Datasheet

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 audi-

ence could browse the new content without any network latency, which was the rule in those dial-

up 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 open-

source foundations. Instead of concentrating the distribution channel in the hands of a few compa-

nies 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 aggre-

gates 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.

See Chapter 2, “Podcasting’s Meteoric Trajectory,” for a more complete history of the

development of podcasting.

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. We’ll cover these controversies throughout this book, but they can be summarized by saying

that the technology is frequently mistaken for a genre. 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 reli-

gious 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.”

CROSS-REF

Stars Being Born Everyday

05_043523 ch01.qxp 1/4/07 6:10 PM Page 29