Emmis ‘Won’t Rest’ Until NextRadio App Is Adopted on Every Phone, Says CEO
Q3 was a “landmark quarter” for the NextRadio FM-reception smartphone app, Emmis CEO Jeff Smulyan said on a Thursday earnings call. NextRadio developer Emmis landed adoption of the app on the Samsung Galaxy S7, the top-selling smartphone in the world…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
and one that’s sold by all major U.S. carriers, Smulyan said. “Stay tuned for announcements about NextRadio being adopted by other manufacturers.” Emmis also just reached a renewal agreement with Sprint that keeps NextRadio pre-loaded on the carrier’s Android devices, he said. “That’s our first renewal and Sprint was our first partner, and we’re happy about that.” NextRadio has surpassed 25 million listening hours, but “the reality is this is still the early stages,” he said. “We have come an awfully long way since this project started.” Emmis thinks NextRadio “is the catalyst that our industry needs,” he said. But landing NextRadio on the iPhone remains the toughest nut to crack, Smulyan said. “We have a whole game plan” for winning Apple’s support, but nothing “definitive,” he said in Q&A. Emmis defied the “skeptics” when it won NextRadio adoption among all the major U.S. carriers after Sprint, he said. “We won’t rest until we are in every smartphone, and we’ve got to get Apple.”