The Tyler Woodward Project

A low power FM station in Valdosta, Georgia has a real interference problem. Instead of accepting the engineering explanation, they decided to accuse broadcast engineers, large radio conglomerates, and apparently the atmosphere itself of running a coordinated campaign against them. I break down what's actually happening with Supra 89.7 and WFA GLP, and why the answer was sitting in front of them the whole time.

I get into what tropo...

Kids are not going to stop talking to each other just because you blocked an app. I get into the story of how a group of teenage girls turned NPR's podcast comment section on Spotify into a full blown underground group chat, complete with its own routing system, and why they picked the most boring, least popular corner of the internet to do it.

I walk through how this traces back way further than people think, from the Twin Cities j...

Radio loves patting itself on the back for showing up during hurricanes and tornadoes. I grew up in Florida watching cones of uncertainty aim at my house, so I get why that story feels good. But building your entire pitch around being useful only when everything else breaks is a terrible way to run an industry, and it's exactly what radio has been doing for years.

In this episode I get into why the disaster narrative is true but inc...

Diesel prices are all over the news right now, but everyone's talking about it like it's just a trucking story. It's not. I'm a broadcast engineer, and I'm here to tell you diesel is the thing keeping radio transmitters and cell sites alive when the power goes out, and right now that backup power is getting brutally expensive.

I break down what diesel actually costs to run a generator at a radio site or cell tower right now compared...

On November 17th, every radio and TV station in the country is going to interrupt whatever you're doing with that awful screeching tone. I'm breaking down what that nationwide Emergency Alert System test actually is, how a warning message travels from a federal agency all the way to your car radio, and why the FCC and FEMA bother running this drill every few years instead of just hoping the system works when it counts.

I walk throug...

Radio keeps trying to beat Spotify at being Spotify, and it's losing, because that was never a fight it could win. I lay out why the actual advantage terrestrial radio has always had isn't the music or the transmitter, it's the human relationship, and why chasing efficiency has quietly stripped that out of most stations.

I get into the research backing this up, including a Jacoby Media tech survey showing core radio listeners actual...

There's a box on my basement wall where light turns into internet, and most people paying for "fiber" don't have anything close to it. I break down the term "fiber powered," why Spectrum is selling coax as if it's the real thing, and how the FTTH, FTTN, FTTC alphabet soup exists to hide exactly where your fiber connection actually stops.

I also get into the AT&T versus Spectrum lawsuit, because AT&T is suing Charter over the...

Everyone repeats the line that the cloud is just someone else's computer, and then keeps handing over their whole life to it anyway. I get into what that actually means once you stop laughing at it: they write the rules, they change them whenever they want, and they can lock you out of your own photos and emails without warning.

I walk through what Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Apple actually do with your data versus what people assu...

That lossless badge on your music app feels like a promise, until you realize it's probably not reaching your ears at all. I break down what lossless, lossy, and high res audio actually mean, why almost every pair of Bluetooth headphones including AirPods can't deliver a true lossless stream no matter what tier you're paying for, and how a format called MQA got exposed for basically faking the thing it claimed to guarantee.

I also g...

Tyler digs into why phones, earbuds, and even video games are suddenly going backward, dumb phones, wired earbuds, and vinyl are all trending up while smartphones and streaming keep getting more bloated and expensive. He walks through the polling data on Gen Z and millennials wanting simpler tech, then connects it to something bigger: the licensing traps hiding underneath your music, movies, and games, where companies like Sony and...

Ever notice your chip bag feels lighter but somehow still costs the same? Tyler's had it with companies calling that inflation when it's really just shrinking the product, keeping the price, and quietly banking record profits. This episode walks through real examples from Doritos to Gatorade to General Mills, breaks down corporate profit margins and the growing gap between CEO pay and everyone else's paycheck, and looks at the bill...

Tyler takes a trip down memory lane through video rental stores, sparked by a random Nova Scotia reunion and his kid watching a video store simulator game on YouTube. He walks through the whole Friday night rental ritual, the smell, the ps2 sleepovers, the late fee arguments, and then breaks down what actually killed Blockbuster, and it's not what most people think. Turns out the most hated part of the business, those late fees, wa...

Tyler breaks down why running a small internet radio station went from a fun hobbyist project in 2009 to a legal and financial minefield today. He walks through what changed after the small webcaster provisions expired, why licensing now means dealing with multiple performance rights groups plus SoundExchange, and how the math stopped working for anyone who isn't a billion dollar streaming company. It's a plain look at how a rule m...

Tyler digs into the one MySpace bug that accidentally taught a whole generation how to code: that infamous About Me box that let you paste raw HTML and CSS to completely override your profile. He walks through how millions of teenagers turned copy-pasted glitter code and stolen snippets into a real (if chaotic) education in web design, and how that kind of hands-on customization quietly disappeared as platforms shifted toward clean...

The STL, or studio to transmitter link, is the unglamorous connection that keeps a radio station on the air, and when it fails everything goes dead silent even if every other piece of gear is working perfectly. This episode covers why most stations never built backup STL systems, how broadcast consolidation pulled out the engineers who used to catch these failures fast, and what real redundancy looks like using fiber, cellular bond...

Plex just tripled its lifetime pass price and put remote streaming of your own files behind a paywall, so this episode digs into what it actually takes to switch to something like Jellyfin instead. Tyler walks through the real headaches of self-hosting, from CG-NAT and Tailscale to Synology's drive lock-in and QNAP's ransomware history. It's a grounded look at what owning your media really costs in time, money, and know-how, and wh...

iHeartMedia just laid off hundreds of on air staff this week, wiping out local radio in markets like Springfield, Erie, and Spokane. Tyler traces how the 1996 Telecommunications Act opened the door for private equity to buy up stations, load them with debt, and strip out the people who actually made radio local. It's a case study in regulatory capture and what happens when infrastructure gets consolidated into a handful of hands, a...

HD radio hijacking happens when a distant station's digital signal takes over a local frequency the moment that local station's own HD signal goes dark. Tyler breaks down how this happened to him on his commute, why small and low power FM stations have zero regulatory protection against it, and how outdated FCC rules let bigger broadcasters with more transmitter power dominate the dial. It's a case study in how spectrum rules built...