrowed as terrestrial communications infrastructure continues to expand, but the internet struggles with low-latency real-time media, and an arrangement like leased fiber wavelengths to member stations would still be more expensive than the satellite system. There's a lot of member stations in a lot of places, satellite reaches all of them at once.
woodruffw
The US is pretty large, and has large areas without reliable cellular or wired Internet connections. Public radio ensures accessibility in those areas.
jtbayly
This doesn't answer the question. Why not use the internet to get the radio to those stations?
mig39
Isn't that what they do now? They describe a lot of the IP-based transmission stuff in the link.
almosthere
I wonder if we should just pass a bill that requires Starlink or Amazon Leo to use 0.5% of their bandwidth for low quality (but higher than radio) free access to Inet Radio streams in some special way. Then start building out the infra in vehicles.
woodruffw
There are plenty of places in the US that don't have reliable satellite access either (not because of orbital coverage, but because of geographic features like mountains/deep valleys).
(And these aren't remote/unpopulated areas: you can find plenty of satellite dead zones 2-3 hours outside of NYC in the Catskills.)
fckgw
Or we just continue to use the infrastructure that we already have and works?
kulahan
Seems like a really expensive solution to an already-solved problem.
ndiddy
The stations that rely on CPB funding as a main source of income are the "others" who repeat the NPR content over the radio. They're tiny stations (typically 1-2 full-time employees) that mainly serve communities where internet streaming is not a viable option due to spotty cell coverage.
floatrock
What happens when a major CDN goes out? Or, god forbid, a major datacenter region has a DNS blip that apparently 1/3 of the internet depends on?
Or, what if a hurricane or ice storm knocks out some internet connectivity? That would be a time when you really want to broadcast a message to anyone with a cheap fm/am radio.
Cheaper isn't always the metric here.
giancarlostoro
CDN? for internet radio? Internet radio predates all that.
floatrock
Predates, sure.
Is affected by? No idea, but I'm sure there's some cloudflare rep convincing you that you need cloudflare to make sure your high-availability stream stays highly available when just yesterday azure got a ddos measured with Tbs. Just not today... today those cloudflare reps happen to be busy.
Point is, radio comms serve a public utility that often is a Plan-B if internet links go down. Multicast it onto your podcatcher of choice, sure, but don't make that your backbone.
standardUser
Not during a major earthquake or hurricane.
null
OfficeChad
[dead]
The system in question is actually pretty interesting from a tech standpoint;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Radio_Satellite_System
> In 2007, the SOSS was retired for the newest and current system of the PRSS, the ContentDepot. The ContentDepot no longer uses linear feeds of SCPC-based digital audio bitstreams like the SOSS. Instead, it uses a dedicated TCP/IP-based one-way connection uplinked via satellite from PRSS, which is received by a storage receiver (a combination satellite data receiver & file server) manufactured by International Datacasting [5]. Program feeds are requested and set up at a special internet-accessible web site (known as the ContentDepot Portal) that member stations can log on to, where they can subscribe to specific programs and live feeds. The subscribed programs are then delivered via satellite as a file transfer to the storage receiver in the form of MP2-encoded ACM-based WAV files, which then can be imported into a station's automation and/or playback system.
> Live feeds are sent in the ContentDepot system as streaming MP2 audio, sent over the same satellite transponder, but as an IP multicast stream (as opposed to a file transfer for pre-recorded programs) which is decoded by a special streaming audio receiver (called a stream decoder) set to the IP multicast addresses assigned for live audio streams on the satellite transponder used by ContentDepot.
> The newest generation of ContentDepot hardware for the PRSS, as of 2014 and also manufactured by International Datacasting, is a special version custom-manufactured for PRSS of their commercially available "Superflex Pro Audio" receiver. It combines both the stream decoder for live programming and storage receiver for pre-recorded programming in one rack-mounted system, in previous comparison to separate units for live decoding and program storage respectively with the introduction of ContentDepot.
> Some components of the previous SOSS still are in use in the ContentDepot era: one of the ABR-700 demods (as well as the downconverter) is still used by NPR as a "squawk box" for verbal announcements regarding programming to NPR stations