As its legal fight with Nielsen grinds on, Cumulus Media is looking elsewhere for audience data. The broadcaster has become the first commercial licensee of Xperi’s DTS AutoStage Broadcaster Portal Premium, rolling out the in-car measurement service across its 393 stations.
The announcement is a major milestone for Xperi, which has been building toward deterministic radio measurement since 2023, when it first launched the DTS AutoStage Broadcaster Portal as a free tool for subscribing stations. The company expanded the portal’s coverage to 250 US markets in a November update, then introduced the paid Premium tier in April, growing coverage to 302 markets and adding daypart-level rankings and near-real-time reporting.
The platform runs on Xperi’s AutoStage connected car system, which the companies say is integrated into more than 16 million vehicles worldwide and logs tens of millions of monthly AM/FM listening hours across 302 US markets, a scale Xperi positions as near-census, rather than sample-based, visibility into in-car listening. For advertisers, the company says the data supports more precise media planning through observed listening behavior, next-day sample sizes and market-level consumption trends.
Cumulus is now the first broadcaster to buy into that top tier at scale.
“We’re proud to be the first broadcaster to deploy AutoStage Broadcaster Portal Premium as part of our broader effort to bring new sources of audience insight to radio,” said Cumulus Media President of Operations Bob Walker. “The platform gives us access to a level of audience intelligence that hasn’t previously been available, creating new opportunities for content creators, sales teams, and advertisers alike. The AutoStage heat maps are a particularly compelling example, visually illustrating where listening is concentrated, on an aggregated basis, relative to advertiser locations.”
Xperi SVP of Commercial Strategy and Partnerships Joe D’Angelo added, “By leveraging large-scale, aggregated in-car listening data, broadcasters can move beyond traditional sample-based measurement toward large-scale data-driven audience insights, enabling better programming decisions, stronger advertiser accountability, and more competitive positioning in a data-driven media landscape.”
The deal lands as Cumulus remains at the center of a measurement firestorm, born of an antitrust dispute with Nielsen that’s stretched on for the better part of a year.
Cumulus sued the ratings company in October, alleging its Network Policy illegally conditioned access to national ratings on the purchase of local market data in every market where Cumulus and its national network, Westwood One, operate. Judge Jeannette Vargas granted Cumulus a preliminary injunction on December 30, and the company’s Nielsen contract expired the following day, leaving stations in the lurch when it comes to ratings numbers to use in sales pitches or programming decisions.
The Second Circuit stayed that injunction in February, but on Monday, a three-judge appeals panel reversed course, agreeing Nielsen made no effort to quantify or correlate its standalone national pricing with its actual costs, and crediting evidence that the policy created a barrier to entry for Cumulus’s preferred local vendor, Eastlan Ratings. The case now returns to district court for further proceedings, with the injunction still in place, but it appears that Cumulus is now openly pursuing every other alternative measurement option.
