Industry News

IT’S NOT TOO LATE … BUT THE CLOCK IS TICKING!
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• IF YOU DIDN’T ATTEND FORECAST 2021, IT’S NOT TOO LATE TO BENEFIT FROM THIS YEAR’S PREMIERE RADIO CONFERENCE
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• CLICK HERE FOR THIS YEAR’S OUTSTANDING AGENDA

 

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Forecast LIVE is this year’s virtual version of Radio Ink’s annual Forecast conference, the radio industry’s premier financial summit, gathering the smartest minds in media and advertising to forecast revenue and analyze projections and trends for the coming year.

Don’t take it from us – here’s what attendees are saying: Caroline Beasley “From incredible speakers to real and relevant insights, Radio Ink’s annual Forecast gathering is an absolute ‘must attend’ event for forward thinking leaders, decision makers, and influencers working within and outside of the media industry! And this year’s virtual event was no exception.” – Caroline Beasley, Beasley Media Group

 

Pierre Bouvard “Radio Ink’s Forecast 2021 was spectacular: It felt like two days of knowledge and insights were compressed into a few hours. Very actionable! As Ghandi said, ‘Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.’”
-Pierre Bouvard, Cumulus Media/Westwood One

 

 

“Thank you for not letting this just not happen this year. I enjoyed it very much. Your team did an amazing job executing this event virtually. All of the sessions were very informative and helpful.”
-Ron Stone, Adams Radio Group

 

“The best online event I have attended. Just enough time, great content, well produced. Great work!”
– Jinny Laderer, vCreative

 

“Great Sessions! Eye Opening and Thought Provoking… Each session provided an honest view of where our industry is today, where it’s headed, and how we need to pivot to meet the needs of tomorrow.” – Danny Tankersley, Wide Orbit “The team did an outstanding job. I think that the program was great and went off technically well.” – Andrew Rosen, Miller Kaplan “The speaker lineup, production pieces and hosts stepped up big time in a virtual time of need for the industry. It was lively and informative while giving lots for the attendees to think about in contemplating 2021 and beyond.” – David Pearlman, Pearlman Advisors “Forecast is one-stop shopping for an overview of where the industry is and where it is going. I gain information and knowledge that I use throughout the year and find myself quoting panelists and keynotes such as Matt Britton. This year’s virtual event was spectacular.” – Heather Cohen, The Weiss Agency “Thank you for a wonderful, informative conference. Excellent!!!!”
– Jeanne-Marie Condo, Skyview Networks “This was absolutely fantastic. The education was strong, and the platform was ideal.” – Becky Brooks, Alliance for Women in Media

Broadcasting companies publicly traded on Wall Street were largely up at the Closing Bell on Tuesday. One company, however, sticks out for another dip in value.

That would be Entercom.

Shares dipped 2.2% to $2.28 in heavier-than-average trading of 2.41 million. Average trading for Entercom is 1.93 million shares.

In contrast, Cumulus Media enjoyed a 3.3% gain as shared reached $9.14, and iHeartMedia gained 5 cents, to $12.45.

On the TV side, it was another banner session for Nexstar Media Group, with gains also seen by Sinclair Broadcast Group.

 

WASHINGTON, D.C. — In 1979, The Media Institute was established as a nonprofit foundation specializing in communications policy issues of concern to all Americans, including the promotion of Freedom of Speech and encouraging a competitive media environment.

On Tuesday, the soon-to-depart Chairman of the FCC, Ajit Pai, addressed the organization in a virtual luncheon that saw him quip about a Commission predecessor before offering “some thoughts on where the federal government should go” once he departs on January 20, 2021.

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The November 2020 Nielsen Audio ratings for Colorado Springs have just been released, and guess what — the top 5 stations, 12+, are all owned by Cumulus Media.

Yes, stations owned by Bahakel and a News Press and Gazette-owned Talk station, do not appear publicly in the ratings. Nevertheless, this group of radio stations’ success is very noteworthy. What’s the No. 1 reason for this cluster-wide strength?

Scott Jones, Vice President and Market Manager for Cumulus Media’s Colorado Springs operations, shares the answer and more in this fresh RBR+TVBR InFOCUS Podcast!

Listen to “The InFOCUS Podcast: Scott Jones, Cumulus Media” on Spreaker.

TORONTO — The President of Cogeco Media, a takeover target of Rogers Sports & Media, has exited the Montréal-based owner of 23 radio stations across the Canadian province of Québec.

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IEEE Broadcast Technology Society has announced it will host an IEEE BTS Pulse event from February 9–11, which will discuss topics including single frequency networks, applications for drone technology and 5G content production.

The second ever IEEE BTS Pulse event, the three-day virtual event aims to answer vital broadcast industry questions with top experts, according to IEEE BTS’ website.

[Visit the Radio World Calendar]

The first of the three days will be dedicated to SFN and virtualization cohesiveness. The session will look at the fundamentals of ATSC 3.0 SFNs as well as the virtualization of broadcast gateways and some of the challenges and uses of software-based SFN implementations. S. Merrill Weiss, Merrill Weiss Group LLC; Benoît Bui Do, Enensys; Mark Corl, Triveni Digital; and Ali Dernaika, Hewlett Packard Enterprise are slated to speak on day one.

Day two will focus on drones and thermography, specifically how thermal imaging can be used to scan broadcast transmission lines and antennas to identify possible areas of concern and how drones can help in this area. Paul Shulins, BTS vice president and president of Shulins Solutions, is tapped as the day two session chair. Session speakers will also include certified thermographers and an expert on using drones for broadcast signal measurements.

The third and final day of IEEE’s Pulse event tackles 5G content production. Organized by the European H2020 project 5G-RECORDS, the session will look at the opportunities and challenges of 5G for professional audiovisual content production. This will include presentations on the European Broadcasting Union’s 5G content production activities and 5G technology enablers from Ericsson and Nokia. David Gomez-Barquero, Universitat de Valencia, Communications Department, iTEAM Research Institute- Mobile Communications Group will lead the session.

For more information on the IEEE BTS Pulse event, visit IEEE BTS’ website.

The post IEEE BTS Pulse Agenda Spotlights SFN, 5G and Drone Usage appeared first on Radio World.

The outgoing chairman of the Federal Communications Commission is asking why broadcasters should be covered by special media ownership rules at all.

“We need a fundamental, intellectually honest reassessment of what the media marketplace looks like now, where it’s going and what this means for consumers,” said Ajit Pai, speaking to the Media Institute Tuesday.

He noted the huge growth in ad revenue for digital platforms over the past decade compared to other media. The result, he said, is that broadcast media are subject to far more regulation “to guard against [their] supposed market power” than companies that are now far bigger than they are.

“In 2020, for example, Google and Facebook are each expected to bring in more ad revenue than every TV and radio station in the U.S. combined,” Pai said.

Pai, a Republican, has made regulatory reform and streamlining one of the themes of his tenure. But he thinks bigger changes are called for.

He said Congress should expand the FCC’s “forbearance authority” so it could eliminate outdated rules for video providers, and also consider “a top-to-bottom re-write of the Cable Act.”

More dramatically, “I also believe that the federal government needs to fundamentally rethink the very concept of media ownership regulation. … We don’t have special rules about how many social media outlets you can own. We don’t have special rules for how many streaming services you can own. We don’t have special rules limiting how many Americans your internet platform can reach. Indeed, our so-called media ownership rules don’t contain ownership rules for much of the media, and in particular those parts of the media that are growing fast. For some reason, the only ones we have are for broadcasters.”

The problem, he said, is “a fundamental refusal to grapple with today’s marketplace: what the service market is, who the competitors are and the like. When assessing competition, some in Washington are so obsessed with the numerator, so to speak — the size of a particular company, for instance — that they’ve completely ignored the explosion of the denominator — the full range of alternatives in media today, many of which didn’t exist a few years ago.”

He said when determining a company’s market share, “a candid assessment of the denominator should include far more than just broadcast networks or cable channels. From any perspective… it should include any kinds of media consumption that consumers consider to be substitutes,” Pai said.

“When you ask the intellectually honest questions, the answers raise serious doubts about whether the FCC should have media ownership regulations at all,” he concluded.

“If general competition law is good enough for other sectors of our economy, why not the broadcast industry?”

 

The post Pai Calls for Reassessment of Media Marketplace appeared first on Radio World.

If the Radio Zindagi brand sounds familiar to you, it should. On October 2, RBR+TVBR reported on the sale of an AM radio station in Nassau-Suffolk, N.Y., with 10kw during daylight hours and 220 watts at night, using a directional two-pattern signal with 2 towers.O

The station aired the network, providing South Asians with music and entertainment tied to Indian, Sri Lankan and Pakistani culture. A format change was anticipated.

That happened. Now, Radio Zindagi is set to return, thanks to a fresh spin of the station by the entity that just bought it.

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Streaming is not a static technology. New innovations are constantly being developed.

Many video and “over the top” streamers have discovered the advantage of CMAF, the Common Media Application Format. This format, explained in standards document ISO/IEC 23000-19:2020, offers advantages to the streamer that are finally being recognized for audio-only streaming.

Technology companies StreamS and StreamGuys recently announced joint support for it. StreamS is part of Modulation Index, a company that offers streaming encoders and internet audio products and is headed by Greg Ogonowski, founder of Gregg Laboratories and former VP of product development at Orban.

StreamGuys is a service provider of live and on-demand streaming, podcasting delivery, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) toolsets.

Why does this matter to Radio World readers?

As the companies put it, their goal is to provide “next-generation, high-performance live audio streaming using fully compliant standards-based CMAF HLS for low-latency, adaptive-bitrate HTTP Live Streaming (HLS). Together, both provide a complete end-to-end streaming solution that is reliable, scales to rapidly growing large audiences and reaches more modern devices with stunning audio quality.”

Container format

Please note that various companies will offer different flavors of a format, which is a problem with generic formats. Someone one said that the beauty of standards is that there are so many. Unfortunately, there are also a multitude of interpretations.

As a result, many existing streaming protocols have been modified and hacked to the point of becoming proprietary, leading to compatibility issues among streaming servers and player clients and devices. Will the disparity end? Probably not in the foreseeable future.

This particular solution is working hard to stay compatible with Apple Music. StreamS makes the hardware and software solution, and StreamGuys is the content delivery network or CDN.

Many formats are needed for streaming: the encoding format (i.e. xHE-AAC), the transport format (i.e. HLS), and the container format. CMAF is an example of a container format:

• It can contain your audio and video plus all the associated metadata.
• ID3 metadata is supported.
• Commercials can still be injected from multiple networks.

A diagram from StreamS/Modulation Index depicts the process.

Why is the announcement from StreamS and StreamGuys a good idea?

Consider that the World Wide Web was designed to present static or small files. It was not originally thought of for presenting non-ending streams; streaming was conceived later.

CMAF takes your content and chops it into segments, sending it to the Content Delivery Network. CMAF then instructs the player how to reassemble and present it, thus getting rid of many of the typical issues associated with streaming.

Greg Ogonowski, president of StreamS, notes that a “streaming server” is no longer essential to send the stream out.

What about latency? The delay of the content from encoding to playback has been the sworn enemy of the streamer.

CMAF can reduce (though not eliminate) latency. With a smaller payload, buffering and unwanted stream disconnections are lessened greatly.

To achieve less latency they are using this with HLS, which stands for HTTP Live Streaming, an adaptive bitrate streaming communications protocol developed by Apple Inc. Yes, that Apple. So there is instant compatibility with all of the iPhones out there. Yes, Android supports HLS out of the box, though support depends on the version of Android.

So compatibility is there. With HLS, latency is closely tied to the duration of the media segments that you’re using.

“HLS is getting a whole lot better with CMAF,” said Kiriki Delany, president of StreamGuys, in the press release announcing the partnership. “We are excited to support ultra-low latency and simplify deploying HLS.”

Delany said HLS provided efficient ways to switch networks while maintaining a stream, as well as savings on power consumption for mobile devices; it also introduced much higher latency than traditional true-streaming systems.

“CMAF changes that by allowing encoding to happen much faster, which greatly reduces file-based buffers. Meanwhile, xHE-AAC, once adopted by all major browsers and mobile platforms, will simplify what codecs are needed on the decoder side. It will support very low bitrates, like 12 kbps for speech, to very high bitrates, such as lossless ALAC/FLAC formats. This simplification will mean larger reach, and lower barriers to cross platform compatibility.”

As a bonus, the higher adoption of lossless formats ALAC/FLAC for “fine arts formats” also invites the audiophile to enjoy streaming.

The introduction of CMAF and HLS is a big step for streaming radio and audio-only services. Hopefully others will get on board.

The author is a broadcast and streaming consultant and co-chair of the Audio Engineering Society’s Technical Committee for Broadcast and Online Delivery.

The post Putting CMAF HLS to Work in Audio appeared first on Radio World.

Late Friday (12/11), the newly formed Independent Broadcasters Association (IBA) released its first Financial Benchmark Analysis, a review of the broadcast operations of non-corporate-owned AM and FM radio stations across the U.S.

IBA called on the services of media and sports specialty accounting and advisory firm dk east associates to produce the report, which is available to members only.

RBR+TVBR has an exclusive look at some of the topline results, and the performance could put publicly traded corporate entities back under Wall Street’s ever-scrutinizing magnifying glass.

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