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Churn remains a persistent problem for video streaming services, with cost and trouble finding content the leading drivers. That’s the big takeaway from new research released this week by Parks Associates.

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TORONTO — The Minister of Canadian Heritage, who oversees the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), has appointed its new Vice-Chairperson.

It’s a five-year term, and she’ll begin her duties on April 3.

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FCC Media Bureau Audio Division Chief Al Shuldiner has made his determination as to who should be awarded the right to build a new noncommercial FM radio station in Wisconsin.

Some eight applicants ended up with mutually exclusive applications, including Educational Media Foundation. Alas, EMF is not the winner of the Construction Permit in “NCE MX Group 223” — but another religious broadcast ministry is.

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Comscore has revealed that it has made a “significant update” to its Comscore Campaign Ratings (CCR) platform.

The enhancement, the audience measurement company shares, now extends deduplicated audience measurement to the local market level, which can be applied to all programmatic environments and platforms.

Thus, CCR will, for the first time, integrate national and local linear TV, digital, streaming, and social channels. The Trade Desk will be the first demand-side platform to integrate CCR Local market reporting.

“With the introduction of Comscore Campaign Ratings Local (CCR Local), Comscore has effectively bridged the last gap in cross-platform ad measurement, offering advertisers the tools needed for true reach and frequency optimization across the top 100 U.S. local markets, with full coverage of all other local markets to follow,” the company said in a statement on Thursday. “This expansion paves the way for complete local market coverage, revolutionizing how advertisers can harness data for precise, in-flight campaign adjustments across all media types.”

Comscore Chief Commercial Officer Steve Bagdasarian commented, “Comscore has delivered a true cross-platform solution that measures audiences at the hyper-local level, enabling our clients to advertise nationally and optimize locally. Advertisers need measurement partners who can address the scale of where their audiences are. We’re building enterprise-level cross-platform measurement that offers advertisers the ability to seamlessly measure and optimize against their intended audiences with speed and accuracy, whether it is programmatically, directly, nationally or locally.”

 

AURORA, COLO. — A group of radio vendors have joined together to create an alliance dedicated to providing planning and advisory assistance to small and medium-sized radio station owners.

As Radio Consulting Services owner and consultant Jon Holiday sees it, the Radio Vendor Alliance will serve “as a trusted advisory for radio station owners and managers looking for high value service and software partners.”

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TORONTO — The AMP suite, known for its digital enhancement products and services, first came to fruition under former owner Triton Digital. Since 2019, it has been the property of Frankly Media. Now, a transaction has taken place that puts AMP in the hands of Canada-based radio industry ad revenue-focused SoCast.

The agreement widens AMP’s reach to more than 250 broadcasting companies, including Cumulus Media.

Key Frankly personnel will make the transition to SoCast, while AMP’s tech will be incorporated into the Engage content management system and the Reach digital ad revenue platform.

The deal has led SoCast to put the wheels in motion on a new array of new products and enhanced services, including an experienced account team and the introduction of a Rewards system. The company in 2023 collaborated with PromoSuite Mail for a new radio-centric webmail distribution product.

SoCast is led by CEO Elliott Hurst and COO Sandy Hurst.

— With reporting by Cameron Coats in New York.

CRISTA Ministries is a family of five ministries based on a campus in Shoreline, Wash., just north of Seattle. Its CRISTA Media arm broadcasts Christian music to northwest Washington on KCMS(FM) in the Seattle area and KWPZ(FM) in Bellingham, as well as religious teaching on KCIS(AM) in Seattle. 

Each station has a simulcast stream; CRISTA (which stands for “Christianity in Action”) also offers online streams called Quiet Time Radio and Lift Radio, the latter of which is also heard on the HD-2 channel of the Seattle FM. And there is a podcast network and a lifestyle blog.

Chief Engineer Aaron Hume said the organization jumped into streaming “as soon as RealPlayer came out with streaming over dialup.” We interviewed him for the Radio World ebook “The Ecosystem of Streaming.”

Radio World: Can you describe your streaming “air chain”?

Aaron Hume

Aaron Hume: For most of our streams we go out of RCS Zetta, through our consoles and EAS boxes, then to our silent sense boxes, and then right into the encoder or off to the air chain.

RW: What streaming encoders do you use?

Hume: I’ve been here 11 years now, and one of my first big projects was the streaming coders, which was a good learning ground. I built them in 2012.

We’ve been using Orban Optimod-PC 1101 cards and they are awesome. However we plan to migrate to Wheatstone StreamBlades.

With Windows 10 and all the updates that continue to break things for radio, the PC is not a direction that I want to pursue; if we have an appliance such as the StreamBlade I would feel a lot more confident in it. And we’ll be saving about 20 rack units of space. 

From there, we send it out to our StreamGuys, our CDN. We have two server operations that we connect to in different parts of the country, so if some of the backbone goes down through our main infrastructure, we should be able to still hit the secondary server in a different part of the country.

On top of that, we have two internet providers at our broadcast facilities, so if Comcast goes down, we still have Ziply or vice versa. 

It’s important to make sure our stations are easy to find on smart speakers. When Amazon Echo came out, it worked great because we were already set up with TuneIn as a registered service. When iHeart took over the search portion of that with the default “hey, I want to listen to a radio station” sort of vibe, everything broke, so we ended up putting in specific Amazon Skills through StreamGuys. Then we could say “Hey, enable the Skill on your speaker,” and it would go by our prompts at “Play Spirit 105.3,” whereas before it would come up with some really weird station that was not in line with our organization or our content. 

Since then Amazon has taken the reins back and said, “We want to help radio stations, let us get you listed properly so it’s easy for people to find you.” We still have our Skills with StreamGuys, but we also have a direct connection with Amazon that should have been there from the beginning. 

Google Home has options to set up radio stations with their equivalent of a Skill. 

RW: Do you have a sense of what percentage of the audience uses various platforms to listen?

Hume: One of the things that we are able to do with StreamGuys is split out aliases, so to speak. You can take one stream and say “This is my Icecast main stream,” then they can replicate it and call it the Amazon stream or another stream. We can give that URL to Amazon or whomever, and dedicate it for analytics collection, even though we’re only sending one stream out. 

That has been useful to me as I go through monthly stats for our staff and salespeople to give them human numbers that Nielsen can’t — unique IP addresses, that sort of thing. 

I’d guess a third to half of our listeners now use smart speakers — it’s way up there. A lot also use our mobile app, and a good chunk use the iHeart platform, which we’re listed on. We try to be everywhere, as much as possible. 

SoCast produced a dedicated app for us. It’s a way to give listeners a lot more information. We’ve got contests and information on there, and events.

The next big thing is going to be platforms such as the DTS AutoStage, with hybrid radio switching the over-the-air reception to streaming, for people driving out of market. It will be a small percentage of drivers at first but I can see that sticking because automakers want “new and fancy.”

Hume creates useful summaries for management, including country by country listening, using data from StreamGuys that he imports into Tableau data visualization software.

RW: What about considerations of audio quality and loudness consistency?

Hume: The Orban 1101 cards have done a really good job of managing what goes out. A big help is our automation system, Zetta; we have normalization of content that may be a little too loud or a little too quiet. It helps narrow that gap before it even hits our processing.

RW: Does it matter which browser someone is using?

Hume: We’ve been good about testing browsers with our web players. In the past this was a bit problematic because of things like autoplay functionality. Browsers change all the time, so you have to keep an eye on them and work with your web player provider to make sure there aren’t any weird bugs. 

We were primarily using a Flash player until five or six years ago, when we switched to an HTML5 player. Of course Flash is dead now so I’m glad that we didn’t wait. 

RW: We hear repeatedly that metadata management is important.

Hume: It’s a really important conversation. We did beta testing of the Inovonics 611 Streaming Monitor last year and decided to purchase one because it has been valuable for keeping an eye on our streams. 

We sell metadata to our clients; we can synchronize their ads on the air with texts that you see on the screen, but it has been challenging to keep an eye on everything. We needed to develop a metadata stream specific to StreamGuys so our internet side would be exactly what we want it to be all the time. 

I set up the Inovonics receiver to send me notifications when it couldn’t detect any changes in metadata for a chosen time interval. I set it for an hour. In fact it just popped up this week saying, “Hey, your metadata hasn’t changed.” The problem usually is just a data disconnect, and we just have to restart a service. But it didn’t have to go like that for a couple of days before somebody complained about it. 

It’s really important to keep an eye on this if you’re going to be monetizing it.

RW: Any other advice for others?

Hume: Make sure you’ve got everything buttoned up with SoundExchange for licensing and royalty payments. Then pick a good preferred encoder type and go with it. 

Also, analytics are very important at our organization. I can give my management real data on listenership. I can tell them how long people have been listening, and approximately where they’re listening from. I get in-depth logs from StreamGuys and I bring those into Tableau and make it pretty for our people to look at.

[Check Out More of Radio World’s Tech Tips]

The post CRISTA Uses Streams to Help Spread the Word appeared first on Radio World.

A radio broadcasting company with stations overseen by Market Manager Reed Shaw and licensed to Dawn Shaw has agreed to part ways with its assets in two of the three Tennessee markets in which it currently operates.

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When it comes to Columbus, Ohio, and sports, many Americans can’t get past The Ohio State University. Yet this vibrant capital city is also home to the NHL’s Columbus Blue Jackets and its very own Major League Soccer franchise, the Columbus Crew.

The Crew’s fan base is vibrant, and in a deal that deserves attention, radio play-by-play rights have been snapped up by Urban One for Spanish-language coverage and by iHeartMedia for its primary English-language audio coverage, shifting from TEGNA’s Sports Talk station in the market.

With so much attention of late given to broadcast TV stations acquiring play-by-play rights, the continued importance of broadcast radio for sports teams is a topic definitely worthy of a bigger spotlight … especially when it involves a MLS team. To learn more about the deal we welcome iHeartMedia of Columbus, Ohio SVP of Programming Michael McCoy to the InFOCUS Podcast, presented by dot.FM.

Listen to “The InFOCUS Podcast: Michael McCoy” on Spreaker.

Among the themes at the NAB Show for Broadcast Electronics will be the latest version of MDCL, or Modulation Dependent Carrier Level.

BE said it can save most AM radio stations up to half of their electricity costs. “For a station operating 12 hours per day (excluding nighttime savings), with a transmitter power output of 10 kW, and with an average electricity cost of 20 cents per Kilowatt/hour, the savings can be more than $6,000 every year,” the company states. “Even for a 1 kW AM transmitter, savings are typically over $600 per year.”

It adds that some locations, including Alaska and Hawaii, have considerably higher power rates and so stations there will see more savings in energy and cost.

“MDCL works by reducing transmitter power during periods when the program is louder and quickly recovers power during quiet periods,” BE notes. “Any increase in received noise is masked by the louder program content. Compression is easily adjustable to ensure the best power savings are obtained without affecting received audio quality.”

The company said it takes less than 30 minutes to install MDCL on most of its transmitters. “The savings are the same on any brand of transmitter not currently employing MDCL.” 

BE will be in NAB Show Booth W2864.

[For More News on the NAB Show See Our NAB Show News Page]

The post BE Updates MDCL+ for AM Stations appeared first on Radio World.

WorldCast Systems says version 3.2.1 of its Ecreso FM AiO Series will be unveiled at the spring NAB Show. It describes the update as an important advancement.

The AiO Series transmitters are available in power options from 100 watts to 1 kW. The company highlights their STL capabilities and built-in software features including APT IP decoder, RDS encoder, sound processing and IceCast and SHOUTCast streaming.

“Key enhancements include a complete refactoring of the onboard APT IP decoder, now supporting the AES67 standard, simplifying audio cabling and interoperability with peripheral equipment,” WorldCast stated.

“The update also includes automatic switching management between external exciters and internal direct-to-channel digital modulators, enhancing redundancy and transforming the AiO series into an amplifier for future applications.”

Version 3.2.1 introduces static synchronization of audio between multiple transmitters, suitable for technically demanding applications like SFN networks, ensuring clear and interference-free transmission. 

Additional improvements cover various aspects of the transmitter including RDS encoding, IceCast and SHOUTCast streaming, SNMP, seven-day graphical history logs, cybersecurity, and easier initial setup of SmartFM for energy savings.

WorldCast said the AiO transmitters are designed to minimize total cost of ownership and facilitate a transition to software-rich designs. 

NAB Show Booth: W3449

[For More News on the NAB Show See Our NAB Show News Page]

The post WorldCast Unveils New Version of AiO Series appeared first on Radio World.

Cumulus Media‘s announcement on Thursday that its Board of Directors has signed off on a plan to prevent a hostile takeover of the audio content creation and distribution company led by Mary Berner appears to have been prompted by the desire of the man who has funded the growth of the NewsNet 24/7 digital multicast television network to snap up Cumulus shares — and perhaps gain control of the radio station owner.

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Cumulus Media‘s Board of Directors has adopted a limited-duration shareholder rights plan that it says is designed “to protect the best interests of all Cumulus Media shareholders.”

The Rights Plan is effective immediately and will expire on February 20, 2025.

The limited-duration Rights Plan was adopted in response to the significant accumulation of Cumulus Media stock by Renew Group Private Ltd., an entity based in Singapore. In adopting the plan, the Cumulus board of directors considered, in consultation with legal and financial advisors, among other things, that:

• The Group initially disclosed that it had acquired approximately 5.15% of the company’s outstanding Class A shares in a Schedule 13G filing on July 28, 2023
• On January 24, 2024, the Group converted its filing to a Schedule 13D and reported beneficial ownership of approximately 10.01% of the Company’s outstanding Class A shares
• In meetings with members of Cumulus Media leadership in the weeks following the Group’s Schedule 13D filing, the Group stated its intent to acquire 20% of the company
• The Group has investments in other media companies, including a sizeable holding in a direct competitor of Cumulus Media.

Board Chairman Andrew Hobson commented, “Given the facts, the Cumulus Board firmly believes it is necessary to adopt a limited-duration rights plan to protect the interests of all Cumulus shareholders. The Rights Plan is intended to enable the Company’s shareholders to realize the long-term value of their investment, ensure that all shareholders receive fair and equal treatment in the event of any proposed takeover of the Company, and guard against tactics to gain control of the Company without paying all shareholders an appropriate premium for that control. Cumulus Media’s leadership maintains open dialogue with its investors, including the Group, and intends to continue that practice.”

The Rights Plan applies equally to all current and future shareholders and is not intended to deter offers or preclude the Board from considering offers that are fair and otherwise in the best interest of the Company’s shareholders.

The Rights Plan is similar to plans adopted by other publicly traded companies. Pursuant to the Rights Plan, Cumulus Media is issuing one right for each share of Class A and Class B common stock as of the close of business on March 4, 2024.

The Rights will initially trade with Cumulus Media common stock and will generally become exercisable only if any person (or any affiliates, associates or persons acting as a group) acquires 15% or more of the Company’s outstanding Class A common stock (the “Triggering Percentage”), including through ownership of the Company’s Class B common stock.

The Rights Plan does not aggregate the ownership of shareholders “acting in concert” unless and until they have formed a group under applicable securities laws. If the rights become exercisable, all holders of Rights (other than any triggering person) will be entitled to acquire shares of Class A common stock or Class B common stock, as applicable, at a 50% discount or the Company may exchange each Right held by such holders for one share of Class A common stock or Class B common stock, as applicable.

Under the Rights Plan, any person which currently owns more than the Triggering Percentage may continue to own its shares of common stock but may not acquire any additional shares without triggering the Rights Plan. Except as provided in the Rights Plan, the Board is entitled to redeem the Rights at $0.001 per Right.

The Board may consider an earlier termination of the Rights Plan if circumstances warrant.

On Tuesday, former media broker Susan Patrick was sentenced by a Maryland federal judge to 15 months in prison for tax return falsification, followed by a year of home confinement and the payment of millions of dollars in restitution.

It is now known when she will need to report to serve her prison term, and where she will be. Other details have also emerged, and according to a Powell, Wyo., newspaper, they are highly damaging.

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In this document, the Federal Communications Commission (Commission or FCC) discusses the adoption of an Order on Reconsideration (Orbital Debris Reconsideration Order), which addressed three petitions for reconsideration challenging the orbital debris mitigation rules adopted by the Commission in 2020. In the Orbital Debris Reconsideration Order, the Commission declined to modify, withdraw, or otherwise change the orbital debris mitigation rules adopted in 2020 Orbital Debris Order, published August 25, 2020, but also provided some clarification and guidance as relevant for some of the issues raised in the petitions for reconsideration.

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