Industry News

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He said Congress should expand the FCC’s “forbearance authority” so it could eliminate outdated rules for video providers, and also consider “a top-to-bottom re-write of the Cable Act.”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

Please Login to view this premium content. (Not a member? Join Today!)

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.”

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.

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.

Please Login to view this premium content. (Not a member? Join Today!)

Townsquare Media on Tuesday (12/15) moved forward with initiating a $550 million bond offering — a move that prompted the local media company to pre-release its fourth quarter earnings well ahead of schedule.

What does the owner of radio stations in small and mid-sized markets, which has excelled in programmatic and local digital across its markets, have to report with two weeks remaining in 2020?

Please Login to view this premium content. (Not a member? Join Today!)

The Nielsen Audio rankings for two top markets — one in Virginia and the other in the Lone Star state — will continue to display the stations for an entity operating under two different names in each of these locales.

A new agreement is in place that sees the dominant audience measurement company’s rankings for Norfolk and Austin now include Sinclair Telecable and Waterloo Media stations, respectively.

It’s a new multi-year for the Hampton Roads stations, comprised of News/Talk WNIS-AM, Sports Talk WTAR-AM and FM translator W243DJ, Adult Hits WNOB-FM “BOB FM,” Country WUSH-FM 106.1 and Alternative WROX-FM 96.1 “96X.”

And, it is a renewal in Austin for stations that Sinclair Telecable, which is not related to Sinclair Broadcast Group, had 49.9% controlling interest in before acquiring the remaining interest in the six station, two translator cluster from Emmis Communications for $39.3 million. That deal received FCC approval in September 2019.

The Austin radio cluster includes eight station brands: KLBJ-AM 590 (with an FM Translator at 99.7 MHz), Rock KLBJ-FM 93.7, No. 1-rated Adult Hits KBPA-FM 103.5 “Bob FM,” dominant Regional Mexican KLZT-FM 107.1 “La Zeta,” Hot Adult Contemporary KGSR-FM 93.3, Alternative KROX-FM 101.5 “101X,” “Austin City Limits Radio” on an FM translator at 97.1 MHz, and Spanish Contemporary “Latino 102.7” via a second FM translator.

Both Austin and Norfolk use the Portable People Meter (PPM) to create audience estimates based on one’s exposure to broadcast media via traditional radio and encoded audio streaming; Nielsen Audio’s PPM ratings do not measure one’s own listening, given the PPM technology and proximity to others’ listening habits, be it at a restaurant or retail establishment.

The new deal includes use of sales software provided by TAPSCAN.

Norfolk is also an Eastlan Ratings market, with surveys in the winter and spring offered through 2019 by the company.

Convergent TV advertising platform Beachfront has teamed up with a video delivery platform provider to help bring real-time, programmatic monetization of linear spot, over-the-top (OTT) and video-on-demand (VOD) ad inventory.

The deal is with SeaChange International, and the companies note the co-platform is already deployed in the U.S. — including with a global operator and regional cable company.

The partnership enables Beachfront’s demand partners to automate cable TV ad buying through SeaChange’s value-based Framework video delivery platform.

SeaChange recently signed agreements with Tier 1 TV providers. Effective immediately, agencies, brands and demand-side platforms (DSPs) who utilize Beachfront can automate their ad buying across the entire video ecosystem, including linear TV as provided by the SeaChange Framework.

These advertisers can then activate the “premium” linear TV ad inventory — along with VOD, connected TV (CTV), mobile and desktop inventory — through the use of real-time bidding (RTB).

“Linear TV inventory has long been excluded from programmatic marketplaces due to technical limitations and infrastructural challenges,” said SeaChange CEO Yossi Aloni. “In partnership with Beachfront, we’ve completed the difficult work of connecting modern, digital-oriented ad buyers to linear TV inventory.”

This partnership, the companies say, builds on Beachfront’s work developing solutions for multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) that address technical challenges surrounding set-top boxes — and solve major infrastructural problems inhibiting monetization of traditional TV viewing environments.

In 2019, Beachfront launched the first-ever set-top box VOD programmatic ad product, allowing MVPDs and media owners to expose VOD inventory to modern programmatic ad buyers and increase the average cost per thousands (CPMs) in the process. Now, Beachfront is bringing that same programmatic VOD solution to linear TV, effectively enabling demand partners to automate their ad buying across the entire video ecosystem.

Beachfront CEO Chris Maccaro commented, “When you look ahead at the next decade of TV
consumption, there will surely be a continued proliferation of cord cutting and Internet-based TV streaming, as well as a continued base of consumers who will get their content via a traditional cable box. For these reasons, we don’t over emphasize any one consumer viewing endpoint. Rather we prioritize all premium TV viewing platforms — from smart TVs to cable set-top boxes — and we’re excited to continue bringing uniformity and simplicity to the convergent TV ad marketplace, while empowering agencies and brands to automate their media buying across the video ecosystem.”

Radio imaging, voiceover, programming, podcasting and jingles producer Benztown says it has become the first imaging library company to bring the benefits of advanced Artificial
Intelligence (AI) technology to audio producers.

How so?

Benztown has launched an AI-based imaging library platform.

Benztown says its AI-powered search functionality “allows audio producers to quickly and
easily find audio in Benztown’s imaging libraries, leaving behind now-dated and more
time-consuming search methods using metadata, which is the current industry
standard. Users are able to upload any audio file (mp3 or wav) to the library, or paste a
link from YouTube, SoundCloud, or Vimeo into the search field, and find files in
Benztown’s imaging libraries that are similar to the example provided.”

The new AI platform downloads the audio file in the background and ingests it to the audio
player, allowing the user to generate similar results based on the entire audio file, or a
specific time selection of the file.

The feature uses machine learning to identify potential tracks based on an example.
Any given track will have a multitude of identifying characteristics, similar to a
fingerprint. These characteristics are compared to thousands of other tracks in the
library to determine possible matches. Recently, Google announced a “hum to search”
feature enabling people to pinpoint songs by simply humming part of a track and
Benztown’s new AI technology works in a similar way.

For more information or to subscribe to Benztown’s advanced AI-powered audio
Imaging libraries, contact Masa Patterson at mp@benztown.com and at (818) 842-4600.

MELBOURNE, FLA. — The turnkey provider of customized network, broadcast and digital signage systems and services known as USSI Global is celebrating its 35th anniversary.

As part of this commemoration, the company is helping broadcasters mitigate interference of the long-standing C-Band satellite spectrum to make room for new 5G services — among other things.

USSI Global is also providing ground station and user terminal services across the globe for LEO satellite internet providers, and offering indoor and outdoor digital signage solutions – plus a suite of repair and sparing solutions – to ensure optimum uptime.

“Our ability to adapt to technological changes and support the world’s digital transformation is really what has kept us relevant and growing over the years,” said President/CEO David S. Christiano. “Our core business is global field services, which has opened up opportunities for us to offer turnkey solutions. We start where everyone else finishes.”

USSI was established in 1985 to cater to the emerging VSAT (very-small-aperture terminal) technology, a two-way satellite system that became extremely popular when the U.S. government broke up AT&T in the 1980s. USSI Global created an installation and maintenance network, building its workforce by training satellite TV installers to be satellite data technicians and recruiting a field engineer network that today is the most experienced in the broadcast television industry.

USSI Global briefly went public in 1989. Two years later, executives returned the company to private status and business boomed. Since 1991, USSI Global has installed more than 100,000 VSAT systems, providing two-way communication for service industries throughout the world. Today, USSI Global’s most prominent business is supporting television broadcasters, providing program management, installation, maintenance, 24/7 technical support, engineering, logistics, and repair services.

For almost four decades, USSI Global has supported a major US network’s satellite distribution and affiliate network in all 50 states. Other companies such as Sinclair, Fox, Discovery Channel, and Telemundo also depend on USSI Global each day to maintain and refresh their technology.

Digital signage projects commenced in 1995, and the market has grown into a major focus for USSI Global. In fact, the company’s Digital Signage Division has completed more than 50,000 site installs, and also offers customized maintenance plans as well as content distribution services.

Recently, USSI Global completed an update of outdoor menu boards for a major quick serve restaurant (QSR) chain, providing full excavation, electrical wiring, and panel installation. Christiano expects to see most QSRs digitize their outdoor menus, as COVID-19 restrictions have increased the use of drive-thru service. ”Why have static menus when you can have dynamic content that you can control digitally?” he said. “We’re currently in the planning stages with other QSRs digitizing their drive thrus. It’s convenient and it works well. We also provide display repair services for Samsung and others.”

Beyond its established digital signage business, USSI Global is expanding to new vertical markets. For example, EV chargers are in the near future plans. An estimated 10 percent of cars in the United States will be electric by 2030, which will require more than 1 million charging stations to be added to current refueling infrastructures. Christiano sees an opportunity to integrate chargers with touchscreen kiosks to deliver advertising and other messages to consumers, similar to digital signage systems the company has already deployed at convenience stores and restaurants. Also, USSI Global is working in the lab to integrate IoT and AI into its solutions.

While COVID-19 presented a challenge for new project work this year, Christiano said service and maintenance work through USSI Global’s Electronic Business and Consumer Solutions remained strong. “We never missed a beat,” he added. “We have a great team, and I think we’re much stronger as a company. With proper precautions, we’ve been able to support our customers in the field, and we’ve identified new lines of business needed for COVID-19 and beyond.”

Over the next decade, USSI Global’s Broadcast and Network Division plans to provide LEO ground station support for satellite-based internet. The company already handles installation and maintenance for the bulk of transmission repeaters used for satellite radio, and continues to assist broadcasters with OTT technology.

During the next three years, USSI Global will also remain focused on stabilizing U.S. broadcast TV quality with 5G/C-Band Interference Mitigation services while clearing the way for 5G. “Tens of thousands of antennas across the country have to be filtered to avoid 5G interference,” Christiano said. “We’re well-positioned for this project – we’re already installing new antennas and supporting the transition that needs to take place.”

— Reporting by Brian Galante. Editing by Adam Jacobson, in Melbourne, Fla.

AudioGO, the self-serve digital audio ad buying service from AdsWizz, is now fully integratrated with popular design platform Canva.

The integration enables AudioGO advertisers to easily create display ads with Canva’s graphic design platform during campaign setup, enabling anyone to complement their audio ad campaigns with professional-looking banner ads. In addition, if an advertiser does not have an audio ad, AudioGO will create one for them in under a day.

The new Canva integration comes on the heels of new behavioral targeting capability added earlier this month, making it easier than ever for audio advertisers to connect and engage with the right audiences.

“Our mantra is to make AudioGO easy to use for anyone looking to run audio campaigns of any size,” said AdsWizz CEO Alexis van de Wyer. “Our integration with Canva gives audio ad buyers the ability to easily design professional-quality display ads with Canva’s design tool without ever leaving AudioGO.”

AudioGO enables anyone to create streaming audio ad campaigns at a time when listeners are tuning in on digital devices more than ever before. Time spent with streaming audio has grown during the pandemic, up 32% from December 2019, according to recent data from Comscore. AudioGO’s self-serve audio ad buying service allows anyone to buy ads on premium streaming music, podcast, and news services that, combined, reach over 150 million listeners every month. Bringing multiple services together onto one buying platform enables local buyers to efficiently target listeners on top services with low minimums.

“We’re thrilled to partner with AudioGo with the Canva Button as together we’ll empower businesses to supercharge their advertising,” said Mike Williams, Product Partnership Lead. “We’re very excited to see it come to life.”

AudioGO enables businesses to easily leverage advanced advertising features like zip-code level targeting, enhanced reporting, Spanish-language content, campaign duplication across geographies, and flexible payment options. The user-friendly interface invites anyone to explore the medium with a low minimum spend. A simple dashboard provides up-to-the-minute information on both unique listeners and total ad impressions, as well as click-through and listen-through rates.