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Listen To Podcasts On Any Phone
Michael Arrington
66 comments »
We’ve been testing two new services, Fonpods and Podlinez, that allow users to listen to podcasts directly from any tele…

While it is interesting and easy to listen to a podcast by dialing a phone number, it is not what people would think of doing on a phone. The other thing is that this process does not enable podcast search & discovery, bookmarking in the content for later continuation on the phone, being able to get a call while listening to a podcast and then resume it after the call is over. The other drawback is the potential for getting high audio quality playback on the phone.

I can see a small segment of the market being interested in doing this process by saving podcasts phone numbers in their contact list on the phone like a person, but it is just not a long-term model for meeting the long-term listener needs in a iPod replacement device like many of the new mobile phones are becoming.

This is good for a person who has a extra minutes to use for this or likes to listen on the weekends when minutes are unlimited, but it will not be a long-lived model that will work.

We have not bailed on this space entirely though, and will be releasing a suite of enabling technologies that we built as part of the group platform. One of the tools we built is a universal transcoder that can take any input format (mp3, aac, windows media, real, etc) and convert it to SIP (phone) or MP3 stream (for high fidelity playback). We will probably not release a consumer facing product apart from a demo, but will be making this available to radio stations and other content providers who want to make their content available to any networked device (including legacy phones). We also have a tool that can take live audio from a phone system and rebroadcast it as a live MP3 stream.

Points well taken. Time and energy from a niche podcaster are critical in the early stages to get an audience in an exponentially growing competitive environment. However, people and small businesses have to start somewhere and podcasts plug you into a global audience immediately. Getting ears and eyeballs won’t just happen as you point out because of the need to market (which isn’t cheap) but (persistant) people always seem to find a way and reaching your niche audience through targeted web communities is making it easier to gain a following.

But I never said it would be easy.

I guess in the future I see smaller podcast content producers perhaps banding together to form their own communities with a very targeted audience. This would provide the podcasters with the ability to offer other things like articles, blogs and more social networking features (as you mentioned) while leveraging the draw of a narrowly focused content community.

This in turn could capture the attention of centextually related advertisers and potentially (collectively) fund the podcasters as aggregate.

The mobile phone services offered by podlinez and Fonpods are good examples of tools becoming available for niche podcasters to both spread their content via new platforms as well as gain some monetization for their efforts and help to keep the proverbial lights on.

“The 10%/80% figures you give are irrelevant when you consider that only 1% of US households listen to podcasts. Clearly, the people that are “geeky” enough to listen to podcasts are probably amongst the 10% that have an iPod (or MP3 player). The Nielsen/NetRatings data seems to validate this.”

I think the goal here is to make “podcasts” appealing to the less geeky audience (which outside of the techcrunch community, is far larger audience)

Anthony: The 10%/80% figures you give are irrelevant when you consider that only 1% of US households listen to podcasts. Clearly, the people that are “geeky” enough to listen to podcasts are probably amongst the 10% that have an iPod (or MP3 player). The Nielsen/NetRatings data seems to validate this.

Jughead: There are certainly niches that are not going to be served by big media, but just remember that one of the main reasons they’re not served by big media is that the size of the audience is not big enough to create significant returns, as you already seem to recognize. While there may be niche advertisers that would drool over these listeners, the big advertisers that have a lot to spend are looking for big numbers, because it takes big returns from ad campaigns to impact the bottom line.

We may very well see individuals and companies pop up to serve these niche subjects but I think you underestimate the barriers to entry. There is little barrier to entry to produce a podcast around yoga, for instance, but there are barriers to entry to produce a quality podcast around yoga. The person or company running the podcast has to find somebody that is extremely knowledgable about the subject to commit time to doing the podcast. That person has to have a good voice and personality (ever try listening to a podcast by somebody with a bad voice and dull personality?). Compelling content for the podcast has to be written/produced on a regular basis. An audience has to be acquired, which can be costly if you don’t own a website that already has an audience. And finally, somebody has to target advertisers and close ad deals. When you consider this, the opportunity is a lot less appealing. The best candidates for taking this on are existing websites built around these niches that already have an audience. This drops the cost of listener acquisition considerably and the podcast serves as a source of incremental revenue (hopefully you can sell podcast advertising as part of your existing ad sales efforts). But again, let’s remember that a lot of these very niche websites are run by people that have day jobs or that only make enough to have a decent small business. Podcasting becomes a component of their business, not a standalone venture. Podcasting isn’t very likely to make them millions of dollars, so the opportunity from the standpoint of an entrepreneur or investor is not as significant. If you want to create an online business around organic foods, for instance, it makes sense to provide a variety of content, not just podcasts.

A company that can find a way to create some economy of scale by serving multiple niches, using a single ad sales team, etc. might be able to build a nice business but it’s not going to be easy nor cheap because while the cost of producing quality content has gotten lower, it’s still not zero and the ancillary costs of building an audience and selling advertising are typically underestimated.

All very good points. I can’t argue with people place and time shifting big media content to better accomodate their busy schedules, that is the biggest selling point to podcasting vs mobile TV and even streaming. With streaming I still have to hunt and find (even if the CNN channel is pre-loaded on to my smarphone, I still have to “discover” the streaming content and then download it) as opposed to podcasts which are delivered to me after the initial discovery and subscription process.

The only other thing I will add is that while big media will dominate (most) of the news, entertainment and sports content categories, keep in mind there are thousands of niches out there that have been neglected due to the smaller size of the audience, meaning, in the old media model advertising to that small of an audience just didn’t scale and therefore programming was never really created for or offered to many niche audiences.

Stuff I’m thinking about includes……

College lectures (a massive new content category)
Holistic Health
Meditation
FengShui
Yoga
Aerobics
Alternative medicine
Organic Foods
Hybrid/alt fuel technology
Alt energy
Religion(s)
Vegan lifestyle
Crafts and hobbies (too many to mention)
Collecting (coins, antiques, comics, sportscards, etc)
Specialised pets, cars, clothing, homes, (you name it) categories
etc

There are many great niche categories for the smaller podcaster to zero in on and offer timely content that won’t butt heads with big media. These new target markets will become viable for content and highly targeted marketing because of no barriers to entry and low expenditures.

Getting back on point about mobile phone podcasts, I just read a very interesting report entitled “This Box was made for walking” funded by Nokia regarding mobile TV. While the report focuses on TV on the cellphone, many of the same principles apply to podcasts on mobile phones.

Google the following: Nokia, box made for walking, London School of Economics

Cheers