This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Business News Media
Smooth Radio expands further thanks to OfCom ruling
By Chris Cooke | Published on Tuesday 17 September 2019
Global Radio’s Smooth brand is expanding once again, although this time courtesy of licensing partner Communicorp. The local radio station in Peterborough and Kettering, Connect FM, will merge with Smooth Radio East Midlands next month.
Communicorp acquired Connect FM off Adventure Radio earlier this year. Most of the media firm’s UK radio outlets license in brands and programming from Global, meaning it operates Capital, Heart and Smooth stations, including Smooth Radio East Midlands.
Merging Connect FM with the East Midlands outlet of Smooth – which has its own locally made breakfast show, but otherwise takes national Smooth programming from Global in London – required approval from media regulator OfCom.
Mainly because of rules over just how local locally-made programming has to be. Because Connect FM and Smooth Radio East Midlands fell into different OfCom ‘approved areas’, Communicorp needed the regulator to recognise a new ‘approved area’ that contained both stations to allow them to share local content.
OfCom confirmed it was doing just that last week, saying: “We have approved format change requests for the Connect FM services … which will allow them to provide their locally-made programming from anywhere within this new approved area, and to share this programming with … the East Midlands service. The two Connect FM services will be rebranded as ‘Smooth Radio’ as a result”.
