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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."
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.
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.
There was a time when traditional radio stations had some kind of licensing issue with a union that covered on-air personalities - with respect to payment for ads they read and whether or not they were fairly compensated for that.
I know it took WABC radio offline for several months, and various other stations as well. Some took to playing "dead air" on the stream while live-read commercials were playing.
There have been non-traditional broadcasters all along, including Digitally Imported, Wolf FM, Radio Paradise, etc, which have been rather continuous for years, but the flurry of "ooh, I can run Shoutcast" broadcasters which popped up running 24kbps streams seems to have hit a low maybe 18 months ago and is again on the rise. This might be coincident with rises in upstream and the relative cheapness of dedicated servers with truckloads of bandwidth included.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
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
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."
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.
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.
He already does maintain show archives that are available to subscribers. With the right amount of hacking, one could automate the process of downloading the content daily, converting it from Real or Windows Media and into MP3 to pop onto their iPod, I suppose.
But that's the smart part about Podcasting that most people in this comments thread is missing -- it's more than just recording an MP3 and posting it on a website. The Podcasting program is a huge part of this -- a central program used to automate downloads and transfer of the files from the web to your local machine or iPod or iRiver or what have you.
It takes all the work out of checking a dozen web sites looking for things. It's an RSS Aggregator with attachments. I'm somewhat afraid that point is getting lost in this whole conversation.
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?
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