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Internet Broadcasting Makes A Comeback
Mark Leaman writes "About six years ago I founded an internet broadcasting company called GT2K (Gametalk 2000) which featured Real Audio based radio shows on gaming in all its incarnations (table top, strategy, computer...). During the dot.com "plague years" we saw hordes of internet broadcasting companies belly up. But now internet broadcasting is making a comeback thanks to Podcasting. Although Podcasting isn't new news Yahoo has some nice coverage on the re-emergence of the medium."
NPR had a recent story on podcasting. They interviewed a guy that would record his commute to work every day and then put it on a web site so that people could then listen to his musings on their IPods. Scintillating.
I'm a big tall mofo.
first postness blah blah bla
lameness filter!!!!
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I have a feeling that'll be the approximate quality of the content, too!
Be relentless!
It's "Narrowcasting," actually. Fine, Comm-school distinction, perhaps, but worth noting in this case. You don't want this to be broadcasting, as that would assume a lot of very low and common denominators and all that attendant government scrutiny.
Wierd, I listen to wolfFM.com and local talk radio over the internet everyday. Have done so for years.
Sam
he podcasts his radio show on KFI I love listening to that guy.
Fuck G-fuck/bletch tv
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Podcasting is hardly broadcasting. Recording to MP3 and making it downloadable isn't in my definition of a 'broadcast' - what next? saving images to your iPod Photo will be labeled Photocasting? please. Satellite radio is the future of digital audio, not the mindless musings of people with too much time.
Real Audio based ;)
how could someone geeky enough to broadcast table top games use real audio?
Personally, I'm more into "on-demand" playback rather than "broadcast" -- that's why I built Andromeda -- it turns your folders and files of MP3s (OGGs too) into a complete browsable/streaming site (needs PHP or ASP)...
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
http://podcast.wfmu.org/
They offer two shows of old 78s which are public domain as well as two other amazing shows (Advanced D & D with Donna Summer.... breakcore / random bedroom electronics and Downtown Soulville which is pure funk 45s from the 60s / early 70s and is extremely addictive. Especially of interest if you like stuff like Peanut Butter Wolf's Funky 16 corners comp from a few years back).
As for npr podcasting you can get on media as a podcast at http://onthemedia.org
I'm not sure PodCasting is creditworthy when it comes to bringing back web broadcasting.
If any technology or trend is responsible for the rebirth of web broadcasting, it is undoubtedly P2P Streaming (like PeerCast.org).
I can't figure out why p2p streaming isn't getting more hype than it is. I downloaded my first P2P streaming client about a month ago, and was pretty amazed at both the quality and the possibilities.
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http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=4473787
"NPR's Robert Smith reports on the rise of "podcasts" -- amateur music and talk shows created by the users of Apple's popular iPod personal music devices and other digital music players. Whole "shows" of music and talk can be downloaded from the Internet to individual players automatically, and some of the show hosts have become celebrities among the burgeoning podcast audience."
Does anyone have time for commercials anymore? I don't. Tivo TV, burn radio streams to my iPod, and skip thru the commercials. Number of commercials I have to listen to nowadays: zero. Good friggin riddance.
Perhaps this is part of the declining TV viewership companies have begun to bemoan, blaming yet again the revenue-robbing Internet.
Currently bidding on sig
GTK2 file dialogs suck! Oh, wait, it's GT2K! Oh, nevermind.
If that is the case, then I'd say that many stations have been doing this for a long time. Nothing new...save for the iPOD.
Podcasting itself is just the concept of archival retreival and playing back on your own handheld type device.
Nothing would stop podcasting from riding on top of p2p type networks, so thats not really the issue here.
I think the issue goes back DRM - who owns what, and who can listen to what. I think the last thing podcasters would want happening is having someone replay content for public consumption without licensing such content.
I know when i would produce a radio show i wouldn't care.. not in it for the money. However if the noted Rush Limbaugh (sic) produced a show and others replayed or rebroadcasted the "podcast"
that would convert to lost revenues and potential for interesting hacks.
Imaging someone making a pod cast of Rush saying he likes Gay people and doesn't mind paying taxes if it helps society as a whole.
With that said free podcasting has its place, however as any formal communication channel or commercial effort i believe it has to be protected in one way or another not for monetary value necessarily but content integrity.
Which ofcourse is an issue with many types of content these days so easily edited, enhanced and modified on the average pc.
Live365 has made a difference because it's legal to broadcast music, so no problems on that end. They handle the licensing for your netcast. I have two stations using live365.
SCIREV.NET - fanfics,reviews & more
Shoutcast is awesome and anyone can run a station. There number of listeners is only limited to the available bandwidth. There are many stations that run on donated bandwidth. Listeners listen using Winamp, XMMS or a program that is compatible with Nullsofts MP3 streaming format. Nullsoft recently released a TV steaming format that works very similar to their MP3 format. The best thing is that everything is free.
'Podcasting'
should be called podreceiving
You are not sending data from your iPod but just receiving a playlist from an external site.
Wrong name. misleading. silly
I listen to Digitally Imported Radio (DI) every day. In fact, since I have something always available I rarely download music anymore. It's simply more convienent to just tune in than it is to go searching for what I'm interested in.
WURD!!
Todays Trib has a pretty good story on Podcasting that quotes many of the regulars (Adam Curry, etc.).
The story is here and may require registration.
Funny this should come up, as I was just looking at this:
http://mixcastlive.com/
Looks like a very easy-to-use tool for putting together simple audio tracks with a few FX. The programmer has obviously put a lot of work into it. Too bad it's Windows-centric, but I imagine it will find a niche quickly.
with more people getting on broadband (not just in college anymore) and the spread of wireless spots in public places (starbucks, cities, airports) its not that surprising that internet broadcasts are getting more popular (again). casts can be sent in better quality to more people now.
I'm not disputing the technology and idea of podcasting, just the fact that for commercial or historical purposes there has to be a way to validate the integrity of the content.
podcasting can be done through web/rss/p2p or even pvr type functionality that you schedule on your own.
My point is without having a subscriber base and decentralized podcasting units particular to each vendor there is no way to validate and enforce content integrity of your podcasted works unless there is a DRM and or other types of integrity checks (combination of keys/crcs and such) that are enforced from the ground up.
Current live delivery systems are succesful because they're controlled from a central point.
Something like the new Napster would make a lot of sense. (basic license fee for unlimited recordings on a device per device basis or such)..
There aren't steadfast definitions of what p2pstreaming means yet.
You're saying its 'video on demand' which it could be, but it also could just be 'tuning in to a p2p streaming station'.
We wrote a video on demand style client at school, but peercast is more of a tune-in-and-listen kind of client. Both are peer-to-peer but the question is whether or not your remote client can initiate the upload.
During the dot.com "plague years" we saw hordes of internet broadcasting companies belly up.
This had little to do with "dot com" ("dot.com" is redundant) failures. Internet broadcasting failed because Yahoo! bought out all the major net 'stations' to merge into its net.radio project - which it then killed itself through gross mismanagement once every competitor had been acquired. It still exists, and it still sucks.
After this 'coincidence', the RIAA attacked every remaining net.broadcaster viciously; the preponderance of "stolen" radio broadcasts was their major propaganda line about the net pre-p2p mainstreaming. This law, which was completely an RIAA creation, is what killed internet broadcasting, not some ambiguous economic situation.
This article is more an advertisement for someone's commercial venture than anything else. If he wanted to just post this rehash article about pod-casting he could have with out plugging his own web site. I'm surprised this made it thru the /. Standards.
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Admittedly a lot of this is like a lot of blogs and not of very great moment. But there is a lot of other stuff that you cannot get any other way. Try http://www.itconversations.com/ for some really good stuff. Conferences you couldn't go to, in depth interviews with authors (40 minutes rather than 5) and The Gilmore Gang which I wait for each week.
Also there is stuff from the BBC which I am unlikely to ever hear on this side of the Atlantic plus NPR stuff that isn't carried on my station.
Two of the more important points of the podcast are that is like Tivo, you listen when you want to and you can listen when you are unhooked from the network (i.e. in a car).
Podcasting? There's no future in it. In fact I didn't just spend a few months of my life developing a new service that allows you to start podcasting using nothing more than a telephone.
Please move along, nothing to see here.
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There seem to be a lot of misinformed, or partially informed views of what Podcasting is or is not. Allow me to try and clear it up:
From a "broadcaster's" perspective: you record a show to MP3, you make that available via some URL-accessible protocol (typically http or bittorrent), then you add an item to an RSS feed which includes that URL as an enclosure.
From a consumer's perspective: you run an application (e.g. iPodder). You give the application a set of RSS feeds. The application polls these feeds, and when it finds a new item that points to an enclosure, it downloads the media. What happens then is application-dependent, but what iPodder does is use the iTunes API to import the new media into the iTunes library.
Podcasting receiver applications like iPodder are meant to be "set up and forget". Once it's going, then assuming you dock your MP3 player every day or so, you are automagically going to find new content on your player whenever it becomes available. (I'm hoping that future versions will also automatically delete stale media).
For the consumer, this is better than streaming because:
- you can listen to it when you're disconnected from a network - e.g. on the bus, in the car
- skipping, rewinding etc. is easy
- being on a slow network (e.g. dialup) is not a problem
- timeshifting is inherent. The user experience is very like having a radio TiVo, except there is no option to listen to live programming.
Sure, it doesn't lend itself to live phone-ins, up-to-the-minute news bulletins, etc. -- but that's not what it's for.
For the producer, the costs scale very nicely, and if you go for bittorrent, you could distribute a very popular show very cheaply indeed.
So that's what it is. Here's what it is not:
Podcasting is not just for iPods. It's a shame the name implies it. This is because it was invented by Mac-heads. Fortunately they're standards-centric Mac-heads.
Podcasting is not just for no-budget audio equivalents of the personal blog or personal homepage. The BBC's trial of podcasting the excellent In Our Time series was by all accounts a great success.
The absence of DRM means it may be difficult for some material to get cleared for podcasting, which may dissuade professional broadcasters from podcasting in some cases.
The cheapness of podcasting means there's an awful lot of shovelware out there: like the middling days of mp3.com, when there was probably good, free music on there, but who was going to wade through the chaff and sort out the wheat?
There's actually a company that is using a peer to peer method to broadcast television over the internet. Of course it's porn. There was an article in wired recently.
adultinternet.tv Sorry, I can't verify the link, I'm at work.
What if you could podcast a playlist in the Rhapsody service?
In other words, you could play whatever music you want in your podcast(well...music that was available via the subscription) with talking in between. The licensing features kick in so it's an end-run around the music webcasting licensing junk.
That may be a hole in the iPods armor.
Naked News never went under. I wonder why that is....
Most are just people bitching about thier lives, yes. But some are very different and even *gasp* entertaining! I have a podcast called "TheCabin's r33tcast" that is hosted by an internet relay chat channel. Everything spoken within IRC is then the show. That way it's not limited to one person bitching, it's a full bitching conversation with anyone who wants to join! http://www.the-cabin.com/podcast check it out if you're into the podcast thing. People seem to like it so far!
Gabe Kangas
Radio Paradise has also been operating for years. 7,226 Listeners on right now - I'm one of them. Not too shabby for a station that's listener supported.
Their 128 k MP3 feed is quality enough to pump through a home stereo system.
That is... if you like the music.
I want my Shasradio back. Shas, where are you?
Shasradio was one of the original listener-driven internet radio stations. (No link since the domain no longer exists). Listeners rated songs either as they played or by browsing through the playlist database. For each block of 5 songs, the station chose 3 or 4 of the highest rated songs (based on the user ratings of whomever was *currently* listening), a request (if any), and 1 or 2 "no votes yet" songs (to keep it fresh).
I loved that station and felt really bad when it went under (lack of funding).
Shas, if you're out there, any chance of reviving it?
Come play free flash games on Kongregate!
Seriously, the main reason streaming exists is so that the content provider can force you to watch/hear commercials and make it harder to watch/listen to the same 'cast twice.
Perhaps. I think you may be failing to consider the usfulness of streaming in delivering content with as small a delay as possible. This is especially useful for live programing be it news, sports, concerts or even talk radio.
http://www.howtopodcast.org
I run HackerMedia.net which is a one stop shop for 30+ underground shows. There is a single RSS feed that can be used with podcasting clients that covers all these shows. It's amazing the content out there that only a handful of people know about.
Hacker Media
A lot of the radio stations and aggregators I worked with got into streaming and back out following exactly the dot com paradigm. The internet was the future and everyone needed to establish a presence or become obsolete. They spent far too much money going in on a clasic 1. Stream content 2. ??? 3. Profit! plan.
Still, it was the extreamely high American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) rates for internet advertising spot rights that really pulled the rug out from under the professionals in the space. We spent a bunch of time and effort on ad replacement but the gold rush mentality was fading.
As the parent post also covers, the Recording Industry Ass. of America (RIAA) also had a hand in increasing the expense of doing internet broadcast of music. The Librarian of Congress has accepted the recommendation of the Register of Copyrights and rejected the rates and terms recommended by a Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (CARP) which were based on the agreement between the RIAA and Yahoo. If you take a moment to look at the rates please note "For purposes of paying the royalty, each transmission to each individual recipient is counted as one performance."
Even if the broadcast rates for internet broadcasts were not absurd and excessive, the gap between internet broadcasting revenues and costs would probably still be an issue. From the section describing why a percentage of revenues fee was rejected, "CARP noted that because many webcasters are currently generating very little revenue, a percentage of revenue rate would require copyright owners to allow extensive use of their property with little or no compensation."
Hey!!! *So* glad you "plugged".
I am a freelance web developer who is currently in the employ of a production music studio who is looking to get their library online. We have decided on a CMS solution and have been going through the process of deciding how to handle the library itself. I was going to code up something from scratch, but Andromeda seems to be everything we will need! You will be hearing from us shortly regarding licencing!
For once, slacking off on slashdot has actually had a positive effect on my workflow.
"Web Logging and Podcasting are the ultimate in ego masturbation."
That's insightful?
Most Slashdot posting is ego masturbation, too, but there's room for lots of voices, so there's usually something interesting to read, too!
There are many interesting podcasts, and a lot of garbage, too. People interested in new technology should check them out and make up their own minds.
Here's some good places to start:
Podcast Directory or
PodcastAlley
The lack of commercials alone was enough to get me interested!
Some podcasters might have their shows available on their website. But you shouldn't confuse podcasting with a website linking to mp3s.
A podcast is a RSS feed with enclosures linking to the show. You use an aggregator to subscribe to the shows. The aggregator will automagically download the shows you subscribe to your harddrive. The aggregator will also automaticaly copy the shows over to your mp3 player (assuming you have one).
Some things are more important than an animated rat