Tracey Connolly is assuming the role, managing the company’s broadcast sales around the world, with a focus on customer and partner relationships. Based in Metro Halifax, Connolly’s sales background includes more than 17 years with Sysco in Atlantic Canada. She’d more recently been serving as Director of Business Development for The Shaw Group Limited.

“Tracey brings 30 years of sales leadership and business development experience to this role,” said Blair Donovan, Nautel Head of Sales, in a company announcement. “She has a superb track record of establishing exceptional relationships and will apply this experience to serve the broadcast industry and Nautel customers.”

Lonergan first joined Nautel in 1978 in research. Successive roles included Project Leader, Medium Wave Transmission, before being named Sales Manager, Middle East and North Africa in 2005. He’d been in his current role since 2012.

“We’re pleased to add Tracey to the Nautel team, and we wish Wendell the very best in retirement,” said Kevin Rodgers, Nautel President and CEO. “Wendell has been with Nautel for more than 47 years; he was involved in Nautel’s early AM designs and has contributed immensely to the worldwide broadcast community in his more recent role as Senior Director of Broadcast Sales.”

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CKUA Radio has had a strong start to an urgent fundraising campaign to keep the donor-funded station on the air. An Alberta institution for the past 96 years and the country’s oldest public and educational broadcaster, the Edmonton station says its future is at risk “due to a perfect storm of rising inflationary pressures, limited government funding, the vacancy and devaluation of Edmonton’s downtown office real estate market, and post-pandemic realities.” CKUA says it needs to raise $3 million by the end of September. After launching its Spring fundraising campaign on Friday afternoon, listeners had already donated more than $850,000 by Monday morning and surpassed the $1M mark on Tuesday. Read more here.

91.3 FM CJTR Regina Community Radio’s membership has voted overwhelmingly in favour of transferring ownership of the station to Access Communications Co-operative. Facing financial hardship, CJTR has been looking for an alternative operating model. Serving Regina since 2001, the station is almost entirely volunteer run, with two staff and 80 programmers creating 60 shows and 5,000 hours of original programming annually. CJTR’s staff will be joining Access Communications. The next steps will see Access apply to the CRTC for approval of the ownership transfer and obtain a community broadcast license. In the meantime, the station will continue to broadcast under its current licence. 

Sports 1440 (CKJR-AM) Edmonton will debut TURN Sports from The Universal Radio Network on Wednesday, May 1. Broadcasting weeknights from 6 – 9 p.m., TURN Sports will offer a blend of local and international sports coverage, including basketball, hockey, soccer, football, cricket, baseball, and more. It’s hosted by Navin Ramharak, the Edmonton creator behind the Brown Ballers sports media platform for brown athletes. Stingray says with the show’s launch, Sports 1440 becomes a full-time sports destination, broadcasting 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Stingray’s Q104 (CFRQ-FM) Halifax launched its HD Radio broadcast on March 18, introducing HD Radio to the Maritimes. In late 2023, the station engaged with Nautel to discuss replacing Q104’s aging transmitter and the possibility of incorporating HD Radio. Nautel embraced the chance to debut their new Radio-Airchain technology, an all-in-one solution that garnered a “Best in Show” award at NAB Show. As the inaugural station to adopt the technology, Q104 has enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship with Nautel, given its proximity to their Nova Scotia headquarters. The station’s collaboration with Quu and Xperi aims to enrich the HD Radio experience for listeners, complete with album artwork and enhanced visuals for programs like Rock of The Atlantic. 

91.7 Giant FM’s (CIXL-FM) Welland, ON Cash FX jackpot has grown to nearly $12,000, resulting in numerous misdials to other businesses as listeners frantically attempt to be lucky caller number 10. The contest, which is currently running five times a day and grows by $100 with each wrong guess, is now the largest radio cash prize in Niagara region history. My Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) Vice President of Content Rob Mise says the record-breaking prize has people buzzing across the Niagara Region.

Libsyn Ads and the Toronto Star have struck a partnership that will see Libsyn serve as the publication’s North American sales partner, augmenting the Star’s sales team to maximize ad opportunities for its podcast lineup, including: This Matters, It’s Political with Althia Raj, Deep Left Field with Mike Wilner, True Crime podcast Suspicion, and Millennial Money, among other titles. As the exclusive advertising partner, the Toronto Star will utilize Libsyn Ads’ offerings, including host-read and programmatic ads, enabling podcasts to enhance their host-read programs by integrating programmatic ad revenues.

LISTEN: After helming afternoon drive on Calgary’s Q107 for six years, Tarzan Dan Freeman was unexpectedly laid off less than 10 days before Christmas in 2022, followed by what he says was one of his hardest years ever convinced his radio career was most likely over. But like every good comeback story, Freeman now finds himself with a new coast-to-coast show, hosting middays across iHeartRadio’s Bounce Radio network. Tarzan Dan joins us on Broadcast Dialogue – The Podcast to talk about being back in the national spotlight, his legacy as “that guy” from YTV’s Hit List, and his advice to others who find themselves between radio gigs.

LISTEN: Alan Grego is on the latest Sound Off Podcast sharing his journey from corporate trainer to award-winning podcast host and communications manager at Moneris. He discusses how he got interested in podcasting and started an internal podcast to share opportunities, which in turn led to him creating branded podcasts for Moneris full-time. In this episode, he touches on his use of tools like the Zoom H5 for recording, and how he draws inspiration from shows like This American Life to achieve that perfect podcast sound. 

The post Radio & Podcast News – CKUA Radio passes $1M fundraising mark following urgent appeal appeared first on Broadcast Dialogue.

The Humber College B²C Lab Open House is approaching, May 11-12, which will include a series of presentations and demonstrations of ATSC 3.0 broadcast and datacast topics and applications from industry experts and global research teams. Learn more here.

Ross Video, a founding member of the Open Services Alliance (OSA) and a long-time supporter of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), has announced that Catena, a new OSA interoperability project, will now reside under SMPTE’s Rapid Industry Solution (RIS) program, with the merger of the OSA and SMPTE. The resulting entity will be known as OSA: A SMPTE Rapid Industry Solution. Catena is intended to provide a simple way to enable control, status reporting and configuration across a wide array of vendors, with devices, complex products, services, or small microservices. Catena builds upon Ross Video’s openGear platform, which has enabled interoperability of on-premises equipment across vendors for over 16 years. Those who wish to join the newly merged SMPTE and OSA can visit the SMPTE Member Portal. 

Nautel has unveiled its new GV2 Series transmitters, the first in the industry to integrate all HD Radio components inside the transmitter. The update to Nautel’s flagship FM transmitter series provides the full hardware platform to support HD Radio with Xperi Gen4 Importer, Exporter, and Exgine implementations for HD radio encoding, station logo and artist experience. Omnia for Nautel covers all FM and HD Radio audio processing needs and provides Livewire AoIP inputs for all audio streams. Nautel will begin accepting orders for the GV2 hardware platform in Q2 2023. Early adopters are expected to be able to test drive the software components by Q4.

Witbe, a leader in test automation and proactive monitoring for video service providers, has moved its Montreal branch to a larger facility to better support its Canadian customers. The company opened its initial Montreal office in 2013. The new Montreal office is one of 12 Witbe locations across the globe, with corporate headquarters split between Paris, New York, and San Francisco. 

Cignal TV, the Philippines’ premier Pay TV provider, is expanding its use of Toronto-headquartered Quickplay’s cloud-native OTT platform to provide more content and access options for Filipino viewers in the Philippines and overseas. Cignal TV is working with Quickplay to create two market differentiators that will be launched in the coming months, running on Google Cloud, including an extension of its Cignal Play video streaming service that will bring content directly to living rooms in the Philippines via smart devices; and the Philippines’ first and only sports app for Filipino fans worldwide. The Cignal Play expansion will allow subscribers in the Philippines to access an all-in-one entertainment platform with multiple tiers of live and on demand content from Cignal TV, in addition to third-party apps and streaming services, regardless of their broadband provider.

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