The Range 95.3 FM

NextKast has been able to exceed KHYI’s broadcasting software needs.

When I first started as mornings and program director for KHYI 95.3fm in DFW in May of 2011, the automation software they were using was OMT’s iMediaTouch v2. KHYI is one of the last few major market “mom and pop” radio stations. That can be a good thing and sometimes that can be a bad thing as small independently owned radio stations don’t have huge budgets. I say that to say this, at the point I arrived at the radio station the automation software we were using was already out dated, but it worked, so ownership had a “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” attitude about it.

Then a few years ago, covid happened and we had to figure out a way for most of the air staff to work from home.  The only solutions (at the time) we could come up with was to either spend a lot of money to purchase remote voicetracking modules for each member of the staff from OMT or have everyone get sent a copy of the the music on their shows, record those tracks as mp3s without hearing the music, and put them in a dropbox where they could be loaded by hand into the automation system.

Ownership chose that latter (remember what I said about not having huge budgets?). As program director, I manually put each and every voicetrack for each and every jock in the system for every day of the week. Trust me that’s a lot of work, and I did it for 3 years. At that point I made it my mission to find affordable radio automation software that could run the station reliably, while allowing the air staff to do their shows from home if necessary either via remote voicetracking or live. I found several options that could do various parts of those, but all the options were cost prohibitive for a “mom and pop” radio station until I discovered NextKast! Here was radio automation software that was affordable and looked to do what I needed it to do and more, so I reached out for a demo. 

We got the demo and I was impressed with the way it performed.  I started talking with ownership about needing to do the switch to this software. They were intrigued, but weren’t ready to pull the trigger just yet.

At the start of 2023 a decision was made to move the station to a new studio and it was going to be a few weeks after the move before the staff would be able to use the studio. I knew that this was the perfect time to switch to NextKast because it would allow us to have everyone work from home and even better, to actually do their shows LIVE and not voicetracked! 

Fortunately the learning curve for NextKast is low and the staff was ready to do their shows from home fairly quickly. NextKast would be great if all you could do with it was voicetrack from anywhere, but the ability to go LIVE from anywhere in the world is what takes NextKast to the next level in my humble opinion!  Just last week my wife needed my car while hers was being worked on.

Being able to do my morning show LIVE from my home studio to make that happen was a real life saver! This feature is also perfect for remote broadcasts as you no longer have to rely on having someone run the board for you  back at the station, freeing up part time staff to be on hand at the broadcast.  I know there are other features that we’re not even using, but let me just say thanks for creating professional broadcast software that is both innovative and affordable for the small radio broadcasters in the world! 

Chuck

Chuck Taylor

Program Director/Mornings

KHYI

https://www.radioworld.com/tech-and-gear/products/khyi-deploys-nextkast