Broadcasters Beware
Laporte, who was working as a radio host at the time, happened to have a microphone and recorder with him. He turned it on and recorded 20 minutes of idle chatter about the day’s expo and developments in the technology industry in general. He posted the recording to his website.
Within a matter of days, thousands of people had downloaded the audio file. A couple of months later, egged on by eager listeners, Laporte launched This Week in Tech, or Twit for short.
Twit 9available at twit.tv) quickly became the world’s most popular podcast. The show, aimed at people interested in developments in the technology industry, is recorded and distributed every Sunday. Among the regular panelists is the provocative John C Dvorak, whose columns in PC Magazine in the 1990s became essential reading among the geek set.
Wired magazine once called him “computer journalism’s most famous columnist”. And, as regular Twit listeners will attest, Dvorak has lost none of his razor-sharp wit.
But I digress. The Twits are at the forefront of a relatively new concept that is having a big impact on the media world. Podcasting – a portmanteau of Apple’s “iPod” and “broadcasting” – allows Internet users to subscribe to audio and video “broadcasts” online. These are then automatically downloaded as they become available for later playback on PCs or devices such as the iPod. More importantly, as Laporte demonstrated, anyone with a PC, a microphone and a broadband connection can become a broadcaster.
Though still relatively new – podcasting started to take off only in 2004 – there is already anecdotal evidence that it’s having an impact on radio listenership figures as people tune out in favour of material they have downloaded. Significantly, most new cars support iPods and other digital music players.
Video didn’t kill the radio star, as British pop group The Buggles famously claimed in 1979. Could the Internet succeed where television failed? Probably not. But, much as online weblogging, or blogging, has changed many people’s reading habits, podcasting could change what they listen to and when.
I still tune in to the radio but I consume much less of it than I used to. When I’m in my car, I either listen to music on my iPod or, more often than not, I switch over to Twit or some other podcast. One of my favourites is Coverville (thanks to colleague Toby Shapshak for the heads-up). Coverville is a thrice-weekly, 30-minute music podcast featuring, you guessed it, cover versions. It sounds corny but it’s engaging. Find it at coverville.com.
Like blogging, one of the problems with podcasting is that there are so many to choose from. There are tens of thousands of podcasts and many of them are awful. Filtering the crud was once an art form. Fortunately, there are now a number of websites that categorise podcasts and list the most popular. Check out Yahoo Podcasts (podcasts.yahoo.com), Odeo (odeo.com) and Pod-Nova (podnova.com).
Sadly, there are relatively few SA podcasts probably because Telkom charges outrageous fees for broadband and enforces punitive bandwidth caps on its users. Nevertheless, there are a few local podcasts worth checking out. You’ll find some of them at podcast.co.za.
It would be naïve of SA media companies to dismiss podcasting as a niche. The next generation of cellphones will include hard drives that will allow people to store gigabytes of data. Once consumers start downloading podcasts directly over cellphone networks, the technology will have gone mainstream. And the Twits will have taken over the world.
Inet-Bridge
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