Feb 3, 2008

What Is Podcasting?

Just two years ago, at this writing, the idea of a "podcast" made its first appearance on the scene. Already as many as 10,000 people are podcasting and as many as 15 million listeners are downloading and listening to audio programming through Real Simple Syndication (RSS) channels. Early podcasters are earning a living from their work, while others have launched service businesses that deliver audio production for commercial clients. But for most, the vast majority, podcasting is about one-to-few communication facilitated by IP-based networks and simple tools


The tools of the podcaster's trade


The basics you need to do a podcast: A microphone and recording device, which could be an old tape player, a solid-state recorder, or your personal computer, editing software, and a place to host the resulting program. This sounds like a lot of pieces, but compared to the complexity of producing and distributing a radio or television program a decade ago, podcasting is self-produced media realized. In a nutshell, a podcast is, according to Wikipedia, a "direct download…file, but the subscription feed of automatically delivered new content is what distinguishes a podcast from a simple download or real-time streaming." This is a description of many different services that pre-date the introduction of podcasting; a more accurate definition, in our opinion, is this:

"A podcast is a series of audio (or video) programs delivered through a static URL containing an RSS feed that automatically updates a list of programs on the listener's computer so that people may download new programs using a desktop application. Programs can be delivered to the listener automatically or when they choose to download them."

Already there are variations on this definition, because podcasts can be delivered directly to handheld devices without the intervention of a desktop computer or software. Likewise, podcasts have changed radically as video has been added to the mix. Originally, podcasts were simply MP3 files, a widely used audio format. Today, podcasts include MP4 and other video file formats, as well as other audio formats such as Windows Media, Ogg Vorbis, and Audible that support subscriptionbased and advertising-based podcast business models.

If you remember something called "push" technology from the late 1990s, podcasting may sound familiar. Companies like PointCast Inc. distributed client software that periodically polled network servers, downloading massive amounts of topical content, including audio and video programming, dumping older content from the user's hard drive to make room for the new material. Pointcast's audience could browse the new content without any network latency, which was the rule in those dialup times. It was the first attempt at non-streaming rich media delivery, but "push" was doomed to fail by its business model, which front-loaded costs for everyone — producers paid for distribution, and Pointcast incurred massive bandwidth and technology development expenses that killed the company before it could convert its audience into advertising revenues. The audience got everything for free, although Pointcast had plans to offer subscription-based programs before it collapsed well in advance of the rest of the Internet bubble's bursting.

However, push technology and podcasting are significantly different. Podcasting is built on opensource foundations. Instead of concentrating the distribution channel in the hands of a few companies like Pointcast, podcasting protocols allow any developer to add the ability to query a server to retrieve content to its application or Web service, and most importantly, podcasting allows anyone to place a program into distribution without having to go through an intermediary host that aggregates many channels of information. Pointcast is unneeded in many podcasting scenarios, because the podcaster can communicate directly with the listener. At its founding, podcasting was designed to subvert the economic equations of existing media, thwarting not just the role of the aggregator but also the advertiser.

But much about podcasting remains controversial because of those initial assumptions about the revenue models, or lack thereof.

Discussion of podcasting is difficult, because it is so young. The people who helped launch the industry are very particular about what is a podcast and what isn't. Moreover, they are vocal about it. That is, people talk about podcasts like the form is a kind of poem or book, turning definitions of what a podcast should be into a kind of religious argument. Podcasts, according to programmer Dave Winer, one of the people credited with inventing the technology, should be free — in fact, according to Winer, podcasts were engineered specifically to defy advertisers' efforts to include promotional content in podcasted programs.

"If you're not using MP3, you're probably trying to make podcasting into a replay of previous media," Winer wrote on November 12, 2005, the day after an advertising tracking service was introduced by Audible Inc. "By design, podcasting took a poison pill at the very beginning of its life that made it impossible for the corporate types to subvert it without fundamentally changing what it is. That's why I was sure that Audible wasn't doing podcasting. Basically MP3 can't be rigged up to serve the purpose of advertisers, and that's why I love MP3. And only MP3 provides the portability and compatibility that users depend on. Any other method will force them to jump through hoops that they will resist. If so, then podcasting isn't for the advertisers."

Winer's initial choices about podcasting's technology reflect that he served the poison pill. Yet, by the time he wrote this, podcasts were being delivered in many different file formats, including Quicktime files that played on Video iPods from Apple Computers Inc. The cat was out of the bag, and new uses must and will be found for podcasting or users will route around the rigid boundaries.

In fact, if podcasting is going to remain relevant — and we think it will — the technology will be extremely pliant, supporting many file formats and many more business models. Had the inventors of the personal computer decided what kind of projects it could be used for, the PC would have been designed for failure. In fact, one of the fathers of the PC, Alan Kay, says today that the problem holding back the personal computer today is reliance on the narrow range of ideas he helped think up in the 1970s.

No comments: