Triton Digital® is announcing this morning that it has acquired Omny Studio, the Melbourne-based enterprise podcast technology and hosting company. The Omny Studio brand will continue as Triton’s podcast-facing technology suite, and Omny CEO, Sharon Taylor, along with the company’s staff, will join Triton Digital.
Omny Studio has built its business by serving hundreds of enterprise clients including some of the largest radio groups in the U.S., Canada, and Australia. The company offers its radio and podcast clients hosting, easy capturing of broadcast audio for on-demand, editing tools, auto-transcription, analytics, and monetization.
Triton Digital has been the face of Omny Studio sales and marketing for the past two years, and the two companies have executed business collaborations serving a global range of clients as diverse as the Brazilian radio network Jovem Pan, Emmis Communications, Salem Media, and an exclusive reselling arrangement in North America.
Triton CEO Neal Schore told RAIN News the close working relationship enjoyed by the two companies smoothed the way for today’s announcement. “We are thrilled to bring the Omny Studio team and technology in-house,” Schore told us. “Since working with them over the past couple of years, we have established a trust and familiarity which made this a simple and natural next step for our partnership.”
As a leading global provider of digital audio delivery and measurement technology, Triton Digital has been involved with podcasting for years. The Omny Studio acquisition does not represent an entry, but a deepening of Triton’s engagement with an audio category that by all projections appears on the edge of mainstream penetration and revenue. The recently released IAB/PwC Podcast Revenue Report projected that podcasting would reach and exceed the milestone $1-billion revenue level in 2021.
We asked Neal Schore how podcasting fits into his view of digital audio, and how he foresees near-term growth. In framing a personal forecast, Schore first distinguished live digital audio as separate from on-demand audio, but compatible and connected.
“Podcasting is a natural extension of digital audio. Digital audio is a live medium, and podcasting is on-demand. On-demand is a natural extension of live. We’ve been focused on podcasting for quite a few years and have clients around the world that use our podcast services which are incremental to their live publishing. Live and on-demand working together is core to our strategy.”
As to the growth of podcasting, Neal Schore is bullish, seeing a quicker realization of upside than some existing published forecasts.
“I believe that podcasting will be here for a long time, and that revenue will ramp up quickly. I see podcasting becoming a billion-dollar market in 2020 or 2021, and a $3-billion market by 2023. Based on how the market is trending, I think that digital audio will exceed $5-billion by 2021 and that on-demand and live digital audio will combine in a $10-billion market a few years after that.”
Triton Digital’s acquisition of Omny Studio is closed as of this morning’s announcement. Financial details are not disclosed.