Inside Radio

Arbitron will reportedly relax some of its terms under which a broadcaster's online stream can be considered a "simulcast."

Until now, Arbitron would consider a station's stream a "simulcast" only if it were 100% identical to the on-air broadcast -- content, ads, everything needed to be the same (and aired at the same time) on the stream as was aired on AM or FM. This means a station stream that substitutes on-air commercials with "online-only" ads, public service messages, promos, or other content, in the stream is not a "simulcast" -- and thus its streaming audience cannot be combined with its on-air audience for ratings purposes.

Beginning in May, the ratings company will allow a "simulcast" broadcast to substitute ads to streaming listeners outside the station's metro area with different ads from the same advertiser. All other content outside of commercials must remain 100% identical.

This change allows stations to "fulfill an advertiser's request that locally advertised specials not be heard outside the local market yet still qualify to receive Total Line Reporting," Inside Radio reports today. Radio can add its digital listening towards its total audience numbers, as well as sell combined on-air/online ad campaigns even for advertisers who want to restrict specific messaging to within the metro.

Inside Radio writes that some broadcasters say McDonald's and Subway directed stations to remove certain spots from their streams for this very reason.

Paragon consultant Mike Henry wrote of many mid- and smaller-sized broadcasters moving towards fully-simulcasting (that is, not changing ads for streaming) because of its inherent advantages. He blogged, "This shift is interesting because it pits the streaming strategy of major groups such as CBS and Clear Channel in one camp, and the mid-sized and smaller groups in another camp. The majors are apparently betting on a streaming sales future, while the other groups are retrenching behind towers and their broadcast sales."

Read more in today's Inside Radio (subscribe here) and from Paragon here.

Over the next few days, we'll be recapping the panels and presentations from the RAIN Summit West conference in Las Vegas on Sunday right here in RAIN, as well as archived audio of the entire day's content from TuneIn and Backbone Networks. Today we want to point out some of the fine coverage of the event in these other industry news sources:

Tom Taylor Now (which was a media sponsor of the event) has excellent summaries of the Summit's first segment in its early Monday morning edition here.  

Inside Radio published extensive, front-to-back coverage of the Summit on Monday morning as well, here.

All Access also went wall-to-wall with keynote, panel, and presentation summaries here.

RadioInfo has coverage today too, here.

Thanks to all these news sources for their coverage of RAIN Summit West.

In January we reported Triton Digital announced its a2x "programmatic buying" solution for streaming audio ads (here), and the launch of Xaxis Radio -- a "digital trading desk" -- on the agency side (here).

Today Inside Radio predicts automated auction buying to grow and help generate revenue for online radio.

"As more shops and broadcasters take a seat at the exchange, multiple buyers would bid against each other for the same audience impressions, driving up demand and tapping into digital budgets. The goal for broadcasters is to extract higher costs per thousands (CPMs)," reads the Inside Radio coverage.

Earlier this month, CBS Radio became the first major service to sign on to Triton Digital's a2x service (press release here).

"It's opening up the door to whole new budgets that we haven't touched before," says CBS Local Digital Media president Ezra Kucharz. "There are certain advertisers that are only going to buy this way in the future."

Inside Radio points to automated buying first in paid search advertising, then in digital display, as the trend.

"Now that executives who rose through the ranks from digital are in charge of planning and buying all media at Universal McCann, Starcom USA and Zenith," watch for automated buying to increase.

There's more on a2x from Triton Digital here.

Inside Radio leads today with a collections of testimonials from program directors revealing how they use social media to track the popularity of new music.

Facebook and YouTube now offer PDs a window into how popular -- or burned -- a song is becoming (see, for instance this article from The New York Times). Lincoln Financial Media CHR KQKS/Denver music director Michael Buhrman says, "Social media has gone to the next level in the past few years as a tool for discovering new music, and helping determine whether a song is compatible with our audience."

Inside Radio adds, "But he and other programmers say it’s just one of many utensils in their toolkit, along with callout, music sales, online testing, requests and other traditional means."

"There is no telling who, what age, or what country (a new song's Facebook) likes and (YouTube) views are coming from," cautions KQMV and KLCK, Seattle PD Maynard. "I feel very confident in our systems of picking music and using the internet or social media as more of a tie breaker or an additional information source." Wilks Broadcasting EVP of programming Jeff Sanders adds, "If I see multiple success stories — You Tube views, iTunes sales, Facebook likes, Twitter followers — then we’ll pay attention."

Clear Channel has redesigned its web radio platform iHeartRadio as it adds hundreds of new station streams from Greater Media and (soon) Cumulus. The redesign aims to help users start listening to their station streams faster and make iHeartRadio's offerings clearer. (Find RAIN's coverage of iHeartRadio's redesign announcement last week here).

For example, the previous site's five navigation options have been simplified into just "Find" and "Create." Indeed, the site as a whole seems to divide itself into those two clear categories. The former refers to the service's AM/FM streams, with "Top Stations Near You," "Featured Stations" and the option to browse by genre or search for stations. "Create" of course refers to iHeartRadio's artist- and song-based Custom Radio stations. Clear Channel says the AM/FM streams make up the majority of listening on iHeartRadio.

The new iHeartRadio homepage also features a selection of the user's previously-listened-to stations, helping move the listener to his or her favorite stations as quickly as possible. The player has been redesigned to be more compact, while the "Discovery Tuner" now lists a sampling of the artists the user will hear with each setting ("Familiar," "mixed" and "less familiar").

The site also now includes streams from Greater Media's 22 stations, with an addition 570 stations from Cumulus Media to be added "in a series of batches" soon, Inside Radio reports. Greater Media announced it would add its streams to iHeartRadio in January (RAIN coverage here), while Cumulus announced the same in December (more here).

Clear Channel says iHeartRadio should display station streams to users "based on their Arbitron cume rank, regardless of station ownership," writes Inside Radio. "That means a user accessing the digital radio platform from Philadelphia will see Greater Media’s classic rock WMGK (102.9) and active rock WMMR (93.3) displayed under the 'Stations Near Philadelphia' banner, alongside Clear Channel O&Os like CHR 'Q102' WIOQ and alternative 'Radio 104.5' WRFF." iHeartRadio also includes station streams from Univision, EMF, various college stations and, of course, Clear Channel.

Clear Channel may be hoping to add streams from other broadcast groups as well. "We're certainly open to other discussions with other partners," said Clear Channel president of Digital Brian Lakamp. Inside Radio reports that Clear Channel may have even "softened" on its requirement that partners offer their streams exclusively via iHeartRadio. Lakamp says exclusivity is "not a requirement."

That requirement worried some broadcasters, while analysts pondered if such a deal would be damaging to the partner (RAIN coverage here and here). "Content creators should work with every distribution platform they can to give listeners access in as many ways as they want it," wrote Jennifer Lane in Audio4Cast.

You can try the new iHeartRadio design for yourself here and subscribe to Inside Radio here.

The Internet Media Device Alliance (IMDA) is reportedly looking to establish industry standards for in-car Internet radio. "The idea is to help broadcasters get what they want out of car radios and to help the automakers have the best experience for their consumer," explains Harry Johnson, chairman of the IMDA and president of vTuner. "Consumers expect a basic set of stations that are the same no matter what kind of car they buy — it should not be a differentiating feature."

The IMDA hopes to issue a final set of in-car web radio guidelines in spring 2013. They would deal with topics like car device profiles, encoding guidelines, a "universal dial" and station metadata. The Alliance wants to establish such guidelines now, because automakers will begin "selling cars equipped with web radio effective with 2014 and 2015 models," writes Inside Radio. "When that happens, drivers will no longer be required to plug in their smartphone for connectivity and dashboards will be similar to the Ford Sync with the apps on the receiver — not on the phone."

"There is time now to do things properly and make the experience for drivers the best one that broadcasters can offer to them," Johnson said.

He outlined two primary benefits for establishing such standards. First, it would avoid the "wild west" of confusing and conflicting technology seen when tabletop Wi-Fi radios arrived. "Broadcasters had no way of knowing which type of streams they were supposed to supply... it might play on a Samsung but not a Sony," explained Johnson.

Second, such standards would help broadcasters compete with webcasters like Pandora, "which are striking deals directly with car manufacturers," Inside Radio writes. You can subscribe to Inside Radio's daily newsletter here.

Arbtrion and Edison found that 17% of consumers have listened to web radio via a smartphone in a car (up 55% from the year before), while TargetSpot recently found that 14% of Internet radio listeners own an in-car web radio player of some kind.