The renewal builds on a decade of collaboration, following iHeartRadio Canada’s launch in 2016, with the streaming app growing to include more than 360 licensed Canadian radio stations across 170 markets.

As part of the partnership extension, Bell Media will represent iHeartRadio’s extensive podcast portfolio in Canada to advertisers.

“The creation of iHeartRadio Canada has been instrumental in evolving the digital audio landscape in Canada, greatly expanding the choice of incredible content available to listeners,” said Dave Daigle, VP, Local TV, Radio, and Bell Media Studios. “The renewal of this successful partnership ensures iHeartRadio Canada continues to deliver exceptional content and innovative listening experiences to our audiences, further solidifying our position as a leader in the Canadian media industry.” 

“This renewed agreement with Bell Media reflects our shared commitment to delivering the best in audio entertainment to Canadian listeners and advertisers,” added Michael Biondo, President of Business Development & Strategic Partnerships, iHeartMedia. “In the years to come, we’ll continue expanding iHeartRadio Canada with innovative features, exclusive content, and unique opportunities for brands to connect and engage with audiences across the country.” 

Bell says the extended partnership also means continued support for iHeartRadio-branded live music and entertainment events in Canada.

The app has also rolled out a slate of enhanced features as of this week, including: Presets, inspired by the car radio dashboard, allow listeners to save up to 15 of their favourite radio stations, playlists, podcasts, and artist radio stations; Scan Button, a  new way for listeners to discover new stations, by scanning and sampling radio stations, or filtering by city or genre; Live Radio Dial, enabling listeners to explore the best live stations across the country; What’s Trending Rankers, a discovery feature that allows listeners to see what’s trending in the current moment across Top Podcasts, Top Playlists, and Top Artist Radio stations; and Lyrics, offering lyrics for the song currently playing on live radio, as well as for tracks on artist radio stations and playlists. 

The post Bell Media and iHeartRadio announce partnership extension appeared first on Broadcast Dialogue.

Beyond the largest global enterprise businesses, it’s nearly impossible to cover the world as a manufacturer without the assistance of in-country partners. Dielectric has long relied on the professional services and relationships of dealers and integrators in Asia, South America and elsewhere to get closer to the end customers.

While most North American broadcast manufacturers favour this strategy, there has been a tendency to “go it alone” on our continent, where direct sales are traditionally more successful. But seasons change as do business opportunities, and there comes a time where it makes strategic sense to align with companies you know and trust for a specific mission.

That moment arrived last year when FM Radio business opportunities escalated in the United States and Canada. While no stranger to radio, our North American business had largely been focused on TV opportunities over the previous decade, fueled through the U.S. spectrum repack and early ATSC 3.0 trials and technology developments. As those opportunities wrapped up and gave way to expanded FM activity, the moment for strategic partnerships arrived.

Enter SCMS (United States) and Pippin Technical Service (Canada), Dielectric’s valued FM Radio partners in North America.

SCMS Success

Much of Dielectric’s recent FM radio business success is owed to SCMS, widely recognized through North America as a leading distributor of radio’s strongest brands. Since hitting the pavement on behalf of Dielectric and its FM antenna systems, SCMS has boosted FM sales by a very large margin over the first year, leveraging its strong industry relationships and knowledgeable sales team to secure major wins with Minnesota Public Radio and Maine Public Radio, among other commercial and public radio projects. 

On the commercial side, SCMS will soon close a major deal with a large commercial FM broadcaster involving a master FM antenna system in Michigan. Beyond partnerships, Dielectric’s engineering efforts over the past 18 months have birthed innovative solutions for enterprise-level master antenna projects, including a range of FM manifold combiners with clever modular designs.

“The number of master antenna products that enter our view is rising as the leading tower companies continue to buy more real estate, and broadcasters continue to consolidate,” Matt Cauthen, Vice President, SCMS. “The tower companies bring the most opportunity as they court more stations onto their towers. That creates the demand that’s spinning up industry wide.”

SCMS’s brand reputation in radio was always on the radar of Dielectric executives, and the cyclical nature of the transmission business inspired them to bring SCMS on board to build their FM presence.

“SCMS has been instrumental in introducing the merits and expanse of our FM product line to executives and engineers unaware of our research, development and engineering efforts for radio,” said Keith Pelletier, President and General Manager, Dielectric. “Moving forward, we anticipate that SCMS will specify us into more installation-based projects with complete RF system buildouts.”    

Progress with Pippin

Broadcast Dialogue readers are by now familiar with the Dielectric brand as the company has been a consistent voice on Canadian RF activity over the past two years. The success of its SCMS partnership inspired the company to enter into a similar partnership in Canada. 

Pippin Technical Service (PTS) was clearly the right choice for several reasons, including the opportunities for FM radio business taking shape through Pippin’s most active regions. That includes the majority of Western Canada, beginning in Manitoba and extended west through four provinces, as well as Yukon and Northwest Territories to the north. PTS’ Saskatchewan headquarters offer an ideal central access to point to all six regions, including Alberta and British Columbia.

For PTS President and CEO Tyler Everitt, Dielectric’s FM product depth – including an expanded line of cost-efficient and lightweight FM ring antennas – signals new opportunities for Dielectric, PTS, and radio broadcasters.

“We see a lot of opportunity for the FM replacement market coming together where we can refresh aging broadcast infrastructure,” said Everitt. “These projects usually begin with the transmitter and soon extend into the rest of the RF chain. That means new combiners, filters, transmission line and antennas, and the opportunities to modularly build onto exciting systems as new frequencies are added.”

The PTS partnership, which effectively was set in motion around the beginning of this year, has quickly developed as the companies consider new equipment which included modifying a combiner system to be able to operate five high-power stations in HD radio plus the addition of a new station. Dielectric’s clever new technologies with manifold combiners and RingMaster antennas are going to be instrumental in the expansion market as new signals are added to existing sites.  

PTS’ initial strategy includes developing presentations that will breed familiarity with the Dielectric brand and its range of products. Beyond sales and marketing, PTS’s turnkey services for Dielectric will include RF site planning, system design, integration, commissioning, and post-sales technical support and maintenance. This full suite of services, along with PTS’ RF expertise, territorial reach and long-standing industry relationships, makes PTS the ideal Canadian partner for Dielectric.

“PTS’ impressive reach has already taken the Dielectric brand into some of the further reaches of the country, while their strong reputation brings us closer to more broadcasters throughout western Canada,” added Daniel Bizet, International Sales Manager, Dielectric. “That creates new opportunities for the existing replacement market as well as with new FM licenses that we anticipate will surface this year and and beyond.”

Dielectric President Keith Pelletier joined Broadcast Dialogue – The Podcast to talk about the evolution of the industry and the importance of broadcast industry partnerships. Listen on your favourite podcast app or here:

The post Dielectric finds FM radio business success in partnerships with SCMS, Pippin Technical Service appeared first on Broadcast Dialogue.

In conjunction with Environics Analytics (EA), which will scale the data and deliver segments to The Trade Desk, Numeris says its for-profit subsidiary NLogic will help agencies and advertisers activate its audience data in new ways, resulting in stronger ad targeting across linear and streaming.

“Audience measurement companies like us are evolving, now more than ever we’re supporting data collaboration and working closely with key industry players to strengthen targeting for better planning and smarter buying,” said Sue Haas, Numeris’ Interim President & CEO, in a release. “Nobody has all the data to perfectly execute across the full media ecosystem in Canada. But many of us have high-quality data, and through select partnerships like this one, we can incrementally improve the targeting and activation cross-platform process. We are thrilled about this new offering where Numeris television data will be available in ways we have never seen before.”

Numeris says the integration will also see marketers gain improved reach to streaming audiences and frequency management between linear and streaming viewers.

“This partnership begins with television audience data to create targeting segments and over time, the plan is to incorporate commercial ad tracking so that advertisers can match up their first-party data to who saw what TV ad – when, where, and how often – in a completely anonymous and privacy-conscious way,” said Peter Farfares, VP, Business Development at NLogic. “As viewing experiences continue to be fragmented, we need to be able to integrate disparate data for holistic cross-platform targeting and be able to optimize media spend and results.”

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