Yahoo To Relaunch Launchcast Next Year With CBS Radio

Ed: Yahoo provides distribution, gives up content and ad sales.

Yahoo To Relaunch Launchcast Next Year With CBS Radio

Yahoo continues to outsource lots of businesses it previously built and maintained directly. Especially in music - In February they shut their subscription music service, and in September they announced a deal to allow full song playbacks through the Rhapsody service.

Next up is Yahoo’s radio product, http://music.yahoo.com/launchcast. The site today, which draws 3 million monthly unique visitors says Yahoo, allows users to listen to music based on preferred genres and artists. But Launchcast is limited only to Windows users on Internet Explorer, shutting out a large percentage of the Internet.

Next year they’ll shutter the service and relaunch with CBS Radio, much as AOL did earlier this year. CBS provides streaming for 144 owned radio stations, as well as providing some Internet-only content.

CBS will also take over ad sales for Launchcast, offering advertisers both display, video and audio ads...

Yahoo Ties Up With CBS To Save Streaming Radio Service

Yahoo has turned to CBS to help keep its LAUNCHcast streaming radio service alive. As part of the new partnership, CBS Radio will provide the player and handle the ad sales for LAUNCHcast, and various CBS (NYSE: CBS) stations will be available on Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) Music. Yahoo will also incorporate more radio content throughout its news and sports portals. It's the latest move in Yahoo's strategy to "completely open" its music operations to other services: the company recently launched an enhanced music search service with Rhapsody (the same company it offloaded its premium music subscription business to in February). 

Yahoo started shifting the focus away from LAUNCHcast late last year, plagued by the higher royalty fees that threatened to shut smaller Webcasters like Pandora down. Michael Spiegelman, head of Yahoo Music said CBS came courting at the most opportune time: "We didn't want to scale down or put up a lot of barriers with LAUNCHcast, but the economics of online radio had changed. It made sense to have a partner like CBS Radio ... They've made the investment in the infrastructure, the platform and the sales force to operate in a sustainable way."

CBS Radio's ad sales expertise is a big plus: it has a 1,600-member sales team, can sell ads on national and local levels, and has a vested interest in TargetSpot, the ad technology firm that can serve hypertargeted ads into various types of streaming media. CBS also has experience with a partnership of this size, as it merged its online radio network with AOL's back in March.