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Mike Dell Intro

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mikeshuttle

Greetings! I’m Mike Dell and I am very happy to be writing for PodcasterNews.com!

I started podcasting in April of 2005 with a laptop and a $10 stick mic that came with a desktop computer I bought. Needless to say, it sounded like garbage, but I was hooked. That podcast (Mike Dell’s World) is still going on a “once in a while” basis (with a MUCH better sound). I’ve done several other shows that have come and gone. Today I have my main show Podcast Help Desk which is a podcast about podcasting with an emphasis on answering questions about the technology of podcasting with some news, opinion and how-tos thrown in there as needed.

I also work with RawVoice Inc. (Parent company of Blubrry.com and Techpodcasts.com) as the tech support guy. I really enjoy working with other podcasters on the geeky side of the Podcast world.

My focus on PodcasterNews.com will be to cover the technology side of the podcast space. I plan on writing about new products, new versions of old products and services around the podcasting world. I will give my opinion, good or bad when something new comes out and will re-visit some of the old standards along the way.

If you have something you want me to take a look at, you can contact me on twitter (@mgdell) or email mike [at] mikedell.com

Two Principles to Building a Successful Podcast

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This October I will celebrate Geek News Central’s 10th anniversary and my one-thousandth episode. Throughout the past decade, I have enjoyed watching podcasting take off and I am proud to be an integral part of its growth. My success with my own show is a direct result of practicing what I preach and following two principles each and every episode.

First I want to provide some background. When I started GNC I did so with an explicit goal to have the show profitable in 24 months, and to be a full-time podcaster when I retired from the Navy in October 2007.

My initial focus was exposure and profitability, which resulted in me launching a tech network in January 2005, writing the first podcast book, “Podcasting: Do-It-Yourself Guide,” released in May 2005 through Wiley Publishing, GoDaddy sponsoring my show in July 2005 and doing the first multishow network sponsorships in August 2005. All this led to the formation of RawVoice / Blubrry.

There are many ancillary stories that go with each of the above events, so while all of that was happening I remained focused on two principles for my podcast.

1. Deliver value to my audience each and every episode, respecting their time, have fun doing it and, most importantly, maintain my integrity by being 100 percent open and honest.
2. Administratively owning, controlling and building my brand.

While Principle No. 1 is obvious, I want to give you top level insights on why owning, controlling and building your brand is critical.

The obvious thing in owning and controlling your brand is perception. If a listener cannot find you on the Web, and or your show is buried on some third-party site, you have a strike against you. Today’s listener will question whether you’re serious and worthy of her or his time.

The solution is that you must have a permanent Web presence that you own and/or control. The first thing to do that is to buy a .com and put up a WordPress site. Invest in some graphics and give your site the flair and personality “you” choose, not someone else’s vision. Invest time in your site making it a valuable destination for your audience and future audience.

For nearly 10 years my audience has come to GeekNewsCentral.com to get the latest tech news and most recent episodes. It is the main hub. I syndicate my show externally, but all links lead back to my site, my brand and my content.

The second thing is never, ever allow anyone to control your RSS feed. This is your intellectual property. You do not need FeedBurner and you do not need to give third parties control of your feed. I have been evangelizing this since the beginning. My RSS feed URL on my site has not changed in 9 plus years.

I am sure some get sick of me saying this, yet for many who did not listen, they often tell me later “I should have followed your advice.” By having your own .com / website you can easily control your brand, feed and grow content which will be indexed by search engines..

Third, choose wise alliances. Put up your defenses when you hear the word exclusive coming out of anyone’s month. Exclusive often means loss of control.

There is no way I would ever sign an exclusivity agreement, and those we work with are not asked to either. It is one of the primary principles of my company and my show. If you are thinking of doing so, here are the things that I would consider a minimum requirement for exclusivity:

  • Guaranteed minimum monthly revenue
  • 30-day termination clause
  • Opt-out rights for inappropriate advertisers
  • Advertising contract transparency, aka auditable on demand
  • Revenue share percentage
  • 100-percent show ownership

 

There is significant history for me saying this, we have seen several examples where content creators have lost their show and audiences, are forced to run inappropriate advertising, given gag orders, and a host of other really nasty stuff. Always seek a lawyer to review any exclusive contracts.

Today, I speak worldwide on new media, I hold podcasting bootcamps for corporations, and do consulting and interact with podcasters, advertisers and everyone in between on a daily basis. But in the end, the two principles above have been the difference between the success or failure of my show.

I want you to grow your show and have fun doing it. Building a successful show is a lot of work, so stack the deck in your favor by following the two principles above.

Finally, I hope you will tune into the New Media Show and get great insights from successful podcasters. Everyone has something to share; my goal and that of co-host Rob Greenlee is to provide you with new ideas. We think it is the most insightful show in the podcasting space, and we do it just for you. Check us out at NewMediaShow.com.

Justin.TV Pulls the Plug Out From Under Users

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Justin.tv, the live streaming service which started in 2007, has abruptly pulled the plug on it’s service today. With no warning or notification and no way for users to access their account or any videos they may have had, people are rightfully pissed.

Many podcasters and video podcasters used the site for live streaming and for archiving shows. Leaving them with their virtual pants down and having to move to other services like UStream, Livestream or Google Hangouts/Youtube Live.

Back in February JTV officially became Twitch Interactive. Twitch being a primarily video game centric streaming service while JustinTV was for everything else. A lot of content streamed was copyrighted material, that no one seemed to care was being streamed. If you wanted to watch 24/7 of Futurama, it was there. It’s not clear if this has anything to do with the sudden shutdown, but more likely it has something to do with rumors of Google purchasing Twitch for $1 billion.

If it is a Google move, it’s not hard to imagine the search giant wants people to use Hangouts or Youtube.

If this is another move by Google, it’s another public-infuriating one. Google seems to be becoming notorious for creating bad PR for itself as of late. With the G+ experiment and the debacle/laughable Google Glass program, as well as all the NSA business, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of things to be excited about when people mention the “G” word.

Whatever the reason, it seems the 7-year-old service is no more. Their website explains all APIs and accounts are gone. There is a video (hosted on Vimeo, btw) saying goodbye, and some FAQ’s for people wondering what happens next (though there doesn’t seem to be much as far as answers go, other than “So long, thanks for all the fish.” )

Twitch is allowing users to transfer their user names from Justin.tv by filling out this snazzy form (hosted on Google Docs) before Sept. 5, 2014.
More info can be found at Justin.TV

Digging Deep into Mobile Podcast Statistics

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Summer is here and we’re all headed out and about, enjoying the sun. With children out of school, many of us will be going on summer vacations and will be mobile more than ever. Five years ago, June, July and August meant a slow-down period for podcast listenership. That’s not the case anymore because folks no longer need to be at home to download a podcast and sync it to listen. The summer drop in listeners has largely been mitigated by better connectivity.

Today, I am going to give you some global statistics on how media is being consumed — specifically on mobile devices — and where apps break out. I will also touch on the players out there that do not allow us to count them.

I want to emphasize that your show might not be tracking as I outline below; each show is a little different and will likely have a different top 10 depending on where they are telling their audience to go access the show. My show, Geek News Central, still tracks heavier on Web consumption because my blog has new non-podcast content on it daily.

In almost all cases, though, here is how global distribution looks today from top to bottom:

1. Podcatchers
2. Mobile Applications
3. Mobile Phone Web Browsers
4. Web Browsers
5. Tablet Web Browsers
6. Unknown Agent
7. TV / Set-Top Boxes

I am not going to focus on the actual platforms today, but I will say that because of the dominance of Windows iTunes users, the number of Windows users consuming podcasts is nearly three to one.

But lets look real close at the mobile side. Sadly there are a number of app developers out there that do not provide what we call a “user agent.” Every time a file download / stream request is made, the user agent (aka the actual program that is making the request) does not identify itself. Apps such as those produced by Libsyn / Spreaker cannot be measured; thus they get no credit and are either counted as unknown or get lumped into iOS or Android.

Although we are not able to classify the app, we can usually tell if it falls into the mobile category.
Here are the top 10 mobile clients / apps as of May 2014.

1. iPhone 33.5%
2. Podcast for iOS 31.5%
3. Android Mobile 8.7%
4. iPad 7.0%
5. Stitcher for iOS 4.3%
6. Downcast for iOS 3.1%
7. Beyondpod for Android 2.5%
8. CFNetwork (iOS Apps) 2.0%
9. Stitcher for Android 1.7%
10. Chrome (Mobile) 1.4%

The Top 10 Apps make up 95.7 percent of all mobile downloads in May from a pool of 63,152,570 mobile downloads. The graph below is the money-shot showing you the 30 or so mobile apps / devices we track and the dramatic roll off.

stats3

The 20 or so remaining apps we track collectively had 4.3 percent of the of downloads for May, so the bottom 20 have a lot of growth potential.

As you can see, mobile apps are accounting for a lot of listens, and even though there are more +Android listeners worldwide, the Android community is largely missing. So if you are looking for growth in your show, you need to start promoting more Android apps and dedicating some how-tos on your website to attract more Android listeners.

Next month we will dig deeper into global stats. My team is dedicated to providing the most comprehensive statistics data in the podcasting space. Start using our free stats at Blubrry.com today. See you next month Todd.

Auphonic Goes Free-mium

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Auphonic broke the news yesterday that their service is no longer entirely free. While they’ve had a downloadable version of their software available for €69 since February, but for the first time since their launch two years ago, their online service now comes at a price.

Auphonic is an invaluable tool for podcasters. It allows audio files to be automatically leveled, topped and tailed and many other features. So what will happen now it is no longer free?

Well, that depends how much you use it. If your podcast is a weekly release of under 30 minutes, then you probably don’t have to worry about it since the first two hours a month are free for all users.

If you want to use it any more than that, then you’ve got two options (not included the one-time cost to download their software) Either buy recurring credits starting at €9 for nine hours per month, or buy one-time credits that last until you use them up, they start at €9 for five hours.

So what else do we need to know? Well, Auphonic is an incredible service for those that use it, sometimes it’s like a magic button that just tidies up your podcast in no time, and now they need some support, well €1 per hour seems like a pretty reasonable rate and something that most podcasters would easily be able to afford. If you don’t think so then let them know. It’s always tough to gauge how a new product might be accepted into the market so help out the services that help us by dropping them a line.

-Jackson Rogers, OzPodcasts

The Shortest Podcast

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Podcasts are such a varied medium. There’s very few rules or conventions defining what a podcast should be. There’s plenty of trends, so many podcasts are improvised group discussion, many have a specific niche to focus on, but the trends in terms of podcast length are all over the place.

Some podcasts are 20 minutes, some 45, some aim for an hour an episode, many go for 90 minutes and there’s even a healthy number that push three, four and five hours per episode. As someone who often finds themselves giving advice to aspiring podcasters, I usually tell new podcasters that they should aim to make their episodes no longer than it takes their listeners to listen to between episodes. This assumes that they’ve got other stuff going on in their day and other podcasts to listen to also. The bigger podcasters like Adam Carolla can afford to put out 90+ minutes five times a week because he has a dedicated fan base, but for your average podcaster, that kind of quantity is going to see their listeners miss episodes because other attentions take priority.

So that’s my rule for the maximum length of a podcast, but lately I’ve been struggling with finding a similar formula for the minimum length of a podcast. In theory it shouldn’t matter, in fact brevity could help you by making your podcast the go-to filler podcast for short listens. This has the flip side risk that your content lacks depth and therefore interest. It’s a tough line to walk, but recently I took the plunge when I fell in love with an incredible app that is driven by short form content.

For most non-Australian readers, if I mention the Omny personal radio app, you might not be familiar with it, they’re still growing and are slowly launching in new international markets. It comes from Melbourne-based 121cast, the makers of SoundGecko. Omny is a player that scrolls between short podcasts (under 10 minutes) music from your own library, music streaming services and also reads out events from your calendar, weather reports and more. All of this combines to make a highly personal radio experience.

When I discovered this app, I was preparing to launch my short-form podcast The Forgetting Curve. I later made an edited version of another of my podcasts to fit it in with the Omny format. I was nervous at the time about stepping outside of my 30-45 minutes an episode comfort zone, but with a tool such as Omny there, basically providing a shuffle button for podcast content, we have found the way to make short podcasts competitive with longer content.

If Omny is not yet available in your local App Store, then get in touch with them and tell them you’re keen to try it. I’d also highly recommend experimenting with the length of your podcasts. Edit a highlights episode regularly, or just segment your content to allow your listeners to fit you in here and there. Give your audience options and see what kind of length they prefer.

by Jackson Rogers

The Holy Grail of Podcast Statistics Listener Listen Percentages

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As promised, let’s talk about a topic I brushed on last month while I dug into the nitty-gritty of podcast statistics data: Listener-listen percentages, the holy grail of podcast statistics data.

By looking at the raw data of the media server logs, we can now calculate exactly how much of an individual media file was delivered to a listener. With a great number of podcast listeners simply clicking “play now,” versus downloading the file first, oftentimes the entire media file is not delivered.

When you click “play now” on most devices, the media is delivered to you in chunks, aka the infamous Byte Serving. Byte Serving is essentially — without getting too deep — how Apple and other mobile providers send you the media in pieces instead of downloading the entire file at once. Depending on your Internet connection and a lot of other variables, a 100 mb file could be broken up into 100 chunks on one request and 500 the next.

So if you listen to 15 minutes of a 30 minute podcast before clicking “stop,” there are many chunks / minutes of the podcast media file that have not yet been served to you. With this data we are now able to get an exact percentage of a file downloaded.

We can stitch those chunks back together and tell exactly how much, how little, or whether the file was served in it’s entirety. We have detailed data on each and every media file request.  It is pretty neat when we can see that a listener scrubs forward to, let’s say, the 10 minute mark and starts listening there instead of the beginning.

By now you can see where I am headed. The media delivery percentages really tell an incredible listener engagement story. To do this it takes a huge amount of processing to stitch, calculate and build sensible reports for our corporate clients. This data then allows them to do a lot of cool things. Here are a few:

*Make programming changes based on trends showing when an audience bounced out.
*Determine peak listening for ad placement before drop off.
*Provide accurate billing to advertisers.

One of our vendors had a show that lost about 80 percent of its audience each episode around the 23 minute mark. The producers knew that at that point in their program was a segment change. Upon removal of that segment, nearly their entire audience kept listening through to the 45 minute mark.

In another show, the audience scrubbed up — or jumped ahead — to about the 5 minute mark before they started listening. The show hosts revamped the beginning of their show and advertised the new change at the 7 minute mark, and regained the audience at the intro.

I want to be very clear here: This gives our clients inferred data on what is happening with each and every episode, no one to date is providing a signal that an app has been closed or the listener hit stop.  An assumption that they hit stop can be made, but may not always be the case.

The bottom line is that the listening session ended. If they come back later and pick up where they left off, we have other techniques that allow us to account for that action as well.

Simply watching the trending lines of the show’s audience over time has allowed our clients to tweak their shows, gain advertising revenue by better placement, and use a high level of sophistication to understand exactly what is happening with their listening audience.

For podcasters that host their podcast media with Blubrry, we will have an option to opt-in for similar data in their stats later this year, along with some yet-to-be announced data sets that will enable us to “close the loop.”

My goal in these first three articles has been to educate you that measuring media accurately truly is rocket science and we are pretty pleased to be the scientist behind that rocket. My team lives and breathes this everyday, and we hope that all networks and podcasters alike will trust us as tens of thousands of podcasters, networks and radio stations already do in their podcast media measurement.

Next month I want to switch gears and talk about mobile and the trends we are seeing in the utilization of mobile devices and even apps that are trending in the space. I will also cover some of the frustrations we have in tracking some of the mobile apps being used by podcasters today.

At Blubrry, we want to work together as a community to make sure that there are solid, reliable statistics and no misleading numbers in the podcasting space. If all podcasters utilized trusted solutions the space would be much better off in the long run.

Send your comments and questions to ceo@rawvoice.com

Catch my personal podcast @ GeekNewsCentral.com and tune in to our weekly New Media Show co-hosted with Rob Greenlee at NewMediaShow.com.

Lessons Learned from A Failed Podcast Event

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This week, I hosted a podcast event. Australia’s a big country and many of the podcasters can be spread far and wide. One of my main goals in running OzPodcasts.com.au is to give podcasters a reason to come together and build a community of Australian podcasters. On Wednesday I held a trivia night for podcasters and podcast fans to get together, have a bit of fun, and hopefully, make some new friends. This is only the second time I attempted this, so we booked a small room in a bar, we put tickets online through Eventbrite and we sold about half of them. It’s a small room though, so it feels full pretty quickly.

Three people showed up.

Needless to say, I was disappointed. There were four people on the stage including myself, there were three people in the audience. We also had four walk-ins who collectively left after 20 minutes. I was ready to pack up and go home half way through, but everyone convinced me to push on, if nothing else, we were recording and making a great podcast for those who didn’t make it. I was gutted, but they were right. We carried on, we took turns on stage, everyone got involved, everyone had fun. As far as the venue is concerned, the night was very probably a failure. As far as my goals were concerned, I think there’s a lot of positives and a lot to be learned for anyone thinking of hosting their own live podcast.

It’s not about you. Although I didn’t intend for my event to be “The OzPodcasts Show”, that’s probably how it looked from my promotional material. The goal for the night was for local podcasts and local podcast fans to get together, have some fun, communicate and collaborate. On that front, for the people that came, it worked perfectly. The feedback I got was that I was the only person who understood this goal. I had billed it as “Pod vs. Pod” where two teams representing two podcasts compete in a trivia competition. Which it was, but the community element of the night, the driving force, was absent from my promotion. Instead of trying to entice an audience with promises of an epic podcast battle, I should have made it about the audience.

Even if your podcast is popular enough that you can draw a crowd on the promise of a live recording, there’s still a valuable lesson in engaging your audience. Imagine if you get up on stage, do your podcast as normal and go home, why would anyone come out to watch your lips moving? Make the audience a part of the experience as much as possible. Take the opportunity to make new friends. The event isn’t to feed your ego or boost your fan base, you’re there to entertain the audience, the ego boost is just a bonus.

Balance is key. Having run this event twice now, one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that getting the structure and timing right is a tricky job. The first time I had a few performer constraints that messed with my run sheet and threw off the dynamic of the night, this time I tried to be tighter on my rules, but if anything I went too far. The open, collaborative nature of the event called for serious finesse in terms of structure. As the host, I wanted to drive things forward, but I also recognised that if the room collectively decides to take the discussion in a different direction, I shouldn’t force them back on to my predetermined path, I should pull my path closer to what the audience wants. This isn’t going to be true for every event, but in structuring the event, think about what you’re trying to achieve and write your run sheet accordingly.

Plan for the outcome, not the input. The other lessons all lead back to this. All my effort and planning went into what the event would be, how it would work and who would be involved. Although I always had the community outcome in the back of my mind, I never connected the dots. My promotional material missed the mark, because I described what the audience would see, instead of what they’d be talking about on the way home. My schedule was off because I was planning for what my role was, instead of planning what the audience wanted to hear.

Harrison and Phillipe on stage.
Harrison and Phillipe on stage.

Here’s my advice to you, should you be planning a live podcast event: start with the outcome. When you audience goes home, how do you want them to feel? What do you want them to be talking about? Work towards that goal. I missed that step in putting on my podcast event, but I have learned my lesson for next time. So I didn’t get the audience numbers I wanted, but everyone had fun and made some new podcast friends. Two cool people that came and are worth checking out are Phillipe Perez, and Harrison Engstrom. Follow them on Twitter and check out their respective podcasts.

Anyone in Melbourne, Australia in late June should keep their ear to the ground. I’m taking the lessons learned from this event and applying them to another event next month. Follow @OzPodcasts on Twitter for more details about this and other news from the Australian podcast community.

-Jackson Rogers
OzPodcasts

Unique listeners more important than you think!

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This article originally appeared in issue #2 of Podertainment Magazine
Author:  Todd Cochrane CEO RawVoice Parent company of Blubrry.com

Hey folks! We’re going to get into the nitty-gritty of podcast statistics data. We know how confusing some stats can be, this is where I break it down for you.

I want to share a little history with you before I get into the topic at hand. I started my own podcast in October 2004 and as near as I have been able to figure it, my show was one of the first 50 or so podcasts to launch. In the early days, we were not worried about stats — our biggest challenge was bandwidth. There were no so-called unlimited bandwidth services.

Those hurdles were quickly overcome, and within a year we started focusing on who was listening, where and how. Today we have vibrant data that can tell us exactly how many people listened on the Web, used an app, or kicked back and watched on a set-top-box. Tracking the all of that now is an afterthought.

Two questions remain: Did they really listen and For how long?  I will share with you insights no one has to date revealed, data that is now 100 percent capable of being measured and will benefit you as you grow your show and your audience.

In a related article I provided some statistics that raised a lot of questions. We figured that might happen. This time, I have refined and broken down the data into chunks that are comprehensive.

With the RawVoice/ Blubrry podcast statistics reporting that we do for our clients, on every download / stream request, or “hit,” we analyze in great detail whether the hit should be counted as a download. With this precision analysis we can see out of range trends and account for that, as percentages fluctuate daily, show to show, episode to episode. With our proprietary algorithms we provide consistent podcast download totals regardless of what these percentages are on any given day.

Given a random snapshot in November 2013, of 5,606,161 hits for media files ranging in size, we determined:

p3

Looking at the 55.9 percent of hits that were not countable, 22.4 percent ip duplicate requests, mostly caused by iTunes (iTunes may send one request to get the file size, then a separate to download the file). The remaining 33.6 percent stem from a variety of issues, such as invalid HTTP status code, empty byte range request size, non-existing files, invalid file name (non-podcast media), etc.

When we see partial download requests, we take the time to assemble the bytes requested to determine how much of the file was downloaded. In some cases, we will only see one or two requests from the same unique visitor, and in other cases we see hundreds of small byte range requests from a unique visitor. Factoring in the byte-request data we know exactly what portion of each file is requested, allowing us to calculate how much of the file was downloaded. Of the 19.2 percent partial file downloads they make up small segments aka repeats of portion of a file already counted we do not count those partials as they have been accounted for in the other confirmed downloads.

We reported 24.2 percent as counted downloads (underlined totals), with 22.5 percent being from unique IP addresses, leaving only 1.7 percent of the hits accounting for two or more downloads. The end result shows us that two or more downloads coming from the same IP address is very low.

Any given day, the percentage breakdown of countable and not-countable downloads fluctuates based on many factors. If you rely solely on download hits, you will find that your numbers will not be consistent and will not reflect your true download total or audience size.

It is important to note that unique IP address data is critical validation data for podcast media downloads. Based on the results above, we know that the final download / stream total will always be higher than and relatively close to the unique IP address total. We (Blubrry/RawVoice) knew this back in 2005 when we started measuring podcast downloads, and as you see from our small snapshot from November, it still holds true today.

If you are concerned about being audited or need accountable details to meet the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, make sure your podcast measurement is taking the necessary steps to calculate the true download total.

Here is where I am going to get up on my soap box for just a moment. If you are counting your downloads with anything other than a trusted podcast statistics platform, you are likely over-reporting your total audience size. It’s complicated stuff. Get the unique IP count correct by throwing out the garbage and you will find that Unique IP is a large indicator of true audience size. This is evident, as we’ve noted above, because we do not see Unique IPs coming back very often for the same file.

In a future article, I will translate the percentages into describing what we are seeing in an actual listening rate. With Byte Range being used nearly exclusively in the space, we can tell you based on server data just how long they are listening to your show.

If you desire your podcast network to get on track and have media statistics that keep you honest, feel free to reach out to me at ceo@rawvoice.com. We host and measure the biggest podcast networks in the space

Podcasting Will Never Die

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Podcasting will never die. That’s a bold statement to open with, but in it’s true to say the soul of podcasting is a hardier beast than many give it credit for. There’s been an awful lot of talk lately about the patent trolls threatening the future of podcasting, but before that all the podcast chatter centered around the three words “podcasting is back”. The die-hard podcast fans, myself included, will tell you it never left, but it’s fair to say that podcasting is bigger now than ever before.

So why are we threatened by patent litigation? If it came to pass that syndication of audio through a single URL, i.e. an RSS feed, was a violation of a patent and infringements should either be ceased or be prepared to pay the price, would this spell the death of podcasting? Take a moment to imagine all the podcasters out there right now. Imagine the passion it takes to record a regular podcast for little-to-no gain and more often than not, at a personal loss. Imagine the industries that are seeing a whole new market for their microphones, headphones, software and apps. Imagine the audience that has seen a whole new content stream from their favourite creators mouths to their ears spring up with rich, regular content. Now turn all of that off.

Just take a moment to think of those passionate podcasters, who tomorrow are unable to distribute their podcast to their fans. Imagine those microphone manufacturers who saw that potential industry disappear overnight. Think of the world where lovers of on-demand audio, are suddenly left without their beloved voices and their preferred medium. Now the real test, imagine a world when one of those people, cut off from podcasting as we know it, doesn’t find a way around it.

The problem of the patents is a uniquely American phenomenon. Although I will admit that I would be inconvenienced a little by the worst case scenario, the patent would not affect podcasters operating outside of the US. Theoretically, based on past events, anyone podcasting from inside the US, using a non-US host could still fall afoul of the troll, but the most obvious workaround for the rest of the world is to switch to a hosting provider based internationally (which would be a boom for whoever is first at bat).

There’s way more to it than that though. Although I love to sing the praises of Australian podcasts, I won’t pretend that the biggest producers and consumers do not reside somewhere between the Pacific and the North Atlantic. So, what do all the American podcasters do? Well, find a way around it. I’m not going to pretend to understand on what basis the podcast patent is supposed to restrict usage, but let’s look back a decade or so and you tell me what podcasting was then. Go back a couple more and tell me your experience of the internet. Look how much it’s changed in such a short time. Do you think podcasting will be unchanged ten years in the future? Try 20 years, will you even recognise podcasting to be anything like the delivery method we use today?

Not to say that we shouldn’t fight the patent troll, obviously many people and their business would be hurt by an unwelcome decision, preventing that is a worthy cause. It should be considered, however, that should we end up with victory, how long will we continue to use the disputed medium?

A conversation I had with some Australian podcasters recently was discussing the dilemma of breaking your podcast’s release schedule. In theory, with the syndication format, this won’t be an issue, as your listeners don’t need to tune in at a certain time, they’ll automatically receive your content when it’s published, but in practice that’s not how it works. Any podcasting coach will tell you to be regular and be consistent, you will create a habit in your listeners and you will grow your audience. So then, the syndication is not the factor that we desire. It’s the ease of access for our audience.

Take, for example, YouTube. Which bears little resemblance to podcasting in it’s delivery method, but it’s far-and-away more popular. Why? Because your average podcast listener could care less about RSS feeds and the details of the patent that is being fought for so strongly, they just want to hear your voice. As long as you are producing quality content then you will be heard. That is why podcasting will never die. You can take away our RSS feeds, but you can never take our content. Podcasting will find a way. As long as there’s a microphone and someone who wants to listen to your opinions, there will always be podcasting.

Joshua Liston, a serious name in Australian podcasting has recently launched his sixth concurrent podcast, Social Audio Think Tank, exploring why content is king and the tech stuff should come second. Full disclosure, I’m a co-host, but he’s the driving force behind it, so check out his other podcasts as well.

By Jackson Rogers of OzPodcasts.