Update 10/20: RBC Communications has sent a letter to the FCC notifying the commission that they have terminated their agreement to purchase KDAY and KDEY. No reasons for walking away from the acquisition were given.
Original Report 10/2: LA Weekly is reporting that the proposed sale of 93.5 KDAY Los Angeles/KDEY Ontario has collapsed.
The $19.5 Million sale to RBC Investments and Phoenix Satellite Television would have seen the Classic Hip Hop station shift to Chinese programming. As we reported last month, numerous petitions to deny the sale were made focusing on the connection of Phoenix Satellite Television’s connection to the Chinese government.
Facing increased scrutiny RBC has supposedly backed out of the sale. KDAY GM Zeke Chiadez told LA Weekly, “We have been told by the ownership group that they will be getting back to us on any details soon, but I don’t have an official statement on whether that’s true.”
K.M. Richards
What I’ve heard “through the grapevine” is that RBC wanted to move the main studio to a community near Pasadena which is outside the primary signal contour (although the station is receivable there) and was advised that a waiver would be needed from the FCC.
That apparently made RBC do some more research — which they should have done before they got into this deal — about the 93.5 signals. What I hear is that, once they looked closer at the coverage maps, they saw that the signal isn’t strong enough over the Chinese-speaking population areas of L.A. County to make the price worth paying. (I suppose that’s what you get for basing your original decision on the station sales kit’s map.)
There is already a main studio waiver for the Ontario license to originate from the Los Angeles studios, based on the full-time simulcast status … so I suspect the odds of getting a second waiver for the Redondo Beach license would have been slim anyway.
Or perhaps those petitions had more truth in them than RBC would have liked, they realized they couldn’t easily satisfy the FCC on the foreign ownership limitations, and this is the “excuse” to back out.
We’ll probably never know what really happened behind the scenes.