partnership

Several new arrangements between the various players were announced in the last seven days, and many of those involved are dancing with multiple partners... so here's our stab at a "clear as mud" review:

TuneIn is a web and mobile "tuning service" which provides users (and device makers) a "one-stop" destination to find thousands of terrestrial and online streams and on-demand audio content. Last week, TuneIn announced (RAIN's coverage here) partnerships with 20 major broadcasting companies, including Fox News Radio, Bloomberg Radio, Public Radio Exchange and Monocle 24. These new partnerships alone added 600 new streams to the TuneIn directory. But they weren't finished. This week the company not only announced a new partnership (in RAIN here) to make available content from Carolla Digital (home to "The Adam Carolla Show," "This Week with Larry Miller," "Penn's Sunday School with Penn Jillette," and more) -- but also revealed (here) the addition of the local station streams from major U.S. radio groups Entercom, Cox, and Emmis (the three groups combined own more than 200 stations).

Interestingly, two of those groups -- Cox and Emmis -- had themselves just announced a similar deal with Clear Channel to make their streams available on CC's iHeartRadio platform as well (coverage here).

Clear Channel also announced a major partnership this week with Yahoo!, making them the "preferred radio" partner of the web giant. In our coverage, here, we had suggested that this new arrangement would elbow out CBS Radio, which had been Yahoo!'s radio partner... but coverage in the L.A. Times (here) and Taylor on Radio-Info (here) reports CBS isn't yet out of the picture. In other words, Yahoo! users who want local radio streams will be directed to Clear Channel (or other iHeartRadio partner) streams... unless they're shown CBS streams. Hmmm.

At least the personalized-radio situation is clearer. Now that Yahoo! and iHeart Radio are BFFs, Yahoo! users who want customized Internet radio will now be steered towards the iHeartRadio's "Custom Stations" feature. That is, unless they end up listening to personalized radio from Yahoo!'s other new partner, Spotify (which recently made free personalizable net radio the "central feature" of its mobile apps (here) -- and with whom Yahoo! also announced a partnership, here), for whom Yahoo! dumped Spotify-competitor Rhapsody. 

Enough? Or would you like to know that Slacker and ABC Radio are partnering to produce two gender-aimed lifestyle Internet radio talk stations; and that SiriusXM has announced a deal to make its content available via Google TV (coverage for both stories here)?