Startup: Podcast Ready - Part 2

February 27th, 2006 • Business, Entrepreneurship + Startups, Technology

Okay, so I made a lot of fun at the folks over at Podcast Ready for the fairly lame flash intro on their site. To their credit, they dropped it and added much more useful information on the site. Still, it was (and is) pretty cryptic and I couldn’t figure out what they actually did or built. But with the attention that they’ve already received, having cryptic information on their site is better than a silly countdown timer.

After going back and forth with Podcast Ready’s CEO, Russell Holliman, he offered me a chance to take a look at their beta product. Because of the nature of their stuff I won’t go into gory details just yet. All of you will get a chance to take a look sometime in March 2006 or so. I will say that the idea is pretty cool and does definitely make using podcasts a lot easier. Since my car radio is busted ($300 to fix the antenna! I’m a student for crying out loud!), I’ve been relegated to listening to CDs or audiobooks in the car. I’ve listened to a handful lately including Freakonomics (highly recommended). But alas, I didn’t have an easy way of getting fresh content every day. Yeah, I could go through the hassle but who has the time. Along comes Podcast Ready!

Now I will say that the product is pretty rough but Russell acknowledges that. Of course, it is a limited availability beta so I’m not complaining too much (at least not publicly, I am to Russell). I think it will get better and should ease the introduction of podcasting to many more potential listeners. Which got me thinking about podcasting and potential businesses (none competitive with Podcast Ready mind you - don’t worry Russell!). There are definitely some areas where new businesses could pop up and I might just try to attack some in my free time (yeah, right after reading a dozen articles to catch up on this week’s schoolwork).

It also got me thinking about satellite radio and the future of radio in general. With the advent of more MP3 capable devices and cheaper and more power efficient Wi-Fi chips (like the Broadcom AirForce chips), how long is it before we have a marrying of these two devices and have shows auto-downloaded to your car when you pull into your garage or up to a gas station? Isn’t it easier (and cheaper) for “radio stations” (however you define that in a on-demand pure digital world) to piggyback off of existing technologies (MP3 and Wi-Fi) instead of inventing and deploying a whole new technology (like HD Radio). As far as I can tell, the only things that you really care about being real-time are news shows (maybe, a lot aren’t real time but just generally specific to the day or part of the day) and weather/traffic information. So does the advent of easier ways to get audio content mean that FM radio will be marginalized (like AM was by FM)? And if this does happen, does it mean that satellite radio may find its niche with truckers but other than that be totally overpriced and non-responsive to user needs? (I’ve never found the argument of being able to listen to the same radio program coast to coast compelling. Who drives coast to coast?).

One last thing. I need to rant about the podcast from APM’s Marketplace. Okay, the point of podcasting is to distribute your material to a wide audience. Need to get paid, fine. Have advertisements. But Marketplace podcasts in two formats - iTunes and Audible format. Okay, I don’t have an iPod (remember, I’m a student but I also refuse to buy Apple stuff - I may have covered this before but if not Coty will prod me into saying why). So I have to use the Audible format. Fine. That’s annoying but fine. I load it up on my Palm pilot (this is my device of many uses since I don’t have an MP3 player). Oh surprise. The podcast is in Audible format 4 which the Palm doesn’t support. Congratulations Marketplace. In your moves to (I think) protect your content, you’ve prevented people from listening to your content. Podcasting (and a lot of other Internet technologies) are about using open standards technologies so that the widest array of folks can use them. But hey, its your content and you can do what you want to with it. That just means I won’t be able to listen to it.

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