The Past of Podcasting
Submitted by doc on Mon, 11/14/2005 - 00:04.
slipstream n. ... The area of reduced pressure or forward suction produced by and immediately behind a fast-moving object as it moves through air or water. intr. v. To drive or cycle in the slipstream of a vehicle ahead.
The sucking sound you hear in Mitch Ratcliffe's post "More on the Future of Podcasting" is his effort, on Audible's behalf, to slide the company into podcasting's slipstream. Nothing wrong with that. Audible has every reason to climb onto the podcasting bandwagon, even if it's over the tailgate. Audible is a pioneer in downloadable audio, playback devices and much more. It has a lot to contribute, just as Apple did before the podcasting market leveraged the iPod — and after Apple joined that market by adding podcast subscriptions to iTunes.
While Mitch makes a case for enlarging the concept of podcasting to include Audible's, he also has nasty remarks about Dave Winer (or Dave's "perspective" — it isn't clear) and incorrect (though respectful) remarks about my positions as well. The first responses from Dave and myself are here and here.
Now I see (at 1pm Pacific) that Mitch has replied to both Dave and I (though mostly Dave) at even greater length here.
As I said in my post, podcasting is a market that began with the demand side supplying itself. That's what IT Garage is about, and why I've been writing about podcasting here (more than elsewhere) since the post on September 28, 2004 when I noted that there were just 24 results for "podcasts" on Google.
Today that number is 102,000,000. It is into this slipstream that Audible made an announcement memorably titled Audible Unveils Audible(R)Wordcast at Podcasting & Portable Media Expo; For the First Time, Content Creators Large and Small Will Be Able to Build Audit-Ready Advertising-Based and Subscription-Based Podcasting Business. In Audible's silo, that is.
Because that's what Audible is proposing here: a silo. And what Mitch is proposing as well. It's also what Real and Microsoft and Apple and the whole 'content' industry wants to do, with the noble intention of giving Content Creators a safe place to control sale and use of their "intellectual property" (a misleading term that conflates copyrights, patents, trademarks and trade secrets — suggesting all are forms of simple property when that is hardly the case with any of them).
The problem here, once again, is that the supply side continues to think that 'free markets' for 'content' are Your Choice of Silo. Nothing wrong with having any number of silos in a market, of course, as long as nobody confuses the part — or the sum of similar parts — for the whole.
The podcasting market (like the blogging market before that, and the Web, and the Net itself) is hard for the Content Industry to understand because podcasting was created and grown by small independent developers and users, working together. That's why it was designed (like blogging, the Web and the Net) as an open place where commercial activity was welcome, but where single commercial interests couldn't run the whole world. That's why Apple, which created the iPod (after which podcasting was named), which is itself disrupting the recording (and now the video) industries, is working with the podcasting movement (for example by embracing MP3s) rather than dissing it.
Which Mitch does, for example, here:
The claim that any departure from the basic technology of MP3 and the business model of "no commerce has its claws in us" is like trying to freeze broadcasting in the era of amplitude modulated low-power broadcasts. If you want to live in 1924 or 1480 (which is what year Dave Winer says it is), then I wholeheartedly urge you to avoid anything but MP3s. Stop using iTunes. Stop using Rhapsody, Yahoo! Music and, for that matter, audio CDs, which carry anti-copying language and technology.
First, it's a minor thing, but Dave didn't make the 1480 remark. I did. Specifically, I said we were still in the Web Noir dark ages Craig Burton described in January 2001, where he called the firewall mentality of silo builders a modern expression of a city-state in constant hyper-vigilant siege mode—a castle with stone walls, turrets, parapets, a moat and a drawbridge through a single entrance under a threatening portcullis.
Second, broadcasting grew because amplitude modulation in 1924 (basic radio) was something just about anybody could do. The AM band didn't belong one vendor. You didn't need an NBC radio to get NBC network stations, a Macy's radio to get WLS ('World's Largest Store') or a McAlpin Hotel radio to get WMCA. (Hell, you could get it with crystal, a whisker on a razor blade, or a coil wound around an empty oat box. The rest of radio's history, right up to modern streaming on the Web (your choice of Real, MP3, QuickTime and WindowsMedia) and inconpatible satellite broadcasting systems (your choice of licensed equipment from Sirius and XM) is a freaking mess.
Third, there are a world of businesses, and business models, made possible by the popularity of MP3s. Just ask Apple. As I've said elsewhere, most have to do with making money because of MP3s, rather than just with them.
Between the last paragraph and this one Steve Gillmor called to get my podcastable thoughts about this whole thread. I'll repeat here what I just told Steve: that I'm sad and bothered that Mitch has chosen to anchor his perspective almost exclusively with the supply side of the marketplace, when Audible (his client here) needs to understand and take advantage of what the demand side has already done to supply itself. This paragraph, for example, makes me cringe:
Having a level playing field in a variety of formats—I'm not saying .aa in the current offering will or necessarily should win, because Audible is only beginning this process—gives consumers a variety of ways to send positive messages to publishers about which business rules they want to live with.
wtf? Consumers? Business rules? "Live with" (you mean, like, endure?) Mitch, come back! This is the Dark Side talking. It can't be you.
Earth to Audible (not to Mitch, who probably has this memorized by now):
we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers.
we are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasph.
deal with it
Our reach now includes production. We produced podcasting. We're still producing it, all over the place. You can join us if you like. But you can't if you dis or dismiss what got us to 102,000,000 results without you.
As for "giving the producer a choice", good luck. You may have something going there. But I wouldn't call it podcasting.
Interestingly, nor does Mitch, in that same comment (at Om's blog). That's where he says "a system like Audible’s could facilitate listening to corporate material with equal ease as one subscribes to a podcast".
Corporate material, indeed.
»
London
When they gonna stop blow everything?
London
When they gonna stop blow everything?
London
Police have carried out a controlled explosion on a vehicle at the hospital treating a suspect in the attack on Scotland's busiest airport. Officers also made a fifth arrest in the airport attack and a foiled car bomb plot in London.
WTF
These comments are like rubbish
Sometimes
Sometimes I can't understand...
I've got it
I've got it!
But other said
But other said that the judgement induces common sense, tertium non datur
As one clever
As one clever person said the judgement transforms tragical hedonism.
No
Sorry. I'm not agree with you.
One podcaster's perspective....
I've been called "a suit" and, by alpha geeks that know me, "a business guy who "gets it"" so that's my cred as a preface to this comment from a podcaster.
I'm more on the capitalistic side than on the side of everything is free. Yet I opted to get-in-the-game with blogging and then podcasting 'cause it was fun and felt like I was adding some value to the world. I am as enamored with the blogging and podcasting phenomena as I am with the acceleration of open source (software, business models, new ways of thinking) so I feel very protective of podcasting in general.
I also understand how to align incentives which is absolutely critical to me in my day job (running an alliances organization for a software company) and it's clear that people need to eat...so monetizing value shouldn't be a foreign concept to anybody.
But for the same reasons Michael Robertson became a pariah when he went to market with Lindows or even the somewhat disconcerted, negative buzz when Dave Sifry moved in to analytics with Technorati, when people participate with their passion, their energy, their effort and their soul...it's a fool's errand to think you can introduce a model that's good for your own business and your incentives vs. for those actually doing the work. That's what Audible did instead. If they'd even run a trial balloon up and asked for feedback and input in order to gauge what would be acceptable incentive for podcasters, they might've made this work.
This entire topic really hit a hot button with me so I did this post.
--
Steve Borsch
content is king, put so is price
I agree with your view of podcasting. I enjoy the richness and novelty of the content. I'd pay for content if I were convinced that it is better than free content. ("better" is whatever fullfils my wants/needs at any given time).
I despise most advertising, because I see it as an intrusion on my time and my attention. That is one reason I don't listen to radio anymore and I only watch recorded TV content where I determine what I see or hear. I'm not anti-advertising. Once per year I used to buy a cinema ticket to see "the best TV advertisements in the world for the year" or something similar. The reason I paid was the quality and humour of the advertising.
Being in control gives me satisfaction. I won't relinquish it for commercial reasons.
I buy Audible books when the price and content is right. So far I have only bought 2 books, because they were listed at a special price reserved for opening new accounts. Usually the audio books are much more expensive than the paper copies, so I don't buy them. I didn't buy the Audible book on "The Hitchhicker's Guide to the Galaxy", because the experience of hearing someone read the book pales in comparison to the entertainement value of the original BBC radio show. These are examples of what I mean by the subject line of this comment.
The whole business model of the music industry (and generally the content industry) is changing. Not only through disintermediation but also by facilitating new content creation and discovery. It is only those who help this process of creation and discovery who will florish. What is Audible doing in this respect?
Reduced choices mean reduced revenue
Silos may be great, but if those applications fail, everything fails.
Like myself - for some reason, Quicktime and Itunes won't install on my machine after I tried the last update. So there is no Quicktime or itunes at all available. Any file from the iTunes cosmos is not playable for me. Would I have an ipod, I would not even be able to use my own system. Mp3? I have at least 4 applications on my machine which can play that.
But there is a more disturbing thing I see in this Audible announcement. Because it is something all the media guys are longing for and I think it is only a matter of time until iTunes will follow: How often and how long has somebody listened too to my podcast.
This kind of control involves a data mining par excellence because not only is it this information but connected with a whole lot of other information like "what other podcasts does this person listen to" or worse.
Which is exactly why I will continue to help people see why giving up control like this is not in their interest.
Problem is: We need to help media understand too that customers have changed. If they still want control, they can get it - but only with a decreasing percentage of the market.
I understand that media managers want feedback on this, but this is not what 'we' are about. The sooner they learn to get over it, the better. Yes, we will need new working ways of counting the feedback, but not this way.
Just to give you an example on how 'good' this kind of silo works: Audible.de started in I think January of this year with an offer of two free audio books and a magazin for a month. I have not downloaded even that freebee. Why? Because first of all they have a very unusable website (javascript for every link so you can't tab, absolutly slow, a horror to use even if you would be used to click on one thing at a time) and second their system logs me out frequently.
I have not even gotten to the point of actually putting something into my perhaps shopping cart. I have tried several times because of the freebee, but there is no way in hell I will pay something there.
I think I will actually cancel this account without even downloading that.
So let me think if I want to force _my_ listeners in any way into this kind of experience only so _I_ can have some statistics I should be able to generate otherwhise? No. Absolutly not.
Btw you should consider reading the Cluetrain as a podcast because it seems perfect for that - perhaps even with updates on how the world is now. Than one was the one Audio book I wanted to get from them. ;)
Nicole
(http://crueltobekind.org)
Scientific material?
Another silo... science.
Silo frying
Boy. This is "This is what we want you to want" to the max.
To de-silo-fy, or (silo-fry!) you can store 5 tracks in Ardour format , mix it down to a surround mix with a ladspa plugin, and distribute it as mp3s via apache or streamed in ogg vorbis or converted to gsm and run over the iax protocol...
This is darn near an open source splog. But you know, it's the answer. What was the question?
Mike Taht
http://the-edge.blogspot.com
"That's one for the flying spaghetti monster"
"audio CDs..."
Particularly telling is the comment about audio CDs. Yes, some audio discs carry anti-copying messages and technology. But they aren't CDs and don't even carry the CD logo. In fact, some of them pre-emptively install holes in the user's computer that hostile hackers are now starting to exploit--what might be called insecurity patches.
And it's not clear what Mitch's digression about CDs has to do with his thread about podcasting, except that somehow both podcasting and un-DRMed CDs are somehow threatening to marketers.
The real threat to marketers is that we people will wake up and realize we don't need them.