December’s results are in. The trend to stream using mobile devices rolls on.
Triton Digital is the biggest platform for radio streaming and has “instrumentation” for other streaming services. It isn’t measuring everything, but most of the big domestic streamers.
Streaming companies that still don’t offer native HTML5 streaming are going to fall out of the marketplace. Flash and Silverlight are dead, and rightly so.
Maybe the FCC has saved AM radio, but nothing will save desktop computers.
The just released metrics from Nielsen’s Triton digital is that 73.8% of all streaming is now done from mobile devices, mostly iDevices and Android.
Streaming is changing extremely fast
http://www.tritondigital.com/press-releases/triton-digital-releases-march-2015-top-20-ranker
In March, 73% of audio streaming is happening on mobile devices, and Pandora, Spotify and Slacker are crushing Terrestrial radio. SiriusXM doesn’t use the Internet (although streaming is available) so their 25 million paying subscribers are not in the numbers.
Bruce Jenner isn’t the only story about transition.
Up until recently, if you wanted to listen to a radio station on your cell phone or iPad, you need an app like ooTunes, iHeartRadio or tuneIn.
With the introduction of Internet connected entertainment systems in new cars, over the air radio is on track to become as irrelevant as over the air TV, where the cable TV channels are the innovators in programming and producing some of the highest rated shows. Once the listeners are listening over the Internet, why would anyone want to pay for an FCC license for radio – and subject themselves to the NAB’s goon squad (the FCC) demanding to see their public inspection file?
Version 6 of Abacast works natively on Apple devices, and presumably on android devices as well. Cumulus is backing away from iHeartRadio – it seems that huge revenue stream from Clear Channel selling SweetJack promotions isn’t quite working out – and maybe the Dickey brothers figured out it’s not very clever to hand your listeners over to the competition, and then have iHeartRadio push the listeners to Clear Channel’s streams. I honestly don’t understand what they were thinking other than maybe they are just that stupid. Cumulus stock is down 20% since their horrible earnings report.
listenlive.co is also providing Native support for streaming to mobile devices. Listenlive.co is StreamTheWorld, aka Triton Digital, aka Oaktree Capital – the private equity firm that controls Townsquare Media.
The man from Utah who created ooTunes has moved on to a new job, and has limited time to keep his database current. I’m considering changing the way that I classify a radio station as being mobile friendly to not rely on ooTunes.
For those streaming companies still using flash, your time is running out. HTML5 is the future. Get with the program. For that one company still using Silverlight, get a clue. Microsoft itself has abandoned the product.
Triton Media is the folks owned by Oaktree Capital – the Private Equity folks with their hands in a lot radio. Triton Digital is the part that runs StreamTheWorld and Ando Media – providing a complete end-to-end solution for radio. Ando’s technology measures the audience and tracks listeneres, StreamTheWorld’s streaming technology makes the streams work and Triton sells the advertisements and inserts them into the streams. StreamTheWorld has long been the most reliable and consistent streaming company. Triton Media also owns Dial Global, one of the larger talk and music syndicators for radio and owns Townsquare Media – the folks who have quietly been building an empire of small market radio stations from companies that have gone bankrupt or otherwise become nonviable as an ongoing operation.
Salem currently uses LiquidCompass – they are by far the biggest customer of Liquid Compass. Previously, Salem had used StreamAudio, one of the pioneers in streaming that has been ravaged by the success of Triton Media.
+---------------------------+--------+ | parentname | count | +---------------------------+--------+ | Small Owners | 238 | | Salem | 88 | | Saga | 49 | | Bonneville | 7 | | Border Media | 7 | | Mortenson Broadcasting | 6 | | Triad Broadcasting | 6 | | Simmons | 5 | | Commonwealth Broadcasting | 4 | | Lotus | 2 | | NRG | 1 | | Bristol Broadcasting | 1 | | Private College | 1 | | Eagle Communications | 1 | | Grace Broadcasting | 1 | +---------------------------+--------+
Most of the rest of the list are companies I recognize as troubled companies – ones that had the owner die or have been through some form of financial “restructuring”. Triton Media is close to having a monopoly now on streaming. Even those not using the Triton player are still probably using StreamTheWorld behind the scenes to do the streaming. Triton claims it is providing at least some services to 24 of the top 25 radio groups, which is just about everyone in radio. Cream will rise to the top unless the government demands homogenization.
Bow before the new mighty icon
So you don’t ever want to see a Clear Channel Player? uStream? Flash?
Wherever you see that icon, you can make every station using that player vanish with one click (if you have an account and are logged in)
Change your mind? No problem – bring up the player list and un-hide it. The link to see all the player types is down at the bottom of the page where all the icons are explained.
Not all players can be hidden / unhidden – only if they are part of a known group of similar players.
Most of the highly used pages have been changed to support this, but not all. There might be a few loose ends dangling around, so watch your step 🙂 I only started this yesterday.
List of examples:
http://streamingradioguide.com/adm/player-type.php?playerid=9&action=listall
What it does:
Loads up about 40k of Javascript and 40k of graphics (a Flash app would download all of that in one file)
If you don’t have a cookie for the station, it pesters you to register
Says “Hey, I have a live one!” to addthis, a site that is an aggregator for social networking sites – by putting an addthis link on a web page, you’re basically announcing to the whole world who just loaded your player
Cue the flood of Facebook Content Delivery Network tracking crap! – it’s very complicated and will need further study – but it looks like Facebook is using css stylesheets to pass information back and forth to ad networks – kind of like Flash cookies, but even more difficult to block. The browser can’t run without style sheets and style sheets were not intended to pass data secretly between domains.
This player then does something truly bizarre. For each 67 kb of the audio stream, it issues another http:// request over port 443 – but not using https: This is probably to bypass firewall, since it looks somewhat like just routine web traffic. One other quirk is after you click the Stop icon on the player to stop the stream, that doesn’t stop the download of the stream…. the 67kb at a time downloads keep happening forever.
http://streamingradioguide.com/adm/player-type.php?playerid=24&action=listall
Liveplayer is the Targetspot version of the basic STW player.
What it does:
Downloads a 219k “General Ad Server” Flash App
Says “Hi” to Google Analytics
Gets configuration info via XML
loads the player Flash App (144k)
downloads a 1 MB video ad (on this test) and plays it
Starts streaming the audio
Relatively low bloat factor, and not promiscious
Cox Radio is doing their own thing. They used to use StreamAudio, now they are using StreamTheWorld for the actual stream – but not using the lean mean STW player, but instead the TargetSpot streaming ad insertion with extra junk thrown in for good measure thing.
http://streamingradioguide.com/adm/player-type.php?playerid=48&action=listall
for a nice list.
After a few preliminary things, the player loads a 550kB flash player object (!)
contacts Google Analytics
contacts TargetSpot
contacts Doubleclick (for the static banner ad)
updates a 2mdn flash cookie
lets Quantcast play with the Flash cookies
Loads a 3.5 MB flash advertisement
begins downloading a series of ad descriptors from Targetspot to play later
starts downloading ~1 MB of graphics and AUDIO for those future intersticial ads (the stream hasn’t started yet)
reaches out to adfusion to say “Hi!”
The biggest flaw to this player is there is no reason to be downloading a dozen Targetspot ads into memory before the video preroll ad has downloaded, and before the stream is loaded and going. Get the stream going, and then load up the crap in the background as bandwidth permits…..
I claim no credit for this, but I certainly am cheering.
Clear Channel is going to stop running those damn prestreaming ads on a large part of the day. According to the story at Tom Taylor’s newsletter, CC’s new policy is they’ll only run ads before 8 AM, 11 AM to 2PM and 5PM to 8PM.
Advertisers are pissed. Boohoo, cry me a river. Paying for streaming by rolling in a delay is a horrible business model. You would never accept that on your car radio.
If you test steams, you probably notice a high failure rate on Clear Channel stations. After a long delay, the player reports that there is no stream available, which is not true. What happened is the video preroll ad server failed to respond in time. If you click OK instead of closing the window, the stream will start playing. This usually gets worse right around the top of the hour.
I suspect CC also is catching heat from employers – having 500 employees arrive at work and more or less at the same time fire up Quinn & Rose and bringing the employers LAN to a crawl would motivate me to consider blocking all streaming