Southern Cross Austereo launches investment and content partnership with Omny

Southern Cross Austereo has embarked on a new investment and content partnership with Omny, the personal radio product launched in Australia late last year.

Omny allows mobile users to create their own personal radio experience made up of radio show content they love, news, sport and weather they need coupled with their favourite streamed or owned music, without the need to continually switch apps of streaming music providers.

Southern Cross Austereo Director of Digital and Innovation Clive Dickens has told radioinfo: 

One of Radio’s USPs has always been the ability to weave all content; whether news, sports and personality into one seamless experience. This will allow consumers to truly personalize their radio experience. 

“It will give you music, news, weather that’s important to you. It will use location services to know where you are and tell you the weather in your exact location. It will also integrate your friends and contacts and use a voice to remind you about their birthdays, your appointments, emails and other things important to you.
 
“Because it reads the content to you it is a radio-like experience that is personalized for you. It uses your own songs and your favourite podcasts to put together your own personalized radio experience… It is improving radio.”
 
Why did Austereo invest in the company?
 
“Because this will fundamentally change way we do radio. Every American radio company had the opportunity to invest in Pandora before it launched, but they didn’t, they just hoped it would fail and go away. Now Pandora is more valuable than all of them. We didn’t want that to happen here.”
 

Omny unifies content consumption and now with Southern Cross Austereo’s involvement, the existing content offer for users will deepen significantly. The result of this investment and partnership will see SCA’s owned content available to consumers on Omny. Like never before, users will be able to personalise the curation of content via streaming audio.    

Omny Co-founder and CTO Andrew Armstrong said: “Partnering with Southern Cross Austereo lets us accelerate our vision to improve the way people enjoy radio. Now Omny users can include the best radio content in their personal radio station alongside streamed music from their chosen provider and personal social updates.”
 

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