Simulcast

• 1. Introduction

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  Simulcast is the practice of broadcasting the same program across more than one medium, resolution, or service at exactly the same moment. The word itself is a portmanteau of "simultaneous broadcast," and an early written use of it dates to 1925. Long before anyone called it by that name, broadcasters were already doing it. The BBC experimented as far back as 1926, transmitting a Halle Orchestra concert from Manchester across different regional wavelengths. That single concert from Manchester planted the seed of an idea that would reshape how audiences receive audio, how television handles sound, and how sports leagues distribute their biggest games. What drives the practice, what problems it solved across the decades, and how it persists in surprising corners of modern broadcasting is the story that follows.

• 2. The Word and Its Origins

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  WCAU-TV in Philadelphia is where the term "simulcast" in its modern broadcasting sense was coined, in 1948, by a press agent working there. NBC and CBS had begun airing a handful of programs for both their radio audiences and the much smaller, still-growing television audience at the same time. NBC's "Voice of Firestone" is often cited as an early example, but the picture is more complicated. The TV version, known as "Voice of Firestone Televues," reached only a small Eastern audience beginning in 1943 and was distinct from the radio program. Actual simultaneous broadcasts of the identical "Voice of Firestone" program on both TV and AM radio began only on the 5th of September 1949. A stronger candidate for the first true simulcast may be NBC's "We the People." Toscanini's NBC Symphony performance on the 15th of March 1952 is also a plausible first instance of a radio and television broadcast of the same concert airing at the same time, predating the rock concert simulcasts that would draw more public attention in the 1980s. NBC's "Band of America" programs were simulcast starting the 17th of October 1949, and Toscanini led an NBC simulcast of two acts of Verdi's "Aida" on the 3rd of April 1949. In its earliest days, the BBC had taken a simpler approach: it often broadcast the same programme on both its National Service and its Regional Network without ceremony or special labeling.

• 3. Stereo Before Stereo TV

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  On the 14th of November 1972, the BBC broadcast a live classical concert from the Royal Albert Hall on both BBC2 and Radio 3, becoming the first such transmission in the United Kingdom to use TV and FM radio together to deliver stereo sound. The problem the broadcasters were solving was a real limitation: stereo TV sound transmission was simply not yet possible. Displaying an FM frequency on screen so viewers could tune a separate radio to the matching channel was an improvised workaround, but it worked. The first pop and rock simulcast in the UK arrived almost two years later: a recording of Van Morrison's London Rainbow Concert aired simultaneously on BBC2 and Radio 2 on the 27th of May 1974. In the United States, the band Grateful Dead and their concert "Great Canadian Train Ride" in 1970 was the first TV broadcast of a live concert with an FM simulcast component. WPXI in Pittsburgh went further in the 1970s, broadcasting a live Boz Scaggs performance with audio simultaneously on two FM radio stations, creating quadrophonic sound, the first of its kind. PBS stations adopted the technique widely in the 1980s for live concerts, and it was also how MTV and similar music channels carried stereo sound through cable networks. Viewers connected their FM receiver's antenna input directly to the cable outlet and tuned to a frequency published by the cable provider. The first cable TV concert simulcast, on the 31st of October 1981, was Frank Zappa's Halloween show from New York City's Palladium, carried on MTV with audio simulcast over FM's new Starfleet Radio network, engineered by Mark G. Pinske using the UMRK mobile recording truck.

• 4. Australia, South Africa, and the Global Spread

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  Commercial FM stations launched in Australia in July 1980, and commercial TV channels immediately began simulcasting music programs alongside them. The practice continued into the early 1990s, covering late-night music video shows and rock concerts before expanding to major rock musicals including The Rocky Horror Picture Show and The Blues Brothers when each first aired on television. During the mid-1980s, the final Australian concerts of several major artists, including Dire Straits, were simulcast live on commercial TV and FM simultaneously. The ABC also simulcast programs on ABC Television and ABC FM, among them the final concert of Elton John with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. In South Africa, the SABC established Radio 2000 in 1986 specifically to simulcast SABC 1 programming in its original English, serving audiences who preferred to hear imported American and British shows without dubbing. This arrangement predated South Africa's adoption of a stereo television standard that could carry secondary audio tracks. During the apartheid era, many foreign programmes on SABC television were dubbed in Afrikaans, but the Radio 2000 service carried the original soundtrack, accessible via a button labeled "simulcast" on many televisions manufactured before 1995. Live Aid, broadcast on the 13th of July 1985 to destinations around the world, demonstrated the scale the technique could reach: most broadcast markets that carried the concert simulcast it across at least one TV network and at least one local FM station.

• 5. Interactive and Gaming Applications

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  In the mid to late 1990s, Nintendo used simulcasting to add orchestral scoring and voice acting to the first "integrated radio-games," its Satellaview video games. Digital game data was broadcast to the Satellaview unit for the basic game and its core sounds, while Nintendo's satellite radio partner, St.GIGA, simultaneously broadcast the musical and vocal portions by radio. The Satellaview hardware combined those two streams into a single unified audiotrack, functionally analogous to a stereo recording assembled from separate sources. The technique also solved a practical problem for home video recorders through the 1980s and early 1990s: most stereo-capable VCRs of that era included a "simulcast" recording mode that let the machine capture video from its built-in TV tuner while drawing audio from an external FM tuner connected to the line-in jack. JVC units handled this through a switch that moved audio input from "TV" or "Tuner" to "Line." Universities with multiple campuses have also used simulcasting to allow a single instructor to teach students across two or more locations at once via videoconferencing.

• 6. Sports Broadcasting

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  In greyhound racing and horse racing, a simulcast carries a different specific meaning: a broadcast of a race that allows wagering at two or more sites, with wagering information transmitted to a central location so all bettors draw from the same betting pool. Networks such as TVG and the Racetrack Television Network carry these feeds. In American football, basketball, baseball, and hockey, simulcast means a single announcer delivering play-by-play over both TV and radio at the same time. The practice was common in the early years of television, but since the 1980s most teams have maintained separate broadcast crews for each medium. Three NHL teams still use the arrangement: the Buffalo Sabres with Dan Dunleavy and Rob Ray via MSG Western New York, the Carolina Hurricanes with Mike Maniscalco and Tripp Tracy via FanDuel Sports Network South, and the Dallas Stars with Josh Bogorad and Daryl Reaugh via Victory+. Vin Scully broadcast the first three innings of Los Angeles Dodgers home and National League West road games on both radio and television until his retirement in 2016; for his final game, his commentary was simulcast for the full nine innings. The 2021 Toronto Blue Jays season saw Dan Shulman and Buck Martinez's Sportsnet television audio broadcast over the team's radio network, a move the team described as COVID-19-related but which media outlets characterized as a cost-cutting measure by Rogers Communications. Super Bowl LVIII illustrated how far the concept has traveled: CBS held the main broadcast rights, but the same game aired on Nickelodeon and Paramount+ in English while Univision carried the same video with Spanish-language commentary. In 2021, ESPN launched an alternate Monday Night Football simulcast featuring Eli and Peyton Manning with celebrity guests, a format that proved successful enough to extend to other sports through their production company Omaha Productions.

• 7. Radio, Cable, and Public Safety

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  Between 1990 and 1994, the BBC operated Radio 5 as a channel that drew heavily on simulcasts, taking programmes from the BBC World Service and from Radio 1, 2, 3, and 4 for simultaneous broadcast. BBC Radio 4 is still simulcast on both FM and DAB today. In the United States, simulcast in contemporary radio most often describes the practice of running identical programming on an FM and AM station owned by the same company, primarily as a cost-cutting measure. The introduction of solid-state AM transmitters and computing made it easy for stations to run different formats without added expense, so FM-AM simulcasting has become rare in most urban markets. Where it does persist in cities, it typically carries talk, sports, or all-news formats from the AM station onto FM, because office buildings and FM-only tuners block or miss AM signals. On cable television systems, analog-digital simulcasting duplicates analog channels as digital subchannels, allowing cheaper set-top boxes and eliminating the need for MPEG encoders in DVRs. The main drawback is over-compression, which produces fuzzy pictures and pixelation. In public safety networks, simulcast means broadcasting the same transmission from multiple towers on the same frequency, either simultaneously or offset by a fixed number of microseconds. This expands coverage area without multiplying channels, though the tradeoff is poorer voice quality caused by multipath interference, a phenomenon called simulcast distortion. Among radio shows that crossed into television, The Howard Stern Show on Sirius Satellite Radio aired also on Howard TV; Imus in the Morning ran on MSNBC, RFD-TV, and Fox Business Network in addition to its Citadel Media radio distribution until that simulcast ended in 2015.