Richard BF

Podcasting in its simplest form, is the posting of blog posts in audio format, and having them automatically end up on subscribers’ iPods, ready for playback. It’s not so much the audio blogging that’s the innovative part, as on-demand audio has been around almost as long as the web. We used to broadcast our radio show on the Internet, back in 1998, and I’ve still got copies of shows sitting in my iTunes. Big deal.

The real innovation is making on-demand audio easier to use, namely through two technological breakthroughs: 1) automatically removing the audio from an RSS feed (via enclosures), and 2) automagically downloading the audio from iTunes specifically to an iPod, ready to play. Podcasting offers nothing new content wise that community radio hasn’t been providing for the last 40 years, but hey, everything goes in cycles.

The beauty of RSS/Atom, is that it delivers only the bare content, the raw information you’re interested in. You don’t have to visit a web site, you don’t have to scan through pages of navigation and HTML embelishments to get to the actual content.

Podcasting is supposedly the audio version of this, but it fails. All the podcasts I’ve listened to, including Adam Curry’s genre defining Daily Source Code, are about 20-30% useful information, and the rest is umms, ahhs, repetitions, or information that’s easier and faster to get in textual format through other feeds. In fact, all the podcasts I’ve heard, sound like they were simply recorded from community radio, and if you had to read that amount of text to get to the useful bits in a standard RSS feed, you’d end up unsubscribing.

Dave Pollard has talked about useful ways to reduce the effluvium in audio through the use of pitch shifting/time compression, which is infinitely more useful in reproducing audio with the useful characteristics of RSS content, than podcasting. But of course, useless content (umms, ahhs, repetitions etc.), at any speed, is still useless content.

There are however notable reasons why podcating will make a big impact, and it isn’t because people can get on-demand audio.

Lets talk about traditional radio for a bit. Webcasting was supposed to be the traditional radio network killer, and was going to eat into the major radio market over the years during and following the bubble. Like most ideas from that time however, the technologists failed to recognise what was so good about radio. Radio is audio only, there’s no visuals, plus most radio broadcasting is programmed for the masses, so it tends to be the conservative middle of what we as individuals would like to hear. We don’t get to pick the music that’s played, we can’t rewind at all, we have to listen at the exact time the show is on, we can only pick up certain shows in our local area (unless networked) and in many cases we don’t agree with the announcers’ opinions.

With all these flaws, how come radio still succeeds? For three reasons: 1. Because you can pick it up anywhere. 2. Because it is free of charge (no collection/bandwidth/CPU costs). 3. Because you don’t have to concentrate to listen to it, it runs in the background while you multitask.

At home, in the kitchen, while vacuuming, in the car, on the street, think of the radio walkman, or your clock radio which not only turns the radio on at a set time, but can also turn it off after an hour of you being asleep. On a plane, a train, in class, at work, radio is available everywhere, that’s why we tolerate all it’s inherent faults.

So what do the technologists do? They broadcast it over the web, thus solving the problem of reach, but breaking radio’s only real redeeming feature, the ability to take it anywhere. No wonder it failed.

But who says that reach was a problem anyway? Most local programming is local for a reason, meaning the only radio programming that really benefits from streaming is niche special interest programming. But the cache 22, is that with so few listeners, the chances are that most won’t be able to listen in at the right time anyway. Of course there’s always going to be a minority of people who want to sit at their computer all day and listen to low quality audio streams from Internet radio stations, but in general, webcasting is flawed for use in radio broadcasting.

So, the only real Internet based alternative to traditional radio broadcasting, is specialist programming. There are still problems of course, people can only pick it up while they have an Internet connection and a capable computer, tuning in is harder than using a radio, and not everyone wants to sit in front of their computer just to hear the radio. By providing the content on-demand however, people can listen to what they’re interested in, in their own time, and this is the principle behind podcasting.

The bottom line is, the only type of radio broadcast that will be better served with podcasting, is actually community radio. This is why podcasting is so important, because it will change the community and special interest radio stations forever, and will probably shut a lot of them down. Podcasting is community radio.

There’s an argument doing the rounds of the blogosphere at the moment that podcasting will threaten the big radio broadcasting networks, but for the reasons above, that’s not going to happen.

First, mainstream radio only works when everyone can pick it up anywhere, and the only real solution to that is a big mast, real estate to house it, an expensive and power hungry transmitter, and an expensive license from the government regulator. This won’t change, because the radio wave spectrum is becoming more and more expensive as technology advances.

Second, community radio has been around for almost 40 years now, and hasn’t affected the big networks one iota, even though, like podcasting, like webcasting, it was supposed to. What’s more, at the moment community radio is easier to pick up and listen to than the Internet, for the reasons mentioned earlier. Even my phone picks up radio and has earphones, that’s the sort of simplicity that you’d need to equal or beat.

So, podcasting won’t affect mainstream radio, but it just may replace community radio, and that’s a big shame. However, unlike the record companies and the RIAA, we’ll be working our butts off over the next few years to make sure our community radio business models change as the technology changes. Instead of fighting the podcast revolution, we’ll actively integrate it into whatever form community radio will take over the next 5-10 years. Watch this space, the world is about to change again, and not in the way most podcasters are expecting.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the Daily Source Code, and would love to have it on our radio station, but really, it’s still just community radio.