Radio+Television Business Report

There's now roughly one week remaining in the holiday shopping season, with Hanukkah underway and Christmas Eve coming one week from Wednesday. As such, attracting consumers remains a key desire for retailers. That's why Walmart stepped up its spot activity at Spot Television for the week ending December 14.

A noncommercial licensee that involves "WALL Radio" purveyor Bud Williamson and WKZE Radio co-owner Andrew Gladding recently agreed to acquire a Danbury, Conn., AM radio station. Now, they're agreeing to purchase a Poughkeepsie, N.Y.-area FM translator.

Across Italy, Marco Mazzoli is known as a Radio 105 "Zookeeper." In the U.S., he's been associated with a group of FM signals in South Florida for nearly a decade. Now, Mazzoli-led ANCO Media Group are ready to bring their radio "Revolution" to Sin City in a deal brokered by Michael J. Bergner.

The Enforcement Bureau on Friday issued the final Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) audit letters for 2025, sent to randomly selected multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs). Some 27 local franchises must comply with the request.

It's the new owner of the global TuneIn audio streaming portal and the parent of stations including "Boom 97.3" in Toronto. In the U.S., it is the purveyor of all-music channels on MVPDs such as Hotwire Communications. Now, Stingray has launched a co-branded music, podcast and radio platform for automakers.

That's the conclusion of new forecasts courtesy of Omdia, which state that the change will come in 2027 — marking the first time a vMVPD will claim the top position in the evolving cable television marketplace.

A new partnership will see Banfield lead the cable TV network’s true crime digital vertical. As part of the new agreement, content from Banfield’s podcast "Drop Dead Serious with Ashleigh Banfield" will be made available on NewsNation, too. The bigger news is the end of the prime-time "Banfield" offering.

The Nashville-based non-profit organization that represents commercially licensed radio stations when it comes to music licensing matters has selected the former General Counsel at Audacy Inc. as its next Executive Director, as Bill Velez will be retiring on January 1, 2026 — ending a 17-year tenure.

For nearly 60 years, Arkansas’s only statewide public television network has worked to inform and inspire viewers through stories that educate and strengthen its communities. From June 30, 2026, that programming will be absent of anything from PBS — a casualty of Congressional CPB defunding.

Under Amancio Suárez, and a few years later Heftel Broadcasting, WAQI-AM "Radio Mambí" would become a Spanish-language spoken word force for the Cuban exile community in South Florida. Now, forty years since its birth, Radio Mambí is coming to an end.

In September 2012, a lawyer-turned-licensee of broadcast radio stations in the Sunshine State agreed to acquire a Class A AM radio station in Palm Beach County.  Thirteen years later, the facility and a sibling FM translator serving northern parts of the county with Haitian Creole programming are being sold.

He's been the Radio + Television Business Report's Top Local TV Leader for the last several years, and in command of the flagship television property within Graham Media Group. Now, he's no longer associated with the NBC affiliate branded as "LOCAL 4," as he has resigned from WDIV-4 in Detroit.

The offering, says Nueva Network, "combines Latino cultural intelligence with modern ad-tech to give brands a single, scalable way to reach U.S. Hispanic audiences across digital audio, video, and Connected TV."

For the first time, Pinterest will combine its intent-rich audience signals with a Connected TV engine, so marketers can clearly measure how television lifts the results of their performance ad campaigns. It is doing so with tvScientific, in an intriguing move for a social media platform.

Just like industry peer Beasley experienced, Discord chat rooms about investment opportunities — as seen on social media platform X — are actively talking up iHeartMedia stock. With 30 minutes to go in trading on Thursday, their posts appeared to be working, with "IHRT" shares up by more than 8% from Wednesday.

Thanks to "meme stock" Discord chat among gamers and followers to dubious trading option-makers with followers on X, "BBGI" exploded in growth on Wednesday. Within the first 90 minutes of Thursday's trading on Nasdaq, the wild increase in value had all but evaporated.

Travel to Visalia, Calif., and you'll find an automotive family focused on everything from Cadillacs and Chryslers to Dodge, Ford, GMC and Honda vehicles across five dealerships, plus GA Motorsports. It turns out the family behind these car and truck centers loves radio, and is buying an AM/FM combo.

Two entities within noncommercial giant Minnesota Public Radio have agreed to settle a matter in which Emergency Alert System tones inadvertently aired across nearly 550 broadcast radio stations during a program provided by the BBC. The consent decree involves a big U.S. Treasury "voluntary contribution."

Global advertising spend is now on course to close out 2025 with growth of 8.9% to $1.19 trillion, an upgrade from WARC’s September forecast. Why? Don't look to linear media, as WARC says the change is due to strong results from "Big Tech" platforms and a muted impact on global trade from tariffs.  

Connected TV advertising player LG Ad Solutions has entered into new partnerships that the TV set manufacturer with its own "FAST" channel lineup across all of its televisions believes has established "the industry’s most robust local television dataset."