Radio broadcasting stations
This Canadian industry comprises establishments primarily engaged in operating broadcasting studios and facilities for the production and transmission of radio programs to its affiliates or the public. These stations operate primarily through over-the-air transmission to the public but may also broadcast over the Internet, by cable or by satellite. — Statistics Canada, NAICS 2022A
- Establishments · CanadaA
- 931
- Under 10 employeesA
- 59%
Size and shape
How many businesses there are and how small they are. Fragmentation is the first thing an entrant — or anyone selling software into this industry — needs to know, and it is one of the few things that is actually measured.
Canadian establishments by number of employeesA
Of 931 Canadian establishments with employees, 59% have fewer than ten — mostly small operators.
Where they areA
Largest four provinces by establishment count. Establishments with employees only — sole operators with no payroll are not in this table, so in trades and personal services the true number of businesses is higher.
Measured, not forecast: the share of US establishments opening in one year that were still active later. It counts good operators and bad ones together, which is exactly why it is the honest answer to “what are the odds”. It is for the whole sector rather than this market, and the ten-year figure comes from an older cohort because no younger one has reached ten years.
No US figure is shown. County Business Patterns is coded to the 2017 US edition of NAICS; this code either does not exist there, names a different industry, or is outside the programme's coverage (most of agriculture, rail, postal and public administration are). A figure is attached only where both the code and the title agree.
How businesses here compete
The structural profile of subsector 516, which every industry beneath it inherits. This is analyst judgment from how the subsector is organised — not research into this industry, and not a measurement.
Licensed broadcasting is consolidating and shrinking. Streaming and online content have no licence barrier and no distribution guarantee.
- Who sets the price
- Advertisers and distributors; regulators license spectrum.
- The software it runs on
- Broadcast traffic, playout and ad-sales systems.
Market screens and studies
Market-entry records filed along this branch of the hierarchy. A record at or beneath this code is about this industry; one above it is about something wider that contains it.
Screened one level up. Nothing is filed at this exact code; the screen for 5161 Radio and television broadcasting stations covers it.
A small-market radio station is the enterable thing in this group: a CRTC licence, a transmitter, a few staff, and the merchants of one town as advertisers. 673 of Canada's 1,189 broadcasting establishments employ fewer than ten people [A], and stations change hands regularly. The pre-screen cut this on licences and spectrum. The screen finds the licence is the smaller problem. The revenue the licence protects is shrinking. Trade reporting of the CRTC's 2024–25 market report puts commercial radio at $1.06B, down 2.6%, and private conventional television at $1.17B, down 7.3%, on a PBIT margin of −40.4%, while online services took about 40% of all broadcasting revenue [B]. A licence is a protected position in a market advertisers are leaving, and the protection does not extend to the platforms taking the money. Stingray shows what it takes to stand still: its radio segment held $132.4M of revenue, flat, at a 31.3% adjusted EBITDA margin in fiscal 2026 [A], with growth in digital advertising only offsetting the fall in airtime sales. That margin is a group result — shared programming, national sales representation and engineering spread across a portfolio of stations. The single station has the same decline without the shared cost base, and its eventual exit is a sale to one of those groups at the buyer's price. Television is cut more simply: the sector's operating margin is deeply negative before an entrant has bought a camera. Streaming and online audio have no licence barrier and sit outside this group.
The customer here is 5161 as it now exists: licensed radio and TV stations, and the far larger number of creators, churches, schools and companies who broadcast online with no licence at all. The software does in a browser or on a desktop what a control room did: switch scenes and cameras, bring in remote guests, lay on graphics, send one programme to YouTube, Twitch, Facebook and LinkedIn at once, and, for audio, run an internet radio station's playlist, automation and stream. This record is the production tool; the licensed station itself is 5161-commercial-radio-station-licence, creator analytics and sponsorship tools are 5162-creator-economy-and-streaming-analytics-software, podcast hosting is 5122-podcast-hosting-and-monetisation-platforms, and post-production pipeline tracking is 512110-video-production-pipeline-software. The price of the core product is zero, and the platforms keep it there. OBS Studio is free and open source (about 77,000 GitHub stars) [A], and its sponsor wall lists Twitch, YouTube, NVIDIA, AMD, Intel and Logitech [C]: the platforms and the hardware makers pay to keep the default free. Twitch gave up its own tool, Twitch Studio, on 30 May 2024 because it carried under 4% of hours streamed, and pointed users to OBS, Streamlabs Desktop, XSplit, vMix and others [B]. Streamlabs is itself a free OBS-based desktop with paid add-ons; Logitech bought it in 2019 for about $89M cash plus up to $29M in stock tied to revenue targets [B], and runs it as part of Logitech G. The paid layer is held by owners with deep pockets and a habit of raising prices. StreamYard, the browser studio, was bought by Hopin for $250M in January 2021 and sold with Hopin's remaining products to Bending Spoons in April 2024, terms undisclosed [B]. Its pricing page now shows Core at $44.99/mo ($35.99 annual) and Advanced at $88.99 ($68.99 annual) [C]; reports of large post-acquisition rises come only from rivals and are UNVERIFIED. Restream (Austin; multistreaming plus a browser studio) raised a $50M Series A led by Sapphire Ventures and Insight Partners in 2020, claiming 2M+ streamers then [B]. Riverside, recording-first but with live, raised $47M to April 2022 [B]. Desktop switchers are owner-run and profitable-looking but publish nothing: vMix (StudioCoast, Australia; perpetual licences $60–$1,200) [C], Ecamm Live (Mac) [C], and Wirecast, still a Telestream product (footer: Telestream 2 LLC, 2026) [C]. Internet radio is the same pattern, consolidated into broadcasters. AzuraCast is free, self-hosted and open source [A]. RadioKing (3,000+ stations in 170+ countries) was bought outright by NRJ Group's towerCast in June 2023 [A]. SAM Broadcaster's maker Spacial says it was acquired in 2009, by Triton Digital per its earlier pages [C]. Live365 sits inside SoundStack and sells by bundling US music licensing (ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, SoundExchange) [C], which is the real lock-in for a small station — the royalty paperwork, not the software. Centova Cast (a Canadian control panel sold through hosting resellers), Radio.co (UK) and mAirList (Germany) are small private vendors [C]. Willingness to pay decides it. Hobbyists and most creators use the free tool; the professional buyer who will pay is already served by four or five well-funded or corporate-owned products, and the internet-radio buyer pays for licensing and hosting, which broadcasters (NRJ, SoundStack) already bundle. The one open seam is a narrow one — a Canadian-licensing bundle for small internet stations (SOCAN/Re:Sound/CONNECT tariffs) analogous to Live365's US bundle — and it was not tested at screen.
Software serving this industry
The vertical software markets filed along the same branch — who sells to these businesses and who they would have to displace — and then the generic categories every business buys whatever it does.
Sold across the wider branch
And what every business buys · 25 generic categories
Sold to every industry rather than this one, so they are filed against the software industry's own code. The same few vendors recur across most of them.
Who works here
The occupations employed in Information and cultural industries, most concentrated in it first. The share is measured against the whole sector, not this industry — the published cross-tabulation stops there.
Concentrated in this sectorA
These jobs are mostly done here. An operator in this industry is competing for them against others in the same industry, not against the whole economy.
And the jobs every business has
Found across at least fourteen of the twenty sectors. In a small establishment several of these are usually one person, or an outside provider.