A panel discussion - designing the perfect podcast player

This was recorded at a conference in Las Vegas.

So, my name is Dave Winer, and this is a panel, but I’m the only one up here, and it’s sort of by choice.
We were thinking about how to do this, and I like to do a conference style called “Uncon ference,” and I’m not sure how many people here are familiar with the concept.
But it basically is based on the premise that the people we call the audience know more about a given subject than any, like, four people you could put up here on stage.
And so rather than try to, you know, have a bunch of speeches, I wanted to try to have a conversation, a discussion.
So the way this is going to work, Mike Lehmann, Mike, do you want to raise your hand? Mike has a microphone in his hand, and actually I’d ask people to sort of, like, could you try to move into the center , because we’ve got everybody, unless I can understand if you ’ve got power over there or something for your laptops.
I certainly sympathize, but this way we can sort of, like, and don’t worry, you can get up and leave anytime you want.
So I know sometimes people sit in the edges because they’re not sure they want to stick around, and, like, that’s totally okay if you have to go on to another session, I totally understand.
And so what Mike is going to do is instead of people lining up, I mean, we’ve got such a small group here, I asked for a small room, too, and instead of people lining up for the microphone, which happens when people do that is they get all nervous and they form speeches in their heads and whatever, that just as soon as you have something you want to say, just raise your hand, and if there’s nobody else talking, Mike will come over to you and he’ll hold the microphone in front of you, and you just talk. You don’t just, and it’s not just questions, right? If you have something to say, you say it.
So it’s a very different way of doing a conference, but I think that if you give it a try, I think you’ll see that it works pretty well.
So the topic for today’s discussion is how to design a podcast player.
And so sort of hopefully a provocative question.
The assumption is that today’s, you know, MP3 devices were not designed with podcasting in mind, and I think that’s a fairly non -controversial statement.
The iPod, for example, was designed, and the Zoom and the SANSes and creatives and so forth were designed primarily to play music.
I don’t think people were thinking in terms of podcasting , but now we’re in a year three of podcasting, you know, by some reckoning.
And I think we understand the activity to enough of an extent that we might actually have some clear ideas about what makes a good podcast player.
So I wrote a few ideas down, and what I’m going to do is just sort of go through those.
There are only three of them, and then open it up for discussion.
That doesn’t mean, by the way, that we can only discuss podcast players because wherever we ramble, whatever we go to, it’s fine with me, and hopefully fine with everybody else.
So the first idea is that the player should be self-contained , meaning that, you know, today ’s players, you have to connect them up to a computer, to a laptop or a desktop, in order to synchronize with stuff that the laptop or the desktop goes and gets off the Internet.
Well, the ideal podcast player in the future, I think, will have the ability to do that all on its own.
So it’ll have a Wi-Fi connection, and it’ll have subscriptions, and periodically it will go out and check all the feeds that you’re subscribed to, and see if there are any new podcasts, and if there are, it ’ll just download them.
And the user interface, I would hope, would sort of be redes igned around this idea that there’s sort of an input queue, and that the most freshest podcast would be the first one that you would see, and that they would sort of be in chron ological order, kind of the way blogs work today.
I know that’s kind of the way I manage my own podcasts, so, I mean, I have an aggregator, I don’t use iTunes, I write my own, and what it does is it, you know, does more or less that, and presents me a list of the new podcasts that I ever find, and then I manually drag those over to my podcast player, which is an iPod, you know, and it’s okay, but it could be a lot better.
The second idea, and this is something that players are actually starting to get more of, is that they should also be able to record podcasts.
Anything that, any platform that’s ever been successful, and if you go, I mean obviously , I don’t know about any platform, my experience goes back to more or less the early 80s, but all the computer platforms that I’ve ever used that were successful had the ability not just to play programs, but also to create them.
So, you know, CPM machines, you could create software on the same machine that you use to run the software, Apple II, IBM PC, Macintosh, Windows.
So, to me, for a podcast device to really have a chance to be good, it has to also be able to record podcasts, and that’s not to say that everybody that uses the podcast player is going to record them, but the barrier to entry should be very, very low.
And I think that was why those other platforms that were successful were successful, because you didn’t need to make a huge investment in equipment or, you know, software or whatever to actually be able to produce it.
And producing podcasts means not just creating an MP3 file, but also creating an RSS feed out of it and, you know, registering with whatever services you want to register with so people can discover your podcast.
And then the final, the third thing that I thought of was that it also needs to allow people to put software on it, not just playing podcasts, but I want to be able to, if the player is missing a feature, I want to be able to add that feature to the player.
And this is another thing that frustrates the hell out of me.
There might be, you know, one thing that I can’t get in a player that I’d like to have as a feature, and in order to get that feature, I have to write everything, I have to write the whole player.
And that seems silly to me.
Well, not only does it seem silly, but it’s stifling.
It’s why you don’t see a lot of innovation happening in podcast player devices.
You could probably throw away the first two features and just get the third one and that would be enough to actually solve the problem entirely, because what we’re stuck with is, you know, one manufacturer, Apple, who thinks in terms of music playing and not podcasts, and everybody else sort of very , very confused about what’s going on here.
Whereas if you’re a daily user of podcasts, you’re probably not too confused about the activity, probably a pretty good idea of what you need to make the thing really work.
So let’s say there’s 10,000 people like that.
And out of those 10,000, there might be five people there who have the programming skills to actually be able to make the software that solves the problems.
And we would be there for solving the problem if we had the podcast player as a platform.
It’s kind of puzzling to me that Microsoft, which is a company that has always shipped platforms, shipped Zoom, which is not a platform.
And I don’t know how their process led them to that, but I think it was wrong.
Is there anybody here from the Zoom team? Now you see? I think that’s a bug.
I flew all the way to Las Vegas to do this.
Well, hopefully they’ll be watching one of these tapes, but I think that’s a mistake.
All right, so who wants to go first? What’s something that bugs you about it? OK, so we have a guy here. Mike , you’ve got to really move.
This is going to get a good work out here.
You can have some carbs tonight . Remember, you hold the mic.
Mike is going to hold the mic for you, OK? Yeah, and because that’s just the way it works.
One of the areas that I see as one of the chief problems here is in the area of discovery.
That’s where I struggle with podcasts. I’m an avid audio book fan, and audio as a delivery mechanism is very compelling.
Yeah, me too.
And just trying to get my arms around what’s out there is very compelling.
How do you find out what’s out there now? Literally through the grapevine and through a hundred different resources.
And to have a resource kind of like iTunes, the MSN Music Library, that would be more of an aggregation service for podcasts would be a very important component of this, I would imagine.
Interesting.
One of a server-side service.
Well, what’s the barrier there? I mean, have you looked, and there are other, there are directories of other than iTunes, right? There are actually a lot of them. Have you tried any of the others? Yes, and I found the quality across them is really kind of … So how are we going to solve that then? I agree.
User ratings, I think, would be helpful.
They all have user ratings.
That’s not new technology, right? I don’t know.
Or many of them do.
I’ve seen them in the iTunes store.
You know what I do, which is kind of a sad thing to admit, but most of the, almost all the podcasts I listen to are from N PR.
So that’s sort of, yeah, I mean , I don’t know, if I see one person, two people, I mean, three, right? Now, that’s sort of a, and word of mouth, let me give you a little word about fresh air is absolutely wonderful.
I just discovered it. I mean, I posted it on my blog twice, once, like six months ago or whatever.
I said, the only two holdouts are fresh air and morning edition.
And somebody, the second time I did it, I got a bunch of emails saying, you know, hey idiot, you know, fresh air is podcast ing.
And so, and then, you know, I didn’t know how much I liked fresh air until they started podcasting because it would sort of be, I’d catch, you know , it’s a long show.
It’s a 50 minute show. And when I would be in the car, and I don’t have a long commute or anything, and not often in the car even when fresh air is on.
So I’d catch a little bits of it. And that’s not a good way to do that show.
You want to do it from beginning to end, and I’ve been absolutely blown away with the quality of it.
So, I mean, that’s admittedly a very poor solution to the problem because, but it is a solution.
I mean, my schedule, you know, I can listen to one hour of podcasting a day, basically.
That’s about what I do because I walk for exercise, and I walk for an hour.
So, there’s my one hour podcast .
And so NPR has been keeping me very well fed podcasting-wise, but it’s totally politically unacceptable to me.
Is anybody else have an idea about the directories? I mean, you know what, that’s number one.
So, right here, yeah. No, he’s holding the mic. I’m sorry to make an issue of that.
One thing that I would like to say is a way for the user to send back metadata, consumption metadata to some kind of service.
Like, when is the last time that I listened to a certain show, episode, or my rating of the episode, or probably tag ging.
Because this way, I would be able to create filters or extra services for recommendation.
Or somebody could make a recommendation based on that, right? Or my friends could recommend something to me.
This is something that, to a limited degree, the iTunes software does.
I mean, it does allow you to know if a certain episode is new or not, which means have you listened to it once or not? So, show of hands, how many people use iTunes to get their podcasts? Okay, that’s, I would say, what , that looked like more than half.
Would you guys agree? Not exclusively? Would you like to say something about that? I use the universities a lot, like Cal Berkeley, MIT, Harvard , Harvard, MIT, Cal Berkeley.
What kind of services do they have? Ah, they got everything. They have all these courses that professors doing one hour one- off. Stanford has a bunch of stuff.
Oh, that’s fantastic.
It’s fantastic. So go to any of the big name universities and they’ve got whole libraries now starting.
So the problem I have is that I go up once a month and I just update.
And I’m like, I spend two hours , takes a long time to download.
I want to do it more often. I just don’t have time.
Wait, explain the process. You do what every month? I go to iTunes or I go and I go , it takes me two to three hours browsing to find what I want, but I do that once a month.
I download a whole, like At the universities, are you saying? At the universities that I tune at, or anywhere I can find it.
Audio books, I don’t like that site that has audio books because I can’t figure out how to download from there, so Which site do you go to? So far, I’ve only been able to successfully download from iTunes for books.
What about Audible? Have you tried Audible? I tried Audible and I couldn’t figure it out.
Audible is a bit difficult.
I just gave up.
Do that again with your that ’s my attitude at Audible. You can have it.
If I had a whole thing happen, I’d lost a whole I was driving I drove cross- country five times in the last few years.
And so that meant and not just cross-country, but all over, and that meant a lot of audio books because this was before podcasting, mostly before podcasting really caught on.
And I had a whole collection of books backlog to read, and I lost my hard drive.
And I asked, you know, Audible, can I please you know, are you about a new computer? Can I download? No. You lost them. You lost them.
I go, geez, what a way to treat a customer.
I mean, this was not a triv ially small amount of money either, so I think they I messed up downloading an iTunes book, and I messed up by stopping prematurely, and I didn’t get two chapters, and I thought, oh, boy, I’m going to have to, you know, live with that.
So I went back to the site and just downloaded it again, and it fixed it without me even knowing how I did it to this day. I don’t know.
Well, that’s better, right? Yes. So the other thing I’d like it to do is I’d like to be able to share it with what I’ve got and suggest stuff to people to push it.
And I’d like them to share it with me, like Yahoo does with their search thing. They’ve got to share a search now.
How does that work? You go up on Yahoo when you search, and you go, my Yahoo, and you set it up so that you have my search.
And when you search on something, if you want, they give you an opportunity to save the search.
Then when you’ve saved it, you can share it with other people you think would be interested in your collection of saved searches.
So I want to do something like that for my iPods stuff and belong to a club that has interests like me, which is, I ’m all over the map.
I mean, and I want it to tag so that it says, you know, use tags so that I don’t have to figure out too much what I’m interested in because it’s so eclectic.
I don’t have any way to describe myself.
So I’m going to be really hard to say what I like.
It’s really serendipitous right now. So how I find stuff is really a miracle to me, but I always find good stuff.
Okay, so make one recommendation to everybody here.
So we all get one, you know, I can’t speak for everybody, but I’m interested.
Give me one podcast that I should listen to that I would die to listen to that was so good.
One of my favorite this month is the HBO has podcasts on the guy, the historical consultant they use to create Rome.
Oh my God.
And he does a whole set of interviews beyond what they do on the video channel.
See now, I love Rome. Rome was one of my favorite shows ever.
It was great.
So how do we find that? I wish I had my projector.
Just go up on Google and go to HBO Rome and then it’ll take you to, I think it’ll take you to that place.
I use Google a lot to find stuff.
Oh, that was great. Anybody have anything like that? That was, you see, that made the whole session worth it for me, okay? I might add, by the way, that I really find this very interesting the way this discussion is going because I ’ve done this a couple of times and it’s never gone in this direction.
It’s always gone in a different , not that satisfying direction.
It’s sort of like, you know, how can we pile on software features onto these things? But I don’t think that we need a whole lot more software, but this is sort of the issue is like, you know, how do I get more? I mean, I played a role in creating podcasting, right? And so like all these people said, “Let’s start a business.
Let’s make a billion dollars. " But I think I’m getting the best reward I could ever have gotten from doing the work that I did, which is this enrichment of my life.
That comes from having so much more value from the time that was, you know, at best I would listen to NPR on my walks before, right? And that was hit or miss. You know, I might get Latino USA, which, you know, while I’m sure some people think it’s a wonderful show, it does absolutely nothing for me.
And, you know, even the, you know, there’s just a lot of programming they do that and KQ ED that I could care less about.
But now every moment is like completely filled with interesting stuff. And so that ’s just a, you know, that’s what ’s cool about podcasting.
Mike, of course, interview yourself.
Three quick suggestions for the podcast player.
Three? Yes. One is multi-speed. I like to listen to stuff at like 1. 6x unless it’s music.
Hey, is anybody writing this down? Could somebody start recording the whole session? I know, but okay, all right.
That’s the second one. I want to be able to make a comment when I’m listening to you say something.
Yeah, nothing.
I want to be able to make a comment.
You really think you’d actually do that if you could do it? Absolutely.
Does everybody agree? Would you actually do that? I had a voicemail system that did a voicemail work for me.
Really? That while you’re listening to a voicemail, you can hit pause and say… You could speed it up and adjust the pitch so that the voice still sounds natural.
Who was more miserable when working with a long voicemail? Nothing, yeah.
Yeah, that’s it.
Having a root canal might be about the same.
I think you were asking about the comment, though, with people who used to talk back.
I was, but you know what? It’s okay. He still has something to say.
I’m sorry, and interruptions are all out here, too.
But go ahead, Mike. You were saying… The third one is, if the podcast contains a bunch of links, and I’ve got a self-cont ained podcast player, I don’t sync it to something else, I’d like to be able to get away of getting those links , because I sit there and subscribe to 10, they all come down in here, and the guy says, “Oh, go to www. mysite. com. " How are you going to do that, Mike? That one, I want those links sent to me as well.
This is what usually comes from these sessions.
That’s the big one. Everybody says, “I want really good…” I want podcasts the way I would summarize it, and I think it’s utterly hopeless.
I want podcasts to work the way blogs work, meaning that I can link to things, and I want those links to work.
Or they say, “I want to be able to link into the middle of a podcast. " But people have come up with technical solutions for the latter, and somehow people don’t do it.
Maybe the player can’t do it, right? The only reason I mentioned it is because you were talking about a standalone player that didn’t sync with anything else.
So if you get the RSS speed coming down, you get that information.
Wait, I want to have an argument with Mike, though.
We’ll come right back to this.
I’m not sure I understand.
Somebody creates a podcast, creates a blog entry, and an audio file.
When you’re syncing to that device, theoretically, you could also sync the blog entry along with the text, along with the audio.
At some point, I’d like to be able to say, “Okay, I’ve gotten subscribed to 100 podcasts.
This one’s great. I want those links. Send them to me as an email. " Oh, okay. That makes perfect sense.
Since it’s a standalone unit, it’s not a computer. It is the whole thing.
Oh, of course. Since it has a Wi-Fi connection, no problem with it sending an email.
Use it up and send it whenever you can.
Okay, good. No argument. Got it .
You can do that on GarageBand, anyhow.
Wait, you can do what? Syncing links to chapters in your mp3 file.
If you’re talking about a topic in your mp3 sequence, then you say these three minutes, actually, on talking about that topic, and you add a link on that one, and then in the preview image that you get in your iTunes, you can add a link onto it, and then from your iTunes, click to the website.
So it’s using GarageBand on Mac .
I missed a lot of that.
I don’t know if that only works for things produced by GarageB and, M4A files as opposed to mp3 files.
Yeah, but I wanted to go another way.
I think the ultimate podcast player would be the one that would tackle our mind as human beings, the mind limitation we have, which is, actually, with audio, we can only listen to one track at a time, where with images or IM-ing sessions or whatever, we can surf or browsing.
We can browse different pages at the same time, where when two audio files are listened at the same time, it’s a mess, you know, there’s no… So if I want to have an efficient podcast player, it would be the one that would allow me to listen to three, five, six different podcasts at the same time.
Kill me. I’d like to die before that happens.
Why not? Why not? Okay, I’m deliberately reacting strongly, because I wanted… Well, not everything has a technical solution, right? There are limits of the human body. We have ten fingers, two hands, two feet, two eyes, one nose, one mouth, two ears, one brain, you know? And God created us, if there is a God, to only be able to listen to one thing at a time efficiently.
And so, for the things that you can multitask, see, I’d have this problem as a blogger, okay , that I would write something, you know, I’d write one paragraph post, right? And in that post, I would say CSS, by the way, you know, CSS, zealots, everybody that… Nobody has no opinion about CSS . Cascading style sheets.
I don’t know why, but it’s a really polarizing thing.
And at one point, I said something critical about CSS.
And as a result, I’ve become a favorite target of the people who, you know, love CSS.
And so, I wrote a blog post. It was not very long, maybe five sentences, in which I basically said, “You know what? CSS isn’t so bad. " And, you know, I wanted to explain why CSS is a very good technology and why I like to use it, and included pointers to sites that I had created that used CSS.
Do you think I got any less flames from that post than I got from the ones where I said that CSS wasn’t so great? And what does that tell you? Did anybody actually read my post? No.
And how many people actually read the blog posts that are up there versus how many people skim it looking for keywords? The answer is, sadly, a lot of people don’t read what you write.
They don’t actually parse the sentences to figure out what you’re saying, and they don’t get past paragraph one if they get past that, OK? So that whole phenomenon that you describe has led us to a place where communication really sucks, where we invent these wonderful technologies that are capable of doing so much communication, yet so little communication actually takes place.
However, you’re listening to me very intently right now.
I can tell that you’re understanding every sentence you just shook your head because you knew that I had said something that, you know, the proper reaction is a head shake, right? Well, if I had written this to you, I don’t think you would be with me now.
You would already be responding to my e-mail, responding to me by e-mail, telling me what a miserable mo fo I am and how I don’t understand anything about it, not saying anything about you personally other than that that ’s just the way it works.
See, I think the wonderful thing about podcasting is that it does force you to sit there and listen to the whole thing, because then communication can slow down a little bit and more complicated ideas can come in. Real teaching can happen and real learning can happen.
You know, I listened to an interview the other day on Terry Gross with David Halberst am, a great author who just died.
I learned ten times more about David Halberstam than I had ever known about the guy when he was alive.
But it couldn’t have been conveyed in something, it couldn’t have happened if I was listening to something else at the same time.
The whole point was to slow down and just let the ideas come into you.
And, you know, if it’s boring, you can click the fast forward, but you don’t get to… So, I mean, alright, I can understand why you speed things up and maintain, you know, and voicemails suck, I agree.
You know, there’s nothing worse than listening to a terrible drone and voicemail, but then there’s also the art of this stuff, and there ought to be a place for that too.
And that learning and teaching, they all play a role in this.
So, that’s why I personally don ’t want to see that, because I don’t want to create podcasts for people who are fast forwarding through this, and listening multitasking while they’re doing it.
I only want to create there, in that context, I want one place where people actually do listen.
And if that only means that instead of 10,000 people listening to it, I only get 20 people listening to it, fine, no problem, because 10,000 people weren’t listening anyway.
So, you got back a speech in response to a well meant, well intentioned idea.
You got to let him say something in response, it’s only fair.
Oh, sorry, you had no idea that was coming, right? No, it’s okay. Good. I mean well, by the way.
It depends on, it’s your point of view on the fact like fast consumption.
My point of view is eagerness to learn.
So, and I have a limited period of time on this planet, you know.
Yeah, but I’m a lot older than you, sir.
Please? I’m a lot older than you.
Yeah, of course.
So, you’ll learn to appreciate.
That’s all right, it’s true.
You’re probably a digital immigrant where I’m a native.
Oh, I beg your pardon.
I beg your pardon, you don’t know that.
Now, that part about me being older is true and observable, but that last part you don’t know.
When do you think that was? That was bad, I guess.
It was because it’s not true.
You know, I have to show some respect for your elders.
Right, anyhow.
That was a joke, all right.
I just want to say that it’s not about fast forwarding or fast consumption, it’s just the fact that multi-layer would allow me to learn faster, you know.
No, no.
There’s always two sides to every argument, and that’s a perfectly valid side.
Right, we just have a difference of opinion on this one.
Yeah, I’m not an immigrant for crying out loud.
Listen to your own accent.
You know where you are right now.
This is the United States of America.
Yeah, I was born here.
You weren’t, were you? I didn’t think so.
But I hold nothing against you.
Hi.
So, to Mike’s comment about the blog notes, the podcast player has to have a web server in it.
Yes, of course.
Everything.
That microphone has to have a web server in it.
Sure.
The web server needs a web server.
Yeah.
I want to be able to share the word of mouth, to share my favorite shows, not only with other people, but also to remind me of what I, you know, to sort of bookmark the things that were interesting to me.
And I’m wondering if that ties into the attention initiative.
Sure.
To help remember what got my attention, how interested I was.
Did I listen to the whole thing ? And also, when I switch back and forth between the podcast, I’m listening to a podcast in the car.
I see one that I want to listen to more, I want to come back to the other one.
I want it to remember where the heck I stopped.
Hello.
And, you know, can you believe that they don’t do that? Yeah, it’s so barbaric.
You know, talk about multit asking.
That I do do, okay? In other words, okay, so one time I only take a 40-minute walk instead of an hour walk.
That means there’s 10 minutes on the media that I haven’t listened to yet.
But now, if I happen to, I happen to sync up my iPod, in between, that completely gets lost.
You know, it does not remember that I still had 10 minutes left to go on that.
So, yeah, I mean, I do multit ask that way.
That I’m listening, like, I read three books at the same time.
I don’t just read one book at the same time.
I have all different types of interest going at the same time.
And I put a bookmark in each one.
And it’s barbaric.
It’s crazy.
Yeah.
That’s a major, major thing that’s got to go.
That’s number four on my list, for sure.
Yeah.
Oh, okay.
You’re Josh, right? Yes, I am.
Hi, Josh.
And I’ll disclaim this comment by saying that I do work for Intel.
But my question is, I want to get some discussion.
Going back to the hardware design, what do you think is stopping or is the problem that would keep a big company like Intel from making this perfect podcast player? Nothing.
Why would anything stop? But why do you think it doesn’t exist yet? I don’t know.
You worked there.
You told me.
I’ll go back and find out.
Does anybody have an idea about that? Yeah.
Well, I don’t know if the money is in the hardware or from a business standpoint, it’s the whole supply chain of the media and the relationships built on providing the distribution of the media.
Well, nobody knows, right? I mean, it’s impossible to know whether, until it actually gets done by somebody, you have absolutely no way of knowing.
And I don’t know for sure there’s no one from Zune to talk about it.
But I noticed that the Zune is actually based on the Toshiba Gigabit S, which was the video version of Toshiba’s media player that I was going to buy.
The minute it came out, and it never came out.
Interesting.
Because Microsoft, you know, sort of absorbed that product and made it the Z une.
It used to be portable media player, and now it’s this crippled version of Zune-ish thing.
Travis.
Completely locked down.
The worst design thing I’ve ever seen.
From what I understand is they locked it down much like Apple locked the iPod down.
Because of the DRM, they needed to keep people out of the box to placate the record companies .
Which totally destroys the scriptability, you know, the third-party stuff .
DRM is a plague.
Wait, wait, we need a microphone because, you know, we’re recording this.
Wait, give him a second.
Thanks.
I think the answer to your question, Dave, is the fact of the economics of the matter, right? If you’ve got music, which is obviously an enormous audience out there, you have, you know, these stores that you can tie into, and this 99-cent hit on that particular transaction, with podcasts, it becomes a lot more amorphous.
I don’t know.
I’d pay 99 cents for almost anything I would pay.
I pay for everything I use.
I don’t have any.
For me, there’s no resistance to that at all.
But I imagine for other people, there might be… Would you pay $1,000 for a podcast player that has all these features? As opposed to, you know, $249? Maybe. Maybe.
I might do that.
You know, I’m not saying that lightly, but, you know, it’s… $1,000 ain’t what it used to be , you know? I spend $1,000 on lots of things that don’t give me any pleasure at all.
And for something that, you know, has all that enrichment for me and makes me feel good about myself and, you know, whatever, yeah, maybe I would.
I don’t know.
Wait, before I do that, $1,000 for a podcast player, what do you say? Maybe.
Yeah, not many hands go up.
Mike, you raised your hand? Yeah.
Well… Well, the big challenge here is the commercialization of this industry.
I mean, all the podcasts you referenced are NPR.
This lady over here referenced universities.
Because there’s not a monet ization model behind it, it’s going to take a while for … It won’t be.
I don’t believe there will be.
Well, I think there will be.
It’s just not in this necessary generation.
And especially if we had a $1, 000 podcast players, then your market penetration is going to be low because people are going to spend $1,000.
I mean, why does radio work? Radio works because we have lots… No, there won’t be a $1,000 podcast player.
I think we can be fairly sure of that.
I mean, it was sort of an intellectual exercise question.
Yeah, absolutely.
The tough thing about podcast ing as a whole is the tracking, the monet ization, the ad revenue, which all the things I think would war against the type of podcast environment we have now that we all kind of like, and is what we have now good enough? Or do we want it to be tinkered with and then turned into something we don’t want, which is commercial radio? Well, the premise of this… No, I don’t know that there’s … If you can track it, then you ’ve got to do your advertising, then you’re going to have… No, I understand, and absolutely.
I understand that people who advertise now can’t in any way invest in podcasting because the number of downloads has absolutely nothing to do with the number of times it’s been listened to.
I almost see that as a good thing.
My feeling… I’ll try not to be too long- winded about this, but I think that advertising is in its last days.
And so that podcasting will be on its curve at the same time advertising is over.
There was a great article in the Sunday Times magazine this week about the future of political advertising and why by 2012 the author felt that advertising for political candidates would be a complete … Nobody would be doing it.
It doesn’t work.
It doesn’t work now.
I know it seems weird, but I wrote that in 2004.
I think by 2012, people will be … It’ll be so much common sense that people won’t believe that anybody ever believed that political advertising could possibly work.
And I think that what you’re going to see is, instead, people creating the kind of information that people want.
There’s nothing wrong with it being entertaining and there’s nothing wrong with information that promotes products.
There’s nothing wrong with it, but the better targeted it gets , the less it’s advertising and the more it becomes information .
And that’s what’s going to happen, is that they’re going to be able to get… The advertising is going to get to exactly the right person at exactly the right time that they need that particular commercial.
And once that happens, it ain’t advertising anymore.
Then it’s now become information.
And that’s a very important distinction.
So can you envision podcasts that do that for you? And absolutely.
I mean, if I’m going to go buy a car, right? You know, I did this in 2005.
I bought a new car.
And I made a point of researching it to the best of my ability on the Internet.
Now, I bought another car in 1999 and did it the same way.
And, of course, it was a lot better in 2005 than it was in 1999.
And I would have at that time been happy to take podcasts with me about the various cars that… Once I had narrowed the field down to four or five different models and manufacturers, if each of them had a 15-minute podcast for me to take with me on a walk, I think I would have done it.
Because at that point, I was very interested in information about their products.
Now, those are commercials.
They don’t have to worry about measuring me.
The measurement’s going to come in the form, in this case, of a check for $40,000.
So it’s worth investing something in marketing.
And it’s a very different world from the one we came from.
We were all born in the 20th century, but we’re in a different century now, I think.
So I think podcasting is part of it.
I think we’re absolutely at the beginning of podcasting, right at the very beginning of it.
So to assume that there’s no money to be made, just because no money has been made, I think , is wrong.
I think there’ll be tons of money made in podcasting, but not in any way, shape, or form, in the ways money was made in previous media.
Just be that way.
You mentioned cars, so comment about both cars and economics.
For me, I listened to audio in the car more than anywhere else .
And so a perfect podcast player would be something that was integrated into my car.
No kidding. How would that work ? How would you like that to work? Maybe my car has a Wi-Fi and I just pull into my garage and it sinks. I don’t know.
Yeah.
I think my podcast should be on a server or centralized so I can go to multiple devices, because I do have different devices.
If I’m working out, that’s ideally a different device on my sleeve.
But I want to ask you a question. What about Wi-Fi being more ubiquitous? I mean, they say that Wi-Fi is going to be metropolitan areas that are blanketed with Wi-Fi.
Well, it already is. I mean, pull into Starbucks parking lot .
Right. And that, of course, could just as easily sink with your computer at home too, right? Because Wi-Fi is Wi-Fi, right? Or it could have the RSS feeds built into it.
Which case, you know… As for economics, I think the issue may just be the demographics for podcasts.
I mean, do kids listen to podcasts? And how big is the podcast market compared to… But at what point do you ask that question? Suppose you had asked that question in 2003.
How many people listen to podcasts? You would have said zero.
Nobody listens to podcasts.
Therefore, should anybody produce podcasts? Obviously. Let me just go through this with you, okay? Then, obviously, nobody should invest in podcasts, because nobody’s listening to them.
The point is when you’re in a … If this is… I’m not saying for sure that it is, but if this is the beginning of an activity that’s going to become popular, we’re not at a point where you can ask if kids listen to podcasts.
The kids that… It could be that the kids who listen to podcasts haven’t even been born yet.
It’s not about listening to podcasts. It’s just listening to, like, the spoken word.
Music versus NPR. What’s NPR’s demographic? And these kids text all the time with each other.
35 to 50, and NPR is a much older… Yes, but I’m 51. That’s why I like NPR. Come on.
I have a friend who’s 12 years old who loves Don and Drew.
I couldn’t stand Don.
Microsoft can’t even get music right now, so they’re not worrying about podcasts, because the market’s relatively insignificant by comparison.
That’s Microsoft. Are you working Microsoft? I do. I don’t.
But, you know, even Apple is investing as much as it should in… What’s your name? My name’s Jeff.
Jeff, out of the 6 billion people on the planet, how many of them work at Microsoft and Apple? Oh, nobody.
Well, why do we have to worry about what you guys think? Come on. You know what? I understand it.
There’s a lot of gravity inside your organization.
You think the world revolves around you, but it doesn’t.
We don’t care. If you want to miss the boat, miss the boat.
It’s okay.
Does that make my podcast… Working at Microsoft make me less of a consumer of podcasts? But you said nobody at Microsoft thinks this is worth going.
I don’t know anything about Zoom. I don’t work with them. I ’m assuming.
Okay, let’s just leave Microsoft and Apple out of this for a moment.
Assume that there might be other people that might make a contribution in this area other than big technology companies.
Microsoft and Apple didn’t make this stuff happen in the first place.
Actually, good question. Why is there no good podcast management software other than iTunes right now? Other than what? iTunes. How do you know there’s no other good product? I’ve actually spent an entire day looking around and playing with a bunch of different things and found nothing that came close to… I know. That’s not to say that there isn’t anything out there.
I mean, I use great podcast management software, but you didn’t find it.
Well, why are you laughing? Because it’s also available.
You could download it and have it for free.
So it’s not just that I wrote it.
I’m also making it available to you if you want it.
I love it.
What? I’d love it.
It looks a little bit harder then.
Let’s come over here.
I’m not playing my product here . No way.
This is not what this is about.
Does it have a name? Ask him. He knows.
We’ll get back to features here .
I think a feature that’s been missing is text-to-speech.
Being able to subscribe to blogs and consume in audio.
Do you like that? I would like that.
There are services that do it online, but to have that integrated… Are they good? Yeah, they’re all right.
Okay.
But be able to just sync to my podcast and my blogs at the same point and listen to them at the same spot.
I think that would be powerful.
Say that again? I think being able to sync with podcasts and blogs and consume them in the same medium would be pretty powerful.
What does everybody else think? You think it’s what? He likes it.
Right here.
I find listening to text-to-spe ech pretty emotionless.
And for content that I care about, it’s not as compelling as my own inner voice when I read it.
So, that’s just me.
But I have another question about the platform, which is, you know, why wouldn ’t you use a phone? There are lots of phones today that have operating systems you can write code on, write apps.
It has Wi-Fi built in or some sort of data service.
Pretty much it has everything you would need to solve the kind of problem you’re talking about.
Yeah, it already knows how to communicate too, right? And it’s one device.
I have in my bag my iPod and my phone.
And I hate having to deal with the iPod and the phone, both of them.
I wish I just had one device.
I have a funny feeling that they might market it that way, eh? Yeah, it’s pretty compelling.
It’s pretty compelling to have one device.
Isn’t that amazing that they’re going to get us to spend another 500 bucks? Somebody asked me, “Do you think you’re going to buy an iPhone?” I said, “Geez, I hope not, but I probably will. " I buy everything those guys make.
Yeah, sure.
I don’t know.
Oh, I’m out.
Okay.
Texas Speech.
I vote for that because as emotionous and robotic as it is , I like you.
I only have about an hour, hour , 15 minutes to either listen to podcasts or review my journals.
And if I could listen to my journals in the car and mentally note what I want to go back and review in my own head, that’d be great.
What do you mean by listening to your journals? I have journal blog, technical articles, stuff that I have to know for work, but I just have piles and piles of magazines on my desk that I don’t have time to read.
Because when I’m at my desk, I ’m not in that mode.
And if I could recapture that driving time or the mowing lawn time or the audio only time with Texas Speech, I’d live with the limitations of it.
Okay.
For the Texas Speech, I quite like it in the context of news.
Maybe not in terms of interests or personal interests podcasting about something, but really like for the CNNs of this world.
So it gives the neutral aspects of news.
You said CMM, is that… Yes, or whatever I don’t know.
They do podcasts.
You know, I say the Texas Speech using the Texas Speech technology.
It doesn’t disturb me to really on what… Have you actually listened to Texas Speech stuff? Yes, I have a… On my blog, I mean, all the posts are converted in Texas Speech automatically and you can download it from iTunes.
It’s a read speaker company.
And that does that… And you do use it.
I do use it for news.
I mean, I tried it for myself to see how it works on a technological aspect, but I do use it to listen to news when I’m doing my email or stuff and in the background there’s the Texas Speech, but it’s news article.
So it’s not like having the emotion of a podcast show about a specific topic.
So it would be more neutral usage of voice.
This guy here right in front of you has his hand up about five times.
I remember you having a talk with Jason Calacanis a couple of months ago about a prototype podcaster.
How did this go? Like most things, you know, there’s a lot of talk and not a whole lot of action.
You know, it’s a… He’s doing a new company, I think.
I don’t know exactly what it is that they’re doing.
I don’t think it’s this.
But I guess, you know, I can’t speak for them, but for me my hope was that I would just, like, we talk about it a lot and that as a result somebody would do it, you know.
It’s happened before.
I mean, I’ve used this technique in other areas and it ’s worked.
You know, just do enough talking, repeat it often enough , and somebody else figures it out.
I mean, Josh asked, “Well, why doesn’t Intel do it?” Well, so he says he’s going to go back and he’s going to ask why Intel isn’t doing it.
You know, maybe half a dozen other people will do it or who knows.
Sooner or later somebody is going to take a fresh approach at this.
You know, I hope. I hope somebody does.
And if they do, within that moment comes, let’s hope they do a Google search and that the ideas that we’ve generated will help them in some way.
You know, if somebody wants to start a company to do this and I could be part of that company, I would be happy to do that.
I won’t start the company myself.
I’ve started companies and, you know, that’s, you know, a pretty amazingly difficult thing to do.
And I am good at what I do.
Starting companies is not one of the things that I’m good at.
So, you know, so, I mean, I’m saying that on something that’s being recorded.
So maybe somebody will listen to this and say, “Oh, you know, these are good ideas.
Maybe we need to work with these guys, you know. " Yeah, Mike. Oh, five minutes? Really? Wow, that went fast.
Yeah, he hasn’t spoken yet.
By the way, you can say your name if you want.
I should have said that at the outset.
I didn’t pick on you in particular if you want to say your name.
My name’s Stephen.
So I’ve been focused a lot on audio podcasts, but I was going to see how your thoughts are on the perfect video podcast.
No, no, how are your ideas on the perfect video podcast? I guess I think the market for the handheld video podcast player is just not there.
Whereas that device has to be something that’s more connected to your usual experience, our usual, you know, video experience, your TV and the like.
Because I think I see video podcasts as a long shot, potentially being the olacart cable that we’ve always wanted, where you might, if enough of the big broadcasters, go that way.
Well, I have a bunch of things to say about that if you want.
What? They’ll have to hear them.
Well, one is that I bought a video iPod.
What? I’m sorry, did you want to say that? He wanted me to tell you that I ’m from Apple.
Pardon me? He wanted me to tell you that I ’m from Apple.
Oh, you’re from Apple? Well, good.
I’m not on the iPod team.
That’s all right.
I’m going to talk about Apple products, so you’ll be very happy about that.
I bought a video iPod, found that it doesn’t really do the, it doesn’t work.
It’s not its fault.
The problem is that I was very optimistic about it, right? I took it with me on an airplane, put five movies on it .
And what I found out first is that holding the damn thing like this while you’re watching a movie, your arm gets really tired after the first 20 minutes.
And there’s no damn way to put the thing down because it slides all over the place, right? So I did manage to get all the way through a movie that way.
And then I found, and my assumption, I hadn’t even thought about it, was, oh, it’s going to last the battery life.
It’s going to be much better on this than it was on my laptop.
My laptop could barely get through one movie.
And iPods can play for, what, 15 hours, right? Before they run out.
Ah, but not when you’re doing video, right? So we’re fucked.
Pardon me.
I shouldn’t have said that.
So yeah, so that didn’t really work.
And I bought an Apple TV because I had to understand what Apple TV was.
And at first I thought, oh, this is not a very good thing, you know, and whatever.
Then I had a flash to understand what it is, and I think it’s brilliant.
I have not used it once.
And it does have to do with video podcasting.
That is what that product is all about, right? And it has this, what’s brilliant about it is it’s an aggregator.
That’s all it is, you know? It just is constantly, I think it’s reading RSS feeds.
And if it’s not, it’s doing something very much like that and just sucking down content.
It’s got this Wi-Fi connection.
You don’t even know what the damn thing’s doing, you know? It’s always getting new movie trailers and new whatever, okay ? And I imagine it can also update itself.
It’s software that way too, right? And so this is one insidious little box sitting there in my kitchen.
And I’m never using it, but God knows someday it’s going to knock on the door and say, “Dave, you might want to try this thing. " It’ll probably send me an email or something like that, right? Well, you can subscribe to all your podcasts and iTunes.
Set it up and then it’ll sync some of it every time.
I know, you weren’t here, I don ’t think you were here at the beginning.
One of the things I said was that I feel that these things should be self-contained.
So that connection, I don’t really feel that comfortable with.
This idea that iTunes is going to do all the work sort of defe ats the whole point of a consumer electronics product.
If you have to have a laptop computer to get something out of it, I don’t quite get that.
You could have solved that problem.
I know you don’t probably work on that team, but it could have been solved with a web application that you use any old computer with to go manage your subscriptions and then that thing would produce an OPML file that it then goes and sucks down and that’s got your subscription list in it.
By the way, that’s the key to the first feature.
It does end up having a really interesting technological solution because at first I thought, how are you going to get the subscriptions into this machine ? That’s going to be the problem.
Well, it’s not really a problem .
The only thing you have to teach it is one URL at the beginning and that’s the URL of where it goes to get its subscription list.
Then what you do is that’s a web app that sits up there and all you have to be able to get to is a web browser somewhere.
See, there’s another one of those fractional words.
This is a big honkin web.
It could be one that runs on your laptop too for that matter .
It comes with the URL of the factory that came from in it, but if it were really a beautifully open device, you could change that.
If you bought the thing from Apple, great, but you don’t have to go to Apple to get your subscriptions .
Of course, 99% of the people would leave it exactly as a chip from the factory, which rewards, you know, that’s why open standards actually work commercially, is because people usually don’t change the defaults, but it’s kind of nice if they can’t, right? So that’s all, hopefully, a bright future.
There’s been some pretty good hacks in the box.
Yeah, but I didn’t buy it because I wanted to hack it because I bought a Mac Mini so that I could do hacking to my heart’s content.
That’s the one that sits underneath my HD, 46-inch HDTV at home, which, you know, like you said, I love it.
It’s wonderful, but it’s not… Video isn’t necessarily something I want to hold in my hand.
It’s something that I like to … You know, these days, I like to revel in its enormity, right? I mean, that’s the beautiful thing about video these days.
Absolutely.
We live in wonderful times for video, I think, you know? I mean, you know what, one of those harmonica holders? They hold the iPod right there.
They have those? Oh, my God.
I just think you could re- purpose that.
That’s actually… Mike, you might want to patent that, you know? Well, until the guy in the seat in front of you leans back.
Well, we must be about done.
I found this very gratifying. I really, really enjoyed this.
I think we all did a great job.
So, we’re done, I think.
So, thank you very much.
(audience applauds)