Growth in Utah County

I have a couple comments... first, most Salt Lake market stations have pulled out of Utah County and moved to SLC. For good reason, that is where the money is right now. But, things are growing on this side of the point and I wonder if Utah Co will ever be "profitable" for a station like 107.5 or 94.9 to start using their Utah County transmitters for Utah County-ish programming. Even TV... do you think Utah County could ever support its own TV affiliates with local news and such..?

I guess my point in bringing this up.... I work nights sometimes and listen to the radio on a portable radio. I can't get many stations here in Provo that would be crystal clear. 107.5, 94.9, sometimes 91.7 and 92.1. Other than that, the SLC stations are fuzzy and don't really come in clear. TV reception is also bad. Can you even get anything other than channel 13 on a regular roof antenna? With DTV and with the SLC transmitters somewhat blocked by mountains and terrain, can utah county do its own thing?

The problem is in the ad money. Utah Co. businesses are crazy and spend big money to advertise in Salt Lake and pay for SL, Weber, Davis as well as Utah Co. I don't know why they do it... maybe KSL has some high pressure sales. When really, I suppose they could advertise on 92.1, 96.7, or 1400 which all do Utah Co. programming, and come in clear ... for much cheaper. So, until Utah Co. 'seperates' itself commercially they'll just play suburb.

Can we define "Utah County-ish" programming?

what I meant by utah county programming is this: maybe news, traffic and etc... devoted to the listeners of Utah County. People down there spend so much time listening to the stuff they don't care about... the University of Utah, SLC traffic, SLC advertisers, you know, things like that. I don't mean a special format or anything like that, but maybe a little more attention.

I once talked with a sales person from a SLC group. She was so amazed that nearly 500,000 people live south of the point and that there may actually be a sales market down there. Yeah, there is a community down there. I work there and for the most part there aren't many people who listen to the radio anymore. Besides the fact (already brought up) that Utah CO. advertisers pay through their nose to advertise in all four counties.

Your best bet is probably local access cable. If the cable companies would wake up and start doing more of that and PROMOTE it, that could be an incentive to not go to Dish Net or Directv. The pizza pans will NEVER be able to provide that kind of hyper-local programming.