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SoundStack has named Michael Fischer as vice president of business development, a newly created position.

He is known in media circles from his work as EVP/business development at mobile app provider AirKast. He also has had roles at Triton Digital and RAIN.

“The appointment bolsters the company’s growing publisher discipline, which also includes customer enablement, support and podcast business teams, with a further focus on broadcast audio enterprises, including National Public  Radio member stations,” SoundStack said in the announcement.

[Read more People News.]

The Pittsburgh-based firm calls itself an “audio-as-a-service company” for digital audio businesses including broadcasters and podcasters. Its services include hosting, delivery, monetization and analysis. It is also the parent of Live365.

The announcement was made by Rockie Thomas, CRO of SoundStack. 

[Related: Read the ebook “Everything as a Service.”]

The post Michael Fischer Joins SoundStack appeared first on Radio World.

NEW YORK — How does the news media portray the U.S. Hispanic community? What does this consumer group have to say about the number of reporters who are Hispanic or Latino?

A just-released Horowitz report offers some sobering statistics as to the work broadcast news still needs to do to win over this audience.

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When it comes to the timely placement by every noncommercial educational TV licensee of an issues/programs list detailing shows ” that have provided the station’s most significant treatment of community issues during the preceding three month period,” the FCC isn’t fooling around with its Online Public Inspection File deadline enforcement.

Just ask the individuals who run Pioneer PBS. They’ve just been handed a monetary forfeiture notice from Video Division Chief Barbara Kreisman.

 

 

Based in Granite Falls, Minn., Pioneer PBS began its operations in February 1966 at KWCM-TV in Appleton, Minn., under what was then-known as West Central Minnesota Educational TV Corp.

That legacy continues through the licensee name of KWCM, which is being fined $3,000 for “willfully and repeatedly violating” the quarterly issues/programs lists. And, in an increasingly common situation, knowledge of the rule violation was presented to the FCC’s Media Bureau by Pioneer PBS itself.

On November 30, 2021, the KWCM operator filed a license renewal application, in which it shared details of its transgressions. Specifically, KWCM’s owner failed to upload copies of its
issues/programs lists for a total of 12 quarters by the deadline established.

The FCC confirmed that Pioneer PBS uploaded nine lists between one month and one year late and three lists between one day and one month late. Why? Pioneer PBS says it was an “oversight.”

As the FCC has established, that’s no excuse for tardiness.

The owner of KWCM-TV now has 30 days to pay up or seek a fine reduction or cancellation.

The financial sector’s quest to grow its consumer base now appears to include a big focus on Spot Cable, new data from iHeartMedia-owned Media Monitors show.

Could banks be in for the long haul when it comes to Spot Cable activity?

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From 2022 until 2023, he served as head of Strategic Sales at T-Mobile Advertising Solutions and before that was VP/Business Development for Octopus Interactive, which T-Mobile acquired. He also spent two decades at Univision.

As of today, he’s now the EVP of Political and Strategic Sales for Entravision Communications Corp.

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Since 1981, he’s been associated with an AM and FM station serving tiny Salem, Illinois, to the northeast of Centralia. Today, these stations are paired with an FM translator and for the last decade have been owned by the Mary Quass-led NRG Media.

Now, a sale of these stations has been agreed to and awaits the FCC’s approval. Not to worry about the stations’ longtime leader, however — he’s the buyer.

 

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For the most part, Quick-Service Restaurants (QSRs) have been active users of Spot Cable when it comes to attracting consumers. However, for the week ending November 12, one burger chain has stepped it up with its use of Spot Radio, new data from Media Monitors show.

It’s a positive development for the category, as Wendy’s was one of just two brands to score more than 40,000 spot plays last week. Thanks to a bump in ad activity at Spot Radio, Wendy’s now ranks behind only Vicks in the overall chart, which appears below.

Meanwhile, efforts from Lowe’s and The Home Depot are a welcome sign for Radio, as Verizon Wireless increases its advertising efforts for audible acceptance by consumers. Boost Mobile is also in the mix, with a new effort landing it at No. 9.

 

He graduated from Kansas State University in 1962 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism. It was there where he met Doris Downing, got married and moved to Williamsburg, Va., where he entered active duty with the U.S. Army as a second lieutenant.

Five years later, Monte Miller and Doris, today his wife, returned to Bellville, Kansas, where he joined his father in a newspaper business that in 1981 grew to a television station. TV station ownership ended in 2000, but broadcasting would prove to be a further endeavor for the Millers.

In 2008, Monte and Doris Miller teamed up with their son, Christopher Miller, and purchased 14 radio stations from Mary Quass-led NRG Media. This created Rocking M Media. By 2015, it was the No. 1 operator of radio stations in Kansas; Monte Miller was bestowed with the Hall of Fame Award from the Kansas Association of Broadcasters. In October 2016, Christopher Miller participated in a lengthy two-part interview with RBR+TVBR about the family business. At the time, RBR+TVBR wrote, “There’s a great story here, one that other small-market broadcasters may gain insight and learning lessons from.”

Sadly, the biggest takeaway, retrospectively, focuses on how a bitter family feud landed Rocking M Media in a federal bankruptcy court, and how a judge’s pending ruling will likely serve as the final chapter to radio station ownership in the the Sunflower State.

 

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WorldDAB is part of a major industry effort to ensure radio’s place in the Android Automotive operating system. 

At the WorldDAB Summit 2023, held in Munich this past week, Joseph D’Angelo, SVP of broadcast radio for Xperi, and Gregor Pötzsch, product owner, radio at Volkswagen Group’s Cariad, spoke about radio’s position in Android Automotive’s latest release, and the journey to put it there. 

“Android launched Android Automotive, which is an in-car operating system: From 2017 until about mid-2019, there was a lot of development going on,” D’Angelo said. 

“It became very apparent early on that it wasn’t sufficient in how it supported radio. So as the [radio] industry discovered this gap, we pulled together a group of companies from around the world representing broadcast, representing the automotive industry and technology developers to try to focus the attention on this gap or deficiency in Android Automotive.”

He said that effort was led by NAB’s PILOT technology arm, which provided the framework and coordination.

[Read: “New WorldDAB President Plants Her Flag at DAB Summit”]

Gregor Pötzsch, left, and Joe D’Angelo

Given the power of Google to shape the future of in-car entertainment, it is vital for radio to be included in the Android Automotive operating system, he said.

“As radio is going through a digital revolution, both with DAB and HD Radio, there are opportunities presented by the technology that — if they’re not enabled in the car — are useless,” said D’Angelo. 

“The fact that you had critical components of the DAB specification that were not easily integrated in a car radio using Android Automotive was a big miss. And so car companies were sitting there saying, ‘I want to use this, but I don’t want to have radio functionality sacrificed.’ This was a real, important thing for both radio and the auto industry.”

The important thing for radio people to remember in this fight for dashboard presence is that Google itself isn’t focused on radio’s in-car future as a priority. 

“They want to sell Google systems in cars,” said Pötzsch, systems that will serve essentially as vehicle operating systems. 

Thus, the speakers said, the radio and automotive industries need to work together to help define radio’s functionality in Android Automotive. The stakes are too high to leave such decisions to Google alone.

“Working with Google is not easy,” D’Angelo said. “Google is a very complex organization. They have a very structured approach to take input and recommendations from the industry, how they filter that input, how they maintain confidentiality with their development partners, and then how they deliver that information into their engineering team to direct next generation development. It’s very controlled.”

Despite these challenges, he said, Google has accepted input from the radio and auto industries in shaping the latest release of Android Automotive, AOSP 14. He called that tremendously good news for radio broadcasters and listeners.

“This project was very successful, when you look back at the collaboration and the scale of the ecosystem that was represented,” said D’Angelo. “If you just look at the broadcasters that were part of the program, they represented close to 2 billion listeners around the world. When you look at the automakers that were part of it, since the launch of Android Automotive, they’ve probably put 125 million cars into the ecosystem.

“Collaboration was key, and we found the right mix of partners that would get Google’s attention,” he concluded. “We didn’t get everything we wanted … DAB was much better treated than HD Radio. But we’re still having those discussions and we’re already engaged with them on AOSP 15.”

Approximately 400 people attended the summit either in-person or online.

[Sign Up for Radio World’s SmartBrief Newsletter]

The post Radio for Android Automotive Discussed at DAB Event appeared first on Radio World.

Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel appears poised to push certain priorities now that the FCC has a Democratic majority. But will the protracted standstill on a number of broadcast matters come to an end?

In October the commission started the process to reestablish the FCC’s oversight over broadband and restore nationwide net neutrality rules. But those who watch the commission closely have many other issues of interest.

National Association of Broadcasters President/CEO Curtis LeGeyt says the FCC must address critical issues facing broadcasters. He laid out the association’s hopes in a recent blog post.

“First, broadcasters desperately need the FCC to modernize broadcast ownership rules dating back decades,” he wrote. Broadcasters need more scale to compete, and that requires further deregulation in his view.

“In today’s world we face competition from pay-TV operators, satellite radio, streaming services and digital platforms operated by tech giants with market caps in the hundreds of billions (if not trillions) of dollars. These competitors have no obligations or incentive to provide the local news, weather, sports, public affairs and emergency information that broadcasters provide for free to the public every day,” LeGeyt said.

FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel used an appearance at the National Press Club to propose the return of a net neutrality policy.

“Yet broadcasters alone operate under regulatory constraints that incorrectly presume we compete only with one another for audience and advertising dollars.”

The NAB took the FCC to court last spring over its failure to complete its 2018 quadrennial review of media ownership rules, accusing it of “a perpetual slow roll.” Among other things the NAB favors abolishing caps on AM station ownership and raising those for FM. 

In September a federal appeals court gave the FCC 90 days to complete the review or justify why the NAB petition should not be granted. 

LeGeyt also hopes the FCC will provide certainty that its merger review process will produce up-or-down votes in a timely fashion. “Unfortunately, opaque and shifting guidelines about broadcaster transactions can deter potential buyers from investing in new and established entrants.”

The Multicultural Media, Telecom & Internet Council cheered Gomez’s Senate confirmation. The organization hopes for action on the push by GeoBroadcast Solutions to allow stations to use FM boosters for geotargeting of very localized programming for a few minutes per hour. MMTC is in favor but the ZoneCasting concept has been opposed by some broadcast companies. 

The FCC also may eliminate Channel 6 distance separation rules for noncommercial FMs, LPFMs and FM translators at the lower end of the FM band, according to Washington attorneys. Previously the commission tentatively ruled that this would be feasible once the digital TV conversion ended. 

David Oxenford, who practices in legal and regulatory affairs at Wilkinson Barker Knauer, blogged in September about the FCC’s further consideration of expanded Emergency Alert System certification and additional public file obligations. 

Pragmatic effect

Melodie Virtue, principal with Foster Garvey PC, told Radio World, “Without a fifth Democratic commissioner, the chair likely advanced items only where she had consensus. That meant that all of the potentially controversial items have been on hold,” including net neutrality.

With Commissioner Anna Gomez sworn in, the FCC has its first Democratic majority since Barack Obama left office.

Does a Democratic majority mean the commission will produce a left-leaning outcome on ownership rules?  

“It’s hard to say where they will come down on the competition vs. diversity debate given the changes in the media marketplace,” Virtue said. 

“It could be déjà vu all over again, to quote Yogi Berra, with rules adopted during one administration being reversed in the next administration.”

A long-pending issue surrounding EEO demographic reporting will likely be under discussion, Virtue said. 

“It could mean additional reporting requirements by bringing back the old grid form 395-B on the makeup of a station’s workforce by gender, race, ethnicity and job category.

“The form has been suspended for 20 years, but the report may come back. And the question raised back then was whether those reports should be made public.”

The practice was put on hold in 2004 when agency lawyers raised constitutionality concerns for quizzing broadcasters about the race and gender of their workers.

Scott Flick, partner at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP, said, “The recent history has been that the Republicans have generally focused on how to make broadcasting a more viable competitor to the Googles and Facebooks of the world, whereas Democratic administrations have tended to view broadcasting as a walled garden in which broadcasters compete only among themselves and therefore are largely immune to other market pressures.”

That difference in philosophy often leads Democratic administrations to impose more operating restrictions and reporting expenses on broadcasters, resulting in a more densely regulated environment, Flick said. It can show up in the form of more restrictive ownership rules, annual employment reports, required cybersecurity plans and more enforcement actions.

“Though people tend to focus on the big policy matters, the more pragmatic effect of having five commissioners is likely to be a flurry of significant fines. This is because the FCC’s rules limit the maximum fine that may be issued by, for example, the Media Bureau to $20,000,” he said.

“In cases where there was a 2–2 split among the commissioners on whether a particular fine was appropriate, having a fifth commissioner now opens the door for fines much larger than $20,000. While you would like to think it would be a non-partisan question, that is often not the case.”

But clearly Rosenworcel now has a greater ability to flex her policy muscles and lead a majority vote to push through initiatives.

Frank Montero, co-managing partner at Fletcher, Heald & Hildreth, said, “I agree that it’s entirely possible that she was shelving some of those initiatives because she wanted to wait until she had the three votes to pass them over the two Republican dissenting votes. But I think also important is that this now provides the chairwoman with the opportunity to craft and implement a more lasting legacy for herself through the passage of more-impactful regulatory changes.” 

[See Our Business and Law Page]

The post Rosenworcel Ready to Hit Fast-Forward appeared first on Radio World.

It’s been a difficult four weeks for Alfred Liggins Jr. and the leadership team at Urban One, the media company superserving African American consumers. On Tuesday, City of Richmond voters for a second time said no to a casino resort proposal that would have seen Urban One team up with Churchill Downs. Meanwhile, the company was diligently assuring the Nasdaq stock exchange that it was working with EY to deliver its much-delayed fiscal results for the first and second quarters of 2023 to the SEC, ahead of a delisting deadline.

With a hearing scheduled with Nasdaq on November 30, Urban One has now confirmed that its Q3 2023 report won’t be coming anytime soon, either.

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In April 2014, a retransmission consent agreement between one of the largest privately held broadcast television groups and a direct broadcast satellite provider was reached. It ended a 14-hour impasse that led to a brief “blackout” of its stations to Dish customers.

Three years later, in April 2017, a fresh stalemate between Dish and the TV station owner was resolved with a new retransmission agreement, ending two months of blocked access to the company’s broadcast properties, by law.

Now, history has repeated itself, as another two-month impasse between the DBS provider and Hearst Television has quietly come to its conclusion.

“A resolution was reached Friday night,” a Hearst spokesperson confirmed, directing RBR+TVBR to Dish for a formal statement.

The lone PR Newswire release from Dish, however, seen since the release of its Q3 2023 financial results last week was a Monday announcement confirming the appointment of Hamid Akhavan as President/CEO; the news was widely reported with the resignation of W. Erik Carlson, which sent DISH shares further descending in value. Today trading at $3.32, DISH was priced at $15.64 to start 2023.

Dish elected to confirm the end of the third retransmission consent dispute in a decade with Hearst with a brief statement sent to the media. “We’re pleased to have reached a long-term agreement that benefits all parties and most importantly, our customers,” said DISH EVP/Group President of Video Services Gary Schanman. “Thank you to our customers for your patience and understanding as we worked through the negotiations.”

As RBR+TVBR reported on November 6, the absence of Hearst’s television stations played at least some role in a disappointing Q3 for Dish. For the three-month period ending September 30, Dish suffered a net pay-TV subscriber decline of some 64,000 customers, compared to a net increase of some 30,000 in Q3 2022.

This illustrates how customers, even when told a MVPD negotiated “in good faith” with a broadcast TV station owner, are expressing their frustrations by switching services. In Dish’s view, the retransmission consent disagreement resulted from Hearst “demanding tens of millions of dollars in rate increases that would affect customers, while it devalues its product by making programming available elsewhere, even as viewership declines.”

And, it was Schanman in September who assailed Hearst for forcing Dish customers to “foot the bill” when it came to giving the broadcast TV station owner what it believes is fair compensation for the right of Dish to profit from its product.

For its part, Hearst said, “We have made significant investments to deliver top tier programming to our viewers, and DISH is seeking the right to carry our stations at below market rates, which is neither fair nor reasonable.”

While terms of the new agreement were not disclosed, it shows that, even with the rhetoric shared in September, the two sides were able to reach an agreement favorable to both parties.

The impacted Hearst stations are shown in the map below:

TelevisaUnivision has expanded an exclusive agreement with SBT (Sistema Brasileiro de Televisão), a company within the Silvio Santos Group, that secures the presence of Televisa’s telenovelas on free-to-air television in Brazil for the next five years.

The deal, announced Monday afternoon, also sets the stage for collaboration of the international distribution of the telenovelas produced by SBT based on Televisa’s formats.

“After months of negotiations, we are happy to officially announce the extension of this historic partnership with SBT for free TV in Brazil,” Guillermo Borensztein, SVP of International Content Licensing and Co-Production, said. “We are excited to confirm that Brazilian audiences will continue to enjoy our content for many years to come, as we take the relationship with SBT to the next level.”

This agreement is part of what is described as “a long and fruitful relationship” between TelevisaUnivision and SBT that dates back more than 40 years.

SBT is the network in Brazil that aired the iconic telenovela Rebelde, which is observing its 20th anniversary with a sold-out concert tour across the Americas that included a Globe Life Field show in Dallas at the end of September.

Logo of the Center for Automotive Research

The National Association of Broadcasters says the auto industry is overstating the cost of keeping AM radio in electric vehicles.

The broadcast group believes the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which paid for the 21-page report from the Center for Automotive Research, “misrepresents, distorts and spins” the facts about interference mitigation found in the report.

The auto industry puts the cost to carmakers at $3.8 billion over seven years. NAB replies: “AAI wrongly attributes the entirety of this $3.8 billion cost to keeping AM radio in EVs.”

The CAR estimate, it says, is based on “$70 unit costs” for shielding, filtering and designing new physical placement of components. NAB says the auto industry ignores that the cost burden is shared by a number of electronic modules that have EMI mitigation needs, not just AM radio.

“CAR’s SME discussions revealed that the material cost of addressing AM band interference in EVs is relatively low because mitigation measures are often necessary and implemented to support other electronic systems susceptible to EMI,” NAB said.

The report also considered costs related to vehicle safety, durability, thermal conduction and functional purposes of chassis, body, infotainment and the associated power distribution needs in electric vehicles.

The NAB compared the CAR findings to those of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which estimated that the proposed AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act would cost carmakers only “several millions of dollars each year the requirement is in effect.”

In a blog post, NAB also rejected the auto industry’s claims that mitigation would add critical weight, reducing battery range.

“The report found from interviews with automakers and experts that a ferrite core filter used to reduce interference to AM radio signals weighs about 2.2 pounds. This is just 0.2% of the weight of an EV battery, which weighs on average 1,000 pounds or more depending on the vehicle model. And for a Tesla Model Y, weighing in at over 4,000 pounds, that’s a whopping 0.06% of the vehicle’s total weight,” NAB said.

In addition, NAB said, the CAR report found that future vehicle models would not have the material and test costs for AM radio mitigation that current production EVs would face. “Most of the costs … would be temporary. This is because the redesign of future vehicles would be optimized for electromagnetic compatibility and AM radios will not face the same level of EMI as the first-generation EVs.”

The association said that, in fact, many automakers have figured out a way to include AM in their electric models. “Of the 20 EV automakers listed in the report, 12 include or plan to include AM in their EVs.”

There is momentum in Congress for the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act, according to NAB. The bill would require automakers to maintain AM broadcast radio in new vehicles to ensure public safety.

The post NAB: Carmakers Inflate Costs of Protecting AM in EVs appeared first on Radio World.

Jack Sellmeyer. Photo courtesy Norm Philips.

The author is chairman of the board of Kintronic Labs.

Radio World invited me to share some comments regarding memories of Jack Sellmeyer. 

In my mind he was one of the most distinguished broadcast engineers to serve the AM broadcast industry. 

Jack and my father, Louis King, had similar backgrounds of working for transmitter companies early in their careers and then transitioning into broadcast consulting. 

Seven months after I came to work full time with my father in 1983, he had a stroke, and I was left alone to keep the business going still being a fledgling broadcast engineer. Jack was one of my father’s close associates who helped mentor me through that challenging season of my life together with Ben Dawson and Ron Rackley. 

He was a very loyal friend to our company and to me. Jack Sellmeyer was a highly knowledgeable AM antenna system engineer, and he was an exceptional man of integrity, who was outspoken about those, who were not following his same code of ethics. I am personally indebted to Jack for his involvement in my nomination to receive the NAB Radio Engineering Achievement Award.

Here’s Jack working at the Kintronic factory, commissioning a transmitter for overseas Christian radio.

Jack and I shared our common faith in Jesus Christ. On one occasion we met at a Radio Disney transmitter site in New York City, where we removed a Continental 317C 50kw AM transmitter from service that was donated by Radio Disney.

After driving the transmitter back to our plant and assembling it for test, Jack visited us and conducted the final commissioning of the transmitter on a new frequency. The transmitter was shipped to Voice of the Martyrs in Colombia, South America, where it has since been in service as a regional Christian radio station.

Anyone who knew Jack knows that he had an endless library of life stories about his days in broadcast engineering or about his service in the Vietnam War as a communications engineer. He was in many ways a walking history book of broadcast engineering. 

The broadcast industry has lost one of the giants of our industry in Jack Sellmeyer, P.E. 

Jack Sellmeyer received the NAB  Radio Engineering Achievement Award in 2009; read our profile. His colleague Tom King received the award in 2015; that story is here.

The post Letter: Tom King Remembers Jack Sellmeyer appeared first on Radio World.

Nominations are now being accepted for the 2024 NAB Technology Awards. The awards honor contributions in digital leadership, broadcast engineering and technology innovation, and will be presented during the 2024 NAB Show, held April 13-17 in Las Vegas.

The NAB Digital Leadership Award honors an individual at a broadcast station, group or network who has had a significant role in transforming a traditional broadcast business to succeed on digital media platforms in a measurable way.

Two Engineering Achievement Awards are presented each year, honoring individuals for their outstanding accomplishments in the radio and television broadcast industries.

The Technology Innovation Award is presented to an organization for advanced research and development projects in communications technologies. The technology must demonstrate significant merit, be exhibited at NAB Show and not yet commercialized.

“Each year, the NAB Technology Awards celebrate the great minds behind the exciting innovations that improve our services, better entertain and inform our audiences, and advance our industry,” said NAB Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer Sam Matheny. “We look forward to honoring these broadcast trailblazers at NAB Show in April and showcasing the breakthrough technologies on the horizon.”

The deadline for nominations is Monday, January 8, 2024. Nomination forms, award rules and lists of past recipients are available at nab.org/events/awards.

SAN LUIS OBISPO, CALIF. — Streaming and podcast solutions provider StreamGuys has launched its second-generation SGreports product, a log processing and content analytics toolset for both live streams and podcasts.

The updated offering, part of StreamGuys’ SaaS suite of analytics and monitoring services, offers an improved user experience through enhanced data aggregation and presentation, along with quicker access to streaming analytics.

StreamGuys has initially made the updated product available for small-to-mid sized clients, and will soon expand availability to larger enterprise accounts that require higher levels of customization.

SGreports helps broadcasters and media companies access metrics to understand how audiences interact with streaming content, and then leverage the resulting data to make intelligent business and programming decisions. The software presents visualizations on user dashboards to help them quickly filter and compare data on program streams and podcast episodes, for example. In its previous iteration, users manually parsed data through SGreports’ expansive filter options to build reports. While the process of exporting data was straightforward, the data aggregation process could grow time consuming as the number of sources of metrics grew.

“Broadcasters with varied streaming portfolios often have specific reporting needs that weren’t easily services by the prior iteration of SGreports,” said Robert Minnix, head of product at Humboldt County, Calif.-headquartered StreamGuys. “SGreports now offers a more cohesive environment to aggregate data from different subsets to achieve a singular view, as opposed to managing data across many dashboards. The simple explanation is that users have a more consumable view of everything in one place, which is especially useful for larger media networks and market-based streamers who have a lot of ground to cover. We have now centralized all this data to a single pane of glass.”

As with before, SGreports also allows users to flexibly drill down for greater detail and customize their views for maximum efficiency. However, SGreports also now offers a “snappier, more responsive user interface” that offers more visually distinctive metrics and with greater speed. That includes more insightful charts and graphics versus columns of numerical information. “Some of the SGreports metrics that our users value most, such as geolocation information from users in difference cities and countries, are now presented in ways that are simply more appealing to view and quicker to digest.”

On the quality-of-service side, StreamGuys has migrated SGreports to a Kappa software architecture that better supports real-time processing for analytics. This allows SGreports to aggregate data quicker, with event metrics often available within minutes of completion. “We’ve integrated the analytics stack into our infrastructure so that the host and client servers are processing data in real-time,” said Minnix. “There is no more waiting until tomorrow to access metrics on user traffic, as there is no more batch processing data across different intervals. The information populates as viewers and listeners disconnect.”

SGreports’ advanced reporting capabilities now include enhanced user agent and device-level analysis based on the Open Podcast Analytics Working Group (OPAWG). Support for OPAWG – a cross-platform initiative to standardize podcast download tracking and measurement – bolsters IP and user agent blacklisting, bot identification, and filtering to provide higher-quality podcast reporting through community-based specifications. SGreports also now directly integrates with StreamGuys’ flagship SGrecast podcast management platform and will soon support SGrewind time-shifting service to help users spot trends in traffic and consumption of rewindable content.

From 1998 to 2003, he served as an Oregon State Representative for Grants Pass and Josephine County. As of July 2020, he was back in the state house in Salem when his Grants Pass Broadcasting welcomed a Class A FM scraping the Medford market, adding it to his AM and FM already serving Grants Pass.

Now, Carl Wilson is selling the stations. But, the buyer is someone wholly familiar with the operation and will likely make very few, if any, changes.

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FORT LAUDERDALE — A generation ago, New York Major League Baseball fans had an easy way to watch a game. Mets fans tuned to WWOR-9; Yankees fans chose WPIX-11. Then came the regional sports networks, as cable TV grew. Today, cord-cutting and other financial pressures has made the RSN a fiscally prickly arena, yielding a return of play-by-play to broadcast stations in various markets including Phoenix.

As the RSN model shows its weaknesses, how are broadcasters working to fill the void? The question was one of several pondered during a panel discussion held Thursday (11/9) at the Matrix Media Ad Sales Summit.

 

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TORONTO — In Canada, much like in the U.S., radio station ownership groups have been challenged by core advertising slowdowns. For Corus and Bell Media, which enjoys a partnership with iHeartMedia, quarterly challenges have made headlines. How did the third quarter of 2023 fare for North America’s most dominant multimedia ownership group?

Rogers Communications blew past analysts’ forecasts, with President/CEO Tony Staffieri “very pleased” to be sharing “industry-leading results” for Q3.

 

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