Emmis To Scale Back NextRadio, TagStation

• Emmis Communications Corporation today announced results for its second fiscal quarter ending August 31, 2018. The company’s net radio revenues for the second fiscal quarter were $30.7 million, down from $41.8 million in the prior year. But that wasn’t the real headline coming from the call —

CEO Jeff Smulyan announced the company planned to “dramatically reduce” operations of his passion projects — the NextRadio and TagStation subsidiaries, which would allow consumers to listen and interact with live local radio on their smartphones. Smulyan cited insufficient financial support from the industry as the basis for his decision.

Smulyan remarked, “For the past several months, Emmis and other companies in the radio industry have been working diligently to form a consortium that would own and operate the NextRadio and TagStation businesses. The participating companies envisioned using their collective scale and resources to build an attribution platform for the radio industry that would have provided the common language and measurement that radio advertisers are demanding. Unfortunately, the consortium has not been formed and these efforts appear to have been unsuccessful. Because Emmis is unwilling and unable to continue to fund the NextRadio and TagStation businesses as they are currently structured, we plan to dramatically reduce the operations of these businesses and explore other means of eliminating the operating losses from these businesses in the coming months.” Smulyan stopped short of definitively stating whether these businesses would be shut down or spun off.