It’s finally for real: Winamp and Shoutcast live on. Though there have been reports that the online radio platform Radionomy purchased them from AOL, Radionomy just made the official announcement today.
This comes some 26 days after Dec. 20, 2013, which was the date AOL said the services would be shut down and taken offline. Reports that a sale of Winamp and Shoutcast was imminent surfaced just a day before the scheduled shut-down. The report seemed much more credible in the following weeks when the Winamp and Shoutcast websites remained online and accessible.
Terms of the Radionomy deal were not disclosed. The company said that, “The acquisition will give Radionomy exposure to a much larger audience and pave the way for offering Radionomy listeners an enhanced experience.” CEO Alexandre Saboundjian said that Radionomy plans to make the Winamp player “ubiquitous, developing new functionalities dedicated to desktop, mobile, car systems, connected devices and all other platforms.” Winamp users will also get access to Radiononmy’s inventory of 60,000 internet radio stations.
The Radionomy platform allows anyone to set up an internet station, at no cost to the broadcaster. Radionomy provides advertising and monetization. The Belgium-based company says the Shoutcast acquisition will expand its presence in the US, claiming that it will become “the source of approximately half of all streamed internet radio worldwide.”
It is not yet clear how the Shoutcast directory will be integrated with Radionomy. We also don’t know to what extent Radionomy plans to support the free Shoutcast streaming platform that thousands of stations and stream hosts use for online broadcasting. I hope to learn more about these issues soon.
