Podcasts are simple audio files delivered via RSS. There is no streaming of the media, podcasts are downloaded to the user's computer in the background, allowing the files to be transferred to portable digital music players (hence the name.) The idea is that podcast content is perfect for listening to in a car or on the subway when you just don't feel like NPR.

Ev is very excited about the possibilities for grassroots radio production through podcasts.

He's also seeing great interest in his new company, but that is frankly less interesting to him than the opportunity to push the podcast form further out into the mainstream.

"It's not that I'm not interested in the business model, startup thing," Ev said as we sat in a corner at Mission bar Medjool, "but the bigger picture is let's make it easier, let's take it the next level and a business will come out of that."

While podcasting is getting a lot of hype and a lot of media attention right now, the actual uptake is still incredibly small. Even among bloggers the number of people actively listening to podcasts is estimated to be tiny. "Podcasting is so nascent right now," Ev said. "Lots of people have done great work in writing software and defining the medium and its evolved much faster than blogging did -- but it’s still not nearly something you can point your mom to. That's what really interests me -- making it accessible and easy and enabling distribution to and from non geeks."

Odeo consists of three modes -- listen, subscribe, create. The idea is to allow users to accomplish all three of those goals within the web browser. Odeo operates as an aggregator, audio player and bare-bones recording studio. When you login, you can play specific shows in the browser, add individual podcasts to a queue or subscribe to "channels" (that is, feeds).

"We want to take as much audio content as there is and make it easy to find and easy to point to and easy to listen to," he said.

Creating podcasts has been the least ready-for-prime-time aspect of the medium, because users have to figure out how to record and edit digital audio, learn about production techniques, upload files, and generate RSS feeds.

At the base level, Odeo offers the functionality of Audioblogger, the voicemail-based recording system created by Noah Glass, Ev's partner in Odeo. With "audblog," you can do personal or conference call recording by just making a phone call.

The real sweet spot, though, is Odeo Studio, a simple recording option in Odeo, which offers a blend of "higher quality sound and more production value but without the difficulties of learning a professional audio package."

In Odeo Studio, you can use built-in sound effects or record or upload your own. There's no mixing facility. The mix happens when you play various effects during live recording. Hitting "publish" adds the recording to a feed and uploads everything to Odeo's servers.

Since Odeo's concept is to be the one-stop finding-listening-recording podcast stop, the plan is also to host the audio that users create, which Ev admits is a substantial cost. "We plan to buy bandwidth in bulk."

The business model is three-fold:

• Offer free basic hosting and charge for premium hosting, based on bandwidth usage. "If you're Adam Curry and getting 50,000 downloads a week, we're probably not going to host that for free."

• Sell advertising into popular content (a la radio) with some sort of revenue-sharing arrangement. "We're not going to auto-insert advertising into your content without your permission. We see ourselves as a platform to allow advertisers and content producers to get together." Still, he said, "there may be an option for auto-insertions in the future, "but I want content creators to be happy -- you'll definitely get something for that," such as free hosting.

• Sell premium content. "Audible has shown that a significant audience is willing to pay for non-music digital audio," said Ev, who counts himself a loyal Audible customer. "I think there's a lot of potential in non-book forms as well. There are a lot of things I would be willing to pay to get in audio form even if they're available for free on text form. ... If we can create a critical mass of listeners then we can aggregate the content and make it feasible for content creators to have a revenue stream from content without having to build payment mechanisms, without subscribers having to have accounts at 100 places."

Look for more details on Odeo when Ev speaks at Etech Thursday and screen shots become available.

March 16, 2005 | Permalink | Comment on this post | Tag: Live from Etech
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March 2, 2005

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher.com

By a strange series of links (starting with Scoble's Crossfader post), I see (via Mark May) that ASCAAP has updated its latest internet license to include a reference to podcasts. So podcasters are explictly included among those expected to shell out to play music. If you're not paying up right now, you're out of compliance. (Thus if the Grokster ruling is for MGM, the companies whose products you use to produce those 'casts would be liable for your actions, right?)

Mark figures the bill comes to $750 to performing rights organizations like ASCAAP, $42.50 per track to Harry Fox Agency for "mechanical rights" and a mystery figure you need to negotiate with the labels for "master use license" (they don't have to agree to give you the license either).

(Oh, btw, Crossfader is "a new online educational and collaboration community for electronic artists. Built by artists for artists, Crossfader will help you learn about the tools of trade [sic], promote your style, experience new genres and stay ahead of the technology curve.” Via Greg Yardley.)

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SPONSORWATCH TIBCO TIBCO's First Hardware Delivers Quantum Leap Performance – Changing the Game for Enterprise IT TIBCO Positioned as a Leader for SOA Governance in 2009 Magic Quadrant TIBCO Contributes General Interface to the Open Source Community Comments Gerry Corbett on Tech Awards For Humanity: "Cash Prizes" Galore And Al Gore's Meaningless Speech . . . And Amazing Laureates! Last time I checked, Al Gore was charging $175,000 for a speech. Tom Foremski on The Death Of The Search Algorithm? Techmeme Has Six Editors I appreciate your tireless work Atul. Atul Arora on The Death Of The Search Algorithm? Techmeme Has Six Editors Tom - you are right - I shouldn't be so pedantic about it. Gabe seems to online 24x7 so one could also argue he counts for more than one person. And thanks for you flattering comments about me in the article. Cheers. Marshall Clark on The Death Of The Search Algorithm? Techmeme Has Six Editors Personally, I think we're moments away from a paradigm shift in how we rank and filter the web. Integration of social media annotation data into search algorithms will effectively turn every one of us into an editor of the web. Eliminating the the need for manual tweaks and human editors. This concept is the focus of my earlier PageRank for People article (http://bit.ly/128U9V) and features prominently in the amazing algorithms that OneRiot (http://bit.ly/1845IQ) is cur Joseph Kingsbury, Text 100 on SNCR Research: Social Media IS Influencing Business Decisions Definitely agree, always good to see these studies and they also seem to be getting more sophisticated/insightful which is positive. Your point about the middle management layer is an interesting one. Could certainly see how that would make sense. Thanks for the post, it inspired a post over on our blog and some conversation here. Joseph, Text 100 Tom Foremski on The Death Of The Search Algorithm? Techmeme Has Six Editors Marshall: Yes, you are right, PageRank is a human-aided system but the harvesting of that knowledge was done by machine, but is this is no loger good enough and requires direct supervision by humans? That seems to be what's happening... Tom Foremski on The Death Of The Search Algorithm? Techmeme Has Six Editors Thanks Atul. Gabe said that he and Omer are engaged in editorial duties so it still adds up to 6 but I take your point about them not doing it full time. But I guess this also means that Techmeme more than doubled their editors... Atul Arora on The Death Of The Search Algorithm? Techmeme Has Six Editors Tom - A small correction. I believe the # of editors is 4 (or 4.5 depends if you count Gabe is an editor or tweaks the algorithm) and not 6. I believe Megan was the first editor back in Dec 2008 and then Techmeme announced the addition of three more yesterday Marshall Clark on The Death Of The Search Algorithm? Techmeme Has Six Editors In many ways Google is a human-aided algorithm as well. PageRank leverages human editorial decisions by measuring linking patterns between sites. Similarly the Hilltop algorithm, developed by Krishna Bharat creator of Google News, uses a list of expert documents to refine search rankings. Clearly there's no shame in using human intelligence to refine search results. I suppose the real trick is using others' human intelligence instead of hiring your own. Tom Foremski on The Death Of The Search Algorithm? Techmeme Has Six Editors Ian: I agree that human editors can make Techmeme better. But it won't neccesarily help list other blogs because Techmeme monitors a core set of blogs/news sites and if you are not in it your chances of being mentioned are slim. You make a good point about what happens when they go home for the night - I guess the machine takes over... Ian Lamont on The Death Of The Search Algorithm? Techmeme Has Six Editors I think human editors can improve quality and help frustrated editors (myself included) complaining about why their blogs aren't making it onto TM, but I am curious to see how Techmeme's new setup can be optimized for speedy updates when humans take a lunch break or sign off for the night. That was one area in which the old Techmeme setup and the current Google News setup have excelled. Tom Foremski on SNCR Research: Social Media IS Influencing Business Decisions Joseph, I agree, I'm not surprised but it's good to have some measurement of the effect of social media. The collaborative decision making aspect is interesting and I'd love to see future research explore this aspect further. For example, is it among peers within a group or are all members of a group, regardless of status, taking part? And the middle-age layer, I've noticed anecdotally, that they tend to be very concerned about preserving the status quo and reluctant to try new things - which Joseph Kingsbury, Text 100 on SNCR Research: Social Media IS Influencing Business Decisions I'm not surprised the results of this study reflect the growing influence of social media. What's more interesting, in my opinion, is what seems to be a more fundamental shift toward collaborative decision-making in professional environments. Certainly social media facilitates that but it strikes me as a deeper shift than technology and communication tools. For example, the fact that 'younger' and 'older' professionals are heavier users of social tools than their middle aged counterp Greg Golebiewski on MediaWatch Analysis: Murdoch Will Negotiate Payment For Access To Basket Of Content With GOOG et al Yeah. And, too bad for everyone, because there is enough room to increase the pie, we call www, and thus earn more money, instead of trying to carve out as big a piece of it as possible, often at the expense of others. The latter strategy also brings money, but it is so shortsighted. Tom Foremski on MediaWatch Analysis: Murdoch Will Negotiate Payment For Access To Basket Of Content With GOOG et al Greg, well said. Google has painted itself into a corner and has far fewer options than Murdoch. And it will never get into content creation because that's not its business. Yahoo has tried several times to get into content creation and failed. Silicon Valley companies are server and software based because that's a scalable business. People based companies such as the New York Times have no interest to a Google... Tom Foremski on A Saturday Post: The Internet Devalues Everything It Touches, Anything That Can Be Digitized I totally agree. I think it is a disgrace that Silicon Valley's public schools are often basket cases when they should be showcases. We can't go around saying to the world "we are inventing the future" yet our own communities are so poorly educated and our schools so poorly funded. I'm fed up of super star Silicon Valley CEOs flying to Washington D.C to complain about education yet they won't walk down the street to their local school and help in their communities. Greg Golebiewski on MediaWatch Analysis: Murdoch Will Negotiate Payment For Access To Basket Of Content With GOOG et al I cannot say what Mr Murdoch is planning to do, but I agree that he has a lot stronger hand now than the search engines ever will. Unless, of course, they start creating their own and/or buy 3rd party content, which is unlikely -- that would be against their current business model. More importantly, Murdoch has one more ace in his deck -- he can buy Yahoo (as he has already tried, I think), and turn it into a premium content SE! What Google would be left with to index then, Mr. Reality Check on A Saturday Post: The Internet Devalues Everything It Touches, Anything That Can Be Digitized One more comment to add to this. The US has a H1B Visa program. It was created for a reason - not enough individuals in the US with the right skills. This article from 1989 entitled "US PUPILS FARE POORLY IN MATH, SCIENCE TESTS" shows part of the cause (http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1P2-8106353.html.) 16 years later another article entitled "A fair comparison: U.S. students lag in math and science" (http://www.educationreport.org/pubs/mer/article.aspx?id=7036) in which the US Mr. Reality Check on A Saturday Post: The Internet Devalues Everything It Touches, Anything That Can Be Digitized I agree, value created does not equal the value destruction. Read the examples I provided above. In many cases, the value created is many times more than the value destroyed. This is the case with video, audio, new jobs in India and China, Graphics design, publishing, housing market and much more. Simply look at the examples like www.gizmag.com, which makes more money since it moved to web only than it ever did in the print business - and they no long have to kill trees and polute the Peter Holsgrove on Analysis On Murdoch And Switching Off GOOG: The Dirty Little Secret About Search Engine Traffic... Certainly kicked off a strong debate, which is needed. Firstly, it strikes me that no one has the answers - there is no 'holy grail' and its about testing, trailing and iterating what might work. That, I suggest, is what Murdoch's doing. If your company is split two ways on an approach (for every advocate of the subscription model in news corp, they'll be equal opposing views), send the CEO out - kick up a stir and draw in some qual analysis amongst all the quant stuff you've been doing wi   Silicon Valley Watcher--reporting on the business and culture of disruption. © Tom Foremski 2004 - 2009 Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-noDerivs 2.5. Details of license.