Audioboom Expands into Australia; Shareprice Closes at $5.45 in Wednesday Trading
London-based Audioboom Group PLC (LSE: BOOM.L) is on an expansion mode. The provider of social media platform for audio producers to record either live or from the studio, upload and share audio by syndication and social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook has now about 2,000 content channels.
That is a dramatic expansion from the initial 19 channels during the platform's launch in March 2013, said Rob Proctor, CEO of Audioboom, which currently has 2.5 million registered users and 12 to13 million monthly active users across platforms.
In the Land Down Under, Audioboom is rapidly expanding its clients which include Southern Cross Austereo - Australia's largest broadcaster - ABC, AFL and other big Australian sporting organisations and bodies.
In the U.S., Audioboom just signed CBS Radio and CBS Local, which provide the company 127 stations coverage across the country. CBS owns and operates 126 radio stations in 27 markets, giving 72 million radio listeners in the U.S. access to Audioboom platform and services.
In the same month, Audioboom signed Sky Sports Limited, which runs multi-platform TV services with access to more than 10.5 million households in the UK and Ireland. Sky Sports, which is setting up a master Audioboo channel with up to 40 additional sub-channels that cover the Premier League and other major sports broadcasts, will embed the highlights from its channels into its Web site and Twitter feed.
Despite the popularity of new media sources such as satellite and streaming, the radio remains a major source of news and information in the U.S. According to The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism's The State of the News Media 2013 annual report, the percentage of people in the U.S. who listened to the AM/FM radio weekly was largely unchanged in 2012 at 92 per cent compared to 10 years ago at 94 per cent.
The same Pew report identified CBS and ABC as the two main providers of national radio headline news, with both broadcasters airing 2 to 5 minutes of headline news to stations across the U.S. between regular programming usually made up of music and sports.
In South America, the firm is signing up national newspapers, radio and TV broadcasters in Argentina, Venezuela, Chile and Mexico.
"Basically, if you are looking for spoken word content, be that in sports, or news and current affairs or entertainment, a broad spectrum of content, then you will be able to find that in all the other (channels)," Proctor said.
Audioboom's global major partners, which uses its apps, embeds and custom publisher solutions, include BBC, Sky Sports, Bauer, Absolute Radio, The Guardian, Universal, Aljazeera, Polydor, The Telegraph and Oxfam.
The company's growth is not only in its operations but also felt in its shareprice. On Wednesday, the company's stock closed at $5.45, 79 per cent higher reckoned from its initial listing price of $3.02 on June 20, 2013.
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