October 11, 2005
Rebranding the MP3
There's been a lot of buzz about Yahooo!'s new Podcast search engine, and what it means for the "new medium" to have a major search engine buy in like this.
Ignore the fact that podcasting isn't a new medium (it's called audio guys, it's been around a while). It's also not that different from seven years ago when people just linked to MP3s on their webpages, and search engines like Scour.net and Lycos MP3 Search would find them for you. Technologically the only difference is a little bit of XML to help machines know what's being linked, plus a few tweaks (like RSS subscription) that make the experience more user-friendly.
What I think has changed in the past 7 years is the number of people producing and distributing their own amateur and semi-pro content, and the accompanying infrastructure to support them. In 1998 almost all the MP3s available on the web were copyrighted songs people had ripped from their CD collection, and so the RIAA and other members of the content cartel could squash whatever infrastructure cropped up in the name of stamping out piracy. Today there're countless MP3s online that are completely legal to download, and that primes the pump for for inventing the infrastructure to make it even easier. Moreover, piracy has largely gone to the P2P networks, so now MP3s on the web are harder to paint with the sweeping "it's all piracy" brush.
And that all leads to podcasting, which I'm hearing the media describe as "making your own radio programs for broadcast over the net." This is, of course, the big long-term competition for the content cartel — their big-advertising, mass-produced one-size-fits-all model will have trouble competing with thousands of niche narrowcasts that each have a small personal audience. More importantly, podcasting is online audio that finally isn't being linked with piracy — it's good, happy audio on the web, not at all like those nasty pirated MP3s in the previous decade.
And just think, it only took us seven years to get here...
Posted by bug to Media Technology at October 11, 2005 11:10 AM | TrackBackIgnore the fact that podcasting isn't a new medium...It's also not that different from seven years ago when people just linked to MP3s on their webpages
Podcasting is more than the sum of its parts; just as the web took existing technologies like hypertext, TCP/IP, and DNS and put them together in a new and surprisingly compelling package, "podcasting" is a confluence of technologies that solves the end-to-end problem of making it relatively easy to produce, distribute, and listen to audio over the internet.
Though you consider them minor tweaks, I think that the combination of RSS, high-capacity portable players, and widespread broadband access change the user experience so dramatically that podcasting can rightly be considered a new medium.
RSS is of course the biggest innovation, in that it allows you to subscribe to podcasts. This is a killer feature because you don’t have to continually hunt for good material to feed your portable player; once you’ve found a good feed, new shows just appear on “automagically”. I spend enough time in front of a computer as it is and I really don’t want to waste time reviewing and downloading shows.
The other big difference between podcasting and previous attempts at "internet radio" is the innovation of downloading directly to a portable player. Listening to audio programs at a desktop or laptop computer is tedious. On a PC, you usually have other distractions like the work, email, the web, IM, and games. Streamed audio also offers a poor experience, because it generally has poor audio quality, and cuts out frequently, and is expensive for producers to support on the server side, especially as a show becomes more popular and requires more simultaneous streams. Putting the shows on the portable player directly solves all those problems, as people can listen to the shows when they are commuting or exercising and they don't have to worry that the stream will crap out halfway through the show. Broadband of course makes this more palatable, but even a dialup connection can provide a decent podcast experience if you're willing to let it run overnight.
Though you consider them minor tweaks, I think that the combination of RSS, high-capacity portable players, and widespread broadband access change the user experience so dramatically that podcasting can rightly be considered a new medium.
I still balk at calling it a new medium, but I agree that I'm selling the technology short by calling it minor tweaks. My main point is that this is the result of slow and steady growth and innovation, from the spread of broadband to RSS to finally getting portable MP3 players right. All of these were around six years ago, just not quite mature or widespread enough to be the noticed next to the huge amount of illegal music sharing going on. Were it not for the copyright issue, I think we would have seen podcasting a couple years sooner, though probably at the expense of less development in the P2P area. As it is, the tech has marched along and now is finally stealing some of the spotlight away from its naer-do-well older brother MP3-Music-Piracy.
Posted by: Bug at October 13, 2005 11:10 AM