Live365, the Internet's largest broadcasting community, and the Arbitron Company, a division of the Ceridian Corporation, today announced an alliance that will lead to full inclusion of all Live365 online radio stations in Arbitron's InfoStreamä reporting service.
Individuals, performers, businesses, and organizations from all over the country have launched over 18,000 stations on Live365, using the company's proprietary technology to create and broadcast Internet radio stations from any personal computer.
The announcement makes Live365 one of the largest webcasters (Internet streaming media provider) to have results reported by Arbitron. The InfoStreamä service provides broadcast metrics with measures that are comparable to conventional broadcast audience ratings, allowing advertisers to better compare traditional radio audiences with those reached by webcasts such Live365. While other leading Internet traffic measurement services typically do not account for at-work listeners or listeners using streaming media, Arbiton's InfoStreamä service includes these groups of listeners in the metrics measurement.
"When considering traditional radio and webcast radio, advertisers and other interested parties need reliable audience measures to make better, 'apples to apples' comparisons of the value they'll receive for their buys," said Raghav Gupta, Director of Special Operations at Live365. "We recently announced that our number of online radio stations has surpassed the number of terrestrial radio broadcasters in the United States. Now, with the highly credible, third-party research capabilities of Arbitron, we are better able to prove the impressive growth and reach of Live365 to our current and future advertisers."
"With more streamers joining the Arbitron InfoStreamä service, it reinforces that Internet radio is a rapidly growing medium that needs and wants third-party audience measurements," said Joan Fitzgerald, Director of Marketing, Arbitron Internet Information Services. "Streaming media not only enhances and extends the reach of existing broadcast stations, it also delivers new Internet-only outlets like Live365. These Internet-only channels provide compelling new content for the consumer that can't be found on the traditional media, plus they provide highly valuable targeted audiences for the advertiser."
About Arbitron
The Arbitron Company is an international media and marketing research firm providing services to broadcasters, advertisers, and advertising agencies in the U.S and Europe. In the U.S., Arbitron measures local radio audiences and develops qualitative measures of local consumers through RetailDirect and through Scarborough Research, a joint venture of the Arbitron Company and VNU Marketing Information Services. TAPSCAN WORLDWIDE, a market leader in desktop development and part of the Arbitron family, offers a host of software services that simplify both data and analysis and the buy/sell process. In the United Kingdom and Europe, Continental Research, a unit of the Arbitron Company, conducts market research in the media, financial, telecommunications, and advertising arenas. Arbitron Internet Information Services provides survey research, consulting, and methodological services including InfoStreamä, America's first webcast ratings service.
Arbitron is a Ceridian Company. Ceridian Corporation is a leading information services company that serves the human resources, transportation, and media information markets. Ceridian's human resources businesses offer HR/benefits solutions that support organizations' complete employment life cycle and maximize their investment in people. Its Comdata business is a provider of transaction processing and information services to the transportation and other industries, and its media services business, Arbitron, is a research company serving the media industry.
About Live365
Live365 is the leading global Internet broadcasting community for individuals, businesses, artists and organizations to create, broadcast and listen to Internet radio stations. Providing free tools and the bandwidth necessary to broadcast, Live365 allows anyone with a computer to create a unique Internet radio station. With more than 18,000 simultaneous broadcasts, Live365 currently features more radio stations than the entire United States radio broadcast network. Live365 was called one of the "Top 6 Killer Apps" of streaming media by Deutsche Banc Alex Brown, one of the world's leading international investment banks, in its May 2000 report "Internet, Broadband and Enhanced TV." Founded in July 1999 in Foster City, CA, Live365 is the single largest broadcaster of streaming MP3 audio content on the Web.