MeasureCast Releases Weekly Ratings of Internet Radio

This week, MeasureCast (www.measurecast.com) released its first weekly rating of the top 10 Internet radio broadcasters in the United States. MeasureCast, founded in 1999, provides third-party audience size and demographic information for webcasters. The stations included in the top 10 ratings are current MeasureCast clients.

"We are interested in showing the industry how Internet streaming is growing and becoming a viable medium for advertisers," said Sven Haarhoff a spokesperson for MeasureCast.

Haarhoff indicated that MeasureCast would be able to provide information on trends by collecting this data over longer periods of time. Along with measuring user audiences, MeasureCast collects demographic data based on a panel of streaming media users.

MeasureCast is a competitor of Arbitron, a marketing research firm providing services to traditional broadcasters and webcasters. Arbitron debuted its own webcast ratings in October 1999.

Also announced this week, GMV Network (www.gmvnetwork.com), developer of software technologies for Internet and communication infrastructure, will use MeasureCast technology on all AudioEdge servers sold by GMV Network.

GMV Network's AudioEdge server takes a single stream and reflects it to any MP3 compliant players concurrently. These players include RealNetworks Real Player 8, Microsoft's Windows Media Player 7, Yahoo Media Player, FreeAmp, Winamp, and many Linux based players.

Customers using GMV's server can register with the MeasureCast Streaming Audience Measurement Service and subscribe to the full MeasureCast reporting package for daily data.

GMV also announced it will be including OctiMax developed by Octiv (www.octiv.com), a B2B audio solutions provider, into the GMV Network INcoder. OctiMax improves the sound quality of streaming and downloadable music from the server side. The new version of the INcoder software, which includes OctiMax, will be available in early 2001.