Industry News

In 1974, Steven C. Roberts teamed up with his brother, Michael, in creating a minority-owned business consulting and construction management firm headquartered in St. Louis. Fifteen years later, they expanded beyond commercial real estate investments with the creation of a broadcast media operation, serving the biggest city in Mississippi.

Now, Roberts is ready to demonstrate how a much-debated new technology the FCC could soon authorize for voluntary use by an FM radio station can aid a minority or women-owned station.

A ZoneCasting demonstration is on track for “The Beat of the Capitol.”

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After amassing a formidable stable of low-power and full-power television properties between the first quarter of 2017 and third quarter 2019, HC2 Holdings appears to be in the midst of a significant asset paring.

The company now led by Chief Executive Officer Wayne Barr Jr. has signed off on its fourth divestment deal since the start of 2021.

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The nation’s No. 1 audio media company, iHeartMedia, has made another notable move in the podcasting arena. Three new shows will shine a light on the “curious tales, historical oddities and stranger-than-fiction true stories that are often left out of history books.”

“We are excited to share our newest slate of iHeartRadio Original Podcasts focused on the curious true stories left out of history books,” said Jason English, Lead Executive Producer of iHeartRadio Original Podcasts. “This spring you can spend time with the Black cowboys who found freedom on the high plains after the Civil War; get a first-person account of the most insane government project in American history; and meet desperate World War I veterans who camped outside the White House for months during the Great Depression.”

The first historical podcast in the slate, “Black Cowboys,” available now, tells the story of what freedom looked like for Black Americans after the Civil War. The podcast shares a more honest version of the settling of the Wild West and shines a light on the one-in-four cowboys who were Black. Upcoming podcasts include “Operation Midnight Climax,” which details the stranger-than-fiction events that took place at a CIA-run brothel in the 1950s; “The White House Coup,” which chronicles a club of powerful Wall Street millionaires in a plot to overthrow President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR); and other little-known odd histories of historical figures and events.

New and upcoming iHeartRadio Podcast Originals include “Operation Midnight Climax,” just launched, and “The White House Coup,” coming in April.

The National Football League has reached new long-term deals with its media partners, and the head of the lobbying group representing the interests of small MVPDs is less than pleased with what it will do for cable customers.

As ACA Connects President/CEO Matthew M. Polka sees it, it only strengthens the need for Congress to pass legislation that eliminates retransmission consent.

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According to Magellan AI, which monitors how much advertisers spend on podcasts, BetterHelp spent $4.3 million in February on 386 podcasts.

One of radio’s favorite advertisers, GEICO, was second with $2.6 million spent on 260 mainly sports podcasts.

Here are the top five:

Its earnings per share increased 57.58% over the past year in Q4. And, it beat the Wall Street consensus estimate by a penny.

While that’s a positive feat in COVID-19 times, investors have soured of late on Veritone Inc., the technology company that has built a reputation on harnessing media sales growth opportunities through AI attribution in audio and video content — including advertising.

On Thursday, Veritone shares were down by nearly 11%. What’s upsetting shareholders?

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RALEIGH — Capitol Broadcasting Company (CBC) has launched a new agency that promises to offer clients in the Triangle region of North Carolina, and beyond, strategic brand, marketing, and creative services.

It’s an expansion of services offered since 2017 by its WRAL Digital Solutions. 

“However, the needs of clients have continued to evolve, and CBC realized there was an unmet need in the market,” it explains.

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An AM/FM combo serving a small Mississippi town southeast of Memphis could be liable for a cash penalty for failing to submit its license renewal applications to the FCC in a timely manner.

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JACKSON, WYO. — Across Thursday, a group of local radio stations in Jackson Hole led their newscasts by trumpeting how gas prices were rapidly escalating, putting a tinge of fear in the report.

It appears such fretting may be premature. Crude oil prices plunged 8%, with European demand now less than anticipated. This, coupled with inflation concerns and the news that another 770,000 Americans filed new unemployment claims for the week ending March 13 sent U.S. financial markets downward.

Several publicly traded media companies were swept up in the tide.

Among the bigger dips was that seen by iHeartMedia, the audio media giant that is poised to benefit from the pending acquisition of a significant non-voting stake in the company by Global, the parent of several leading U.K. radio brands.

At the closing bell, IHRT was down 6%, with downward activity accelerating after the noon hour, Eastern time.

Also down significantly: Saga Communications, which continues to suffer from pandemic-related revenue dips across its radio stations. SGA finished Thursday’s trading at $25.12, down 6.7% from Wednesday.

On the TV side, Sinclair Broadcast Group gave up 5.4% of its value to finish the day at $35.89.

Hudson MX, the provider of next-generation media buying and accounting programs for broadcast media, has launched an “enterprise solution” designed to give the half-trillion-dollar media industry “a modern, cross-media, cloud based media management platform.”

As Hudson MX sees it, FinanceAssist can replace “outdated legacy systems that previously monopolized the market.”

Described as a “one-budget, one-invoice platform,” FinanceAssist can enable agencies to manage omnichannel campaigns with “greater flexibility, efficiency and transparency.”

Hudson MX adds, “With these end-to-end capabilities, Hudson MX provides new infrastructure built for today’s omnichannel reality and can agilely evolve in-step with how the industry transforms in the future while empowering the next generation of creativity and effectiveness for agencies and the broader advertising industry.

JT Batson, CEO of Hudson MX, commented, “Legacy systems don’t support agencies and their media partners’ creativity and innovation ambitions, hampering them with artificially increasing transaction costs and high volume of work that is a distraction from delivering results to clients. As an industry, we can and must do better to fix the ecosystem’s fundamental underpinnings for the sake of our industry’s future. With Hudson MX solutions like FinanceAssist we are doing just that through an agile, digital-first platform unencumbered by legacy technology so clients can eliminate process inefficiencies, allowing them to focus on higher-impact strategic work and unlocking revenue for their businesses.”