Less than a year after launch, Rdio (in which Cumulus has a major investment state) is shutting down Vdio, a video service that sold and rented streaming movies and TV shows.
“Despite our efforts, we were not able to deliver the differentiated customer experience we had hoped for,” Rdio said in a statement.
The service launched in April to existing Rdio subscribers and opened up to the general public in June. Though it was available for everyone to use, Rdio always considered the service in beta launch.
“If monetary issues were already showing themselves with Vdio, pulling the plug quickly was likely a necessary decision: even on the music subscription front, Rdio has been struggling. It had a large round of layoffs just last month, reportedly letting go of up to one-third of its employees. Now it’ll have to streamline its focus on music — an area where it’s succeeded in gaining big fans, just not in big enough numbers,” noted The Verge.
RBR-TVBR observation: With Cumulus having a significant equity stake in Pulser Media, Rdio’s parent, in exchange for exclusive content, media and on-air promotional commitments, it looks like the goal is to focus on Rdio’s core business. With the Cumulus Radio loudspeaker of stations, it’s likely Rdio will start to see some growth. If nothing else, we’ll see how much radio can do for a streaming service like this. We hope, however, that we won’t hear Rdio mentioned at every stopset and every DJ mention like CCME and iHeartRadio. It gets old and makes it appear that iHeart is the only thing that matters, not the radio stations themselves.
