KMSA 91.3 recently experienced a month-long down period for their online streaming service. Questions had been raised about what was taking them so long to fix the issue and whether they cared.
KMSA General Manager Chase Morris explained that the issue was a combination of technical difficulties and the loss of important information during a trade-off of management.
“That information with our login and our payment information was actually lost at the same time that we were switching management at the station,” Morris said.
During the confusion of the management switch, they weren’t aware that auto-pay wasn’t set up to charge their account for the streaming services. Therefore, they were under the impression that they’d paid the bill when they really hadn’t.
“We thought it was more of a technical difficulty like our streaming equipment was broken, and we had an engineer come in,” Morris said. They never received any mail or any other warning notifying them that they hadn’t paid. On top of that, they couldn’t do anything about it due to the loss of their login.
The issue is now much less prominent, but Morris said that the KMSA team is now interested in finding a way to combine their different services to simplify the process and avoid problems in the future.
“Me, our operations manager Alfredo Martinez, as well as both of our advisors, Shane O’Neill and Ryan Gruwell — we’re all trying to figure out basically if we can have a streaming service, an automation software, an app, and a way to organize all of our management in one provider, instead of having it all separate,” Morris said. “We’re in the process of shifting gears, essentially.”
KMSA’s app will have modern features like shows on demand and push notifications, according to Morris. Before, people tuned in at certain times, and they knew when to tune in mostly by word of mouth. Broadcasters would tell their friends when they were on, and they would listen if they were available. These updates are meant to organize everything so that it’s not as reliant on listeners’ schedules.
These changes are planned to take place soon. “It’s basically happening all this week, and it’s taking all four of us to really put everything together to really make the decision,” Morris said.
KMSA wants everything to be of a high quality, but they also want to make sure it happens soon, so they’re working quickly to make it so.
