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misguided radio panel from frontrow
When I walked into the internet broadcasting panel at Conneticon a few weeks ago, I mentioned to my sister that these probably knew nothing about running a radio on the internet. I would have been surprised to hear the mention of ices or icecast, and sure enough, I didn't. Even when I asked about the future of internet radio, they toed the party line and simply said "too authoritarian, too useless, too difficult, not worth it."
I'm sorry, brothers. If you're talking about reaching the masses, they could care less about timeshifting or the tivo effect or whatever. The fact is you need a constant signal, something to carry the broadcast. Sure, the feed is important; it provides links to old shows and keeps listeners updated. But it doesn't unite numbers of people doing the same thing at the same time. That's what makes things popular.
But I have no idea how you guys view your show or how popular you think it should be. Perhaps that's why you fear the radio....
I'm sorry, brothers. If you're talking about reaching the masses, they could care less about timeshifting or the tivo effect or whatever. The fact is you need a constant signal, something to carry the broadcast. Sure, the feed is important; it provides links to old shows and keeps listeners updated. But it doesn't unite numbers of people doing the same thing at the same time. That's what makes things popular.
But I have no idea how you guys view your show or how popular you think it should be. Perhaps that's why you fear the radio....
Comments
I consume media in three ways:
I feel that the streaming, programmed media channels will merge with consumer-created and time-shifted content very soon. I, for one, would be drawn in by a well-done hybrid content delivery system of that nature. Until then, anyone on either side who feels superior to or discounts the other is just setting themselves up to be proved wrong.
6thstreetradio.org
on a 7-year-old PIII Linux box for over a year now. All you need is some disk space and perl skills, and of course some way to record live content. Much less complex than the distributed system that a podcast requires.
I no longer "watch" TV the way I used to. I just find the programs I like and set them to record every episode. I watch them weeks later when I have the free time. Why would I want to tune in to a radio program if I can just download them as a podcast and listen at my leisure? Unless it is hard news I don't need to hear it when it airs.
I'm sorry, brothers. If you're talking about reaching the masses, they could care less about timeshifting or the tivo effect or whatever.Tivo says you're wrong. Just look at their sales numbers. Hell, the biggest selling point of VCRs when they were introduced was time-shifting. Many people bought special VCRs designed primarily for just that purpose.
Also, as the years advance, the time-shifting audience will only increase, while the live audience will only decrease. I'd wager a substantial sum that most of the people in "the masses" who don't care about time shifting are also relatively old and out of touch. More people have heard of "podcasting" than "icecast." TV networks are struggling massively with the "Tivo Generation" as it is. Time-shifted content is most definitely the direction media are heading in the long-run.
The fact is you need a constant signal, something to carry the broadcast. Sure, the feed is important; it provides links to old shows and keeps listeners updated. But it doesn't unite numbers of people doing the same thing at the same time. That's what makes things popular.Penn Jillette's radio show was moderately popular on the radio, but MASSIVELY popular in podcast form. Few people were willing to schedule their lives in any way around a radio show, but many were willing to listen to it at their leisure. The time-shifted feed carried the live show, not the other way around. Most people found the show through the podcast itself, and never once even bothered with the live show.
On-demand media appeals to techies, and while geek fame is quite a nice trophy to have, its just not my planned target audience. I want to have something that will appeal to a more diverse audience; an audience where even checking a feed and clicking a link is still WAY more complicated than hitting the "ON" button. I'm not talking lowest common denominator, just people who aren't even going to be willing to go to the hassle of setting up a feed without knowing that it will be worth it.You honestly think that the people who are too technologically incompetent to click "subscribe" in iTunes are somehow going to download, install, and run some "Internet Streaming Audio" software? Furthermore, people who aren't "techies" tend NOT to sit in front of their computer every time they want to listen to music.The vast majority of people listen to the radio in the car. How, pray tell, are they going to get their live Internet feed there? Podcasts work fine, as does sattelite radio, but streaming Internet not so much.
The only other place most people listen to the radio is at work. A great many workplaces block streaming media of any kind, and more do so every day.
So, Internet radio is useless for the two primary ways non-technologically-inclined people listen to the radio. Fantastic. They need a computer in the livingroom, something few non-geeks even think to try, to listen to anything. They can't listen in the car, or at work. They can't listen in line at the bank, or waiting at the doctor's office. When they do listen, they're stuck with the middle of whatever show is on at the moment. Internet radio is awesome.
But I have no idea how you guys view your show or how popular you think it should be. Perhaps that's why you fear the radio....I don't fear the radio at all. In fact, I've seriously considered pursuing syndication on sattelite radio. The format-related hurdles alone are enough to make it infeasible. Our show would have to be ready well in advance, and be precicely timed to within a handful of seconds of a target time every night. We'd have to worry about -when- it was aired, and who might me listening at that time. The meagre potential returns were far outweighed by the hassle. People are free to syndicate our show live-ish if they want, as per the Creative Commons license, but we personally don't care at all.
I stand by my opinion that, in most cases, non-music streaming Internet radio is stupid and useless, and music streaming Internet radio is barely non-useless.
Here are the reasons that I look down upon streaming
- Bandwidth - Yes, podcasts need bandwidth too, but not all at once. They also don't need speed. If you have a 40 megabyte podcast at a bitrate of 96kbps with 100 listeners, then you just need to send out 4000 megabytes of data over a day or two. This isn't very hard, and it doesn't matter if the download is slower than 96kbps. If you stream a 96kbps show to 100 listeners then you need 9600kbps of bandwidth in real time. You have to be able to maintain the speed to each user while simultaneously having a wide enough band to support a large number of users. If your show has any significant size, it will cost a fortune. Bittorrent can't even help you with that one.
- Timing - Hey everyone. Imagine if you could only listen to GeekNights at one particular time, live. How many shows would you listen to compared to now? Even if we did do a live stream of GeekNights in addition to the podcast. Who would go through the extra effort to listen to that instead? My guess is not enough people for it to be worthwhile.
- Post-production - If you are going to create any audio or video, you can only make it better by editing it and doing some post-production on it. A live show does not have these luxuries, and it is much more difficult to do a live show that is also high quality. If you are streaming a show, but not actually doing the show live, what's the point? If it's a recording, why not let people download at will?
- Cost - In the same vein as the previous item, it is much more expensive to make a high quality live show. With a post-produced recording you can use free software to compress, edit, and add music to the show, etc. With a live show you need expensive equipment to perform the same tasks in real-time.
The only advantage I see to doing a streaming live show is the ability to have live listener participation. While this works well for some shows, In my opinion, live listener participation makes the vast majority of shows much much worse. I'll save the reasons for another thread.In conclusion, I see only two major useful purposes for streaming audio. The first one is music. Sometimes you are at work, and you need some music. Old fashioned FM radio sucks, and you are bored of all the mp3s on your iPod. Hooray last.fm and shoutcast.com are here to save the day. Select a genre and a low-quality stream will fill your ears. Of course, this use of streaming is taking a hard hit from the US congress, so it might not exist much longer.
The only other purpose I see for live streaming of audio would be to get coverage of a live event. I don't have TV, and I only have a radio in my alarm clock and my car. On occasion there might be some event going on, usually a sporting event, where I want some live coverage. In this case, streaming audio or video becomes useful, but that's only because I'm a weird nerd who doesn't pay for TV or have a radio.
If you still insist that streaming audio shows have some merit, answer me this question. How would streaming GeekNights live at a specified time each night be better for the listeners than just letting them download mp3s for free whenever they want?
"As a caller, your job is to make me look great."
You need good call screeners to make a call in show work.
What the hell is an icecast?
If it's an issue of broadcasting all over the world, then the internets is all around you. It's drifting in and out of suburban neighborhoods, oozing out of coffee shops on street corners and drifting invisibly through most places of business. It's even in our phones and vid'yo games. Chances are, wherever there is a geek in need of GeekNights lolz, the internets are nearby. As far as getting your medias to wherever they're needed, GeekNights is set.
I don't think he has any answers for the arguments that have been made against his assertion. I award him no points, and may god have mercy on his soul.
I'm not arguing that podcasting is useless or inferior, it is instead a small cog in a much larger machine. By itself it achieves little. Only when combined with time can it be used as a powerful vehicle. But again, my argument is only relevant if you want to reach people. If you only want to broadcast to your leet audience, release an MP3 every day and watch your numbers climb with the webcrawlers. Even Goldstein and the 2600 crew have a weekly live show on NYC broadcast radio, so I'm not sure what the argument is.
Now, some rebuttals: There is a simple explanation for this: Penn Jlllette is /already/ famous. People will download and listen to his show simply because they know the name, and they know just about everything he does is funny and entertaining. How can I expect the same benefit? Especially when my target is my local market? The only way is the old-fashioned way: live shows and events. So you in your many travels have never heard of an internet enabled phone? Right now the cost is somewhat prohibitive, but that problem will disappear quickly as communication continues to converge. I was listening to my internet radio while camping a few months ago, on a friend's laptop with unlimited mobile internet service. But, of course, why in the world would this element of communication follow the patterns of convergence that all others have? What an insane idea. So you find it humorous that I have used a few hundred lines of programming skill to create an electronic DJ? The perl script selects the songs, according to a small defined set of rules. I guess its far easier to click through 15 different links and upload files every day. That sounds like a real productive use of my time.
Oh, and I also wrote a sexy 140 line ruby web application through which I can order and enable/disable the preset playlists. Thus completing the automated system and allowing my crew to come up with great mixes and playlists. But I guess that's beyond a CS major (you should try software engineering). I'll admit, the most listeners I've ever had at one time is 9. If I get to the point of consistently having more listeners than my small residential pipe can handle, then guess what? That's a GOOD PROBLEM! That's like having too many customers. By comparison, how many simultaneous listeners does Geek Nights have... o wait! That's right. You don't know because there's no live stream. Sorry. You're making my point! People would listen to ZERO SHOWS! You really have no idea how popular you are because you don't know how many people will actually make time for you. Have you ever heard anyone brag about a live band they saw in a /recorded/ somewhere? Of course not (apart from bootleg Hendrix, perhaps). However, people will get up, go out and see a live event, because they want to be part of something happening. First, I'm not saying that offering shows for download is ineffective. I have a feed for my radio where I put the recorded live shows. Second, anyone worth their weight in electrons can record a show almost perfectly the first time, requiring a small amount of editing to take out the uh's and um's and coughs. Do you think productions teams for Hannity or Limbaugh spend 10 hours a day editing their hours of daily shows? I hate this argument. SO WHAT if they Hollywood fscks say I can't use their music? SO WHAT if musicians refuse to accept their role as entertainers and NOT royalty? There's an entire world of music out there just WAITING for this to happen so they can fully break onto the scene outside the system. Youth loves rebellion, remember? I also believe the entire argument is moot because current copyright law is just plan unconstitutional, but that's another thread. This is what /should/ have been covered in the panel at Conneticon:
A free-software only, playlist-based internet broadcasting station consists of three main parts:
1) icecast, which serves up the connections, both from listeners and broadcasters.
2) ices, which encodes the broadcast vorbis stream and connects to icecast (and runs at about 80% CPU on my 7 year old pentium 3, 400 mHz machine).
3) a way to make playlists, which can be as simple as a text file.
#3 is where I use perl and ruby, so that I can better manage the playlists. However, I did run it just using a crontab and two text files for a long time. That's right, I forgot that there isn't a pause button on winamp! Granted you cannot rewind without jumping through hoops, but that's a technology problem. As internet radio grows, more clients will allow buffering the same way a DVR can record live TV. That basically knocks out your entire argument. And as I have mentioned several times, the actual hosted programs broadcast on the radio /are/ actually available in podcast form. The internet radio covers all the bases covered by Geek Nights, AND also gives the live event. 6th Street Radio wins again.
-davek
Well unfortunately I have to go work for my job.
Also I found an inconsistency. So podcasts aren't as good as streaming internet radio because it forces people to listen to it at one time, but yet internet radio in the "future" will allow you to DVR shows as they stream... Isn't that just a complicated way of making a podcast?
Also the hosted programs are available both live, and in podcast form right? And we know at most 9 people listen to the live stream, I'm curious as to how many more listen to the podcast. Although that may be unlikely since you seem to only have a rather small number of listeners.
I also enjoyed how you write off knowing Perl, as if a retarded monkey could do it. The average person doesn't know how to program, and even the not average person that knows Perl or another programming language doesn't want to go through the hassle of having to do something completely themselves, when they can merely click a few buttons and upload a podcast.
Frankly, I think he's delusional in the same way that a lot of people who make "underground content" are. I'd smash his current round of "arguments" point for point, but there's just no sport in that if he won't actually respond to rational arguments. I'll simply make the obvious conclusions in a blunt and forward manner. I won't bandy around the point. I won't mince words. This might offend, or even hurt.
We didn't talk about "icecast" because no one gives a shit about it. No one has heard of it, no one listens to it, and no one cares about it.
All of the evidence points to the future of media being largely time-shifted.
Davek tries to speak and act like he somehow knows about this "industry," yet he has a grand total of NINE LISTENERS.
Davek tries to make what he has done with his server sound special, when such a thing is trivially implemented by anyone with programming knowledge.
Davek ignores the reality and decries people like us for denying him his "deserved" attention.
Davek is at least moderately delusional.
Davek is one of those people who tries to blame someone else for his obscurity and lack of popularity. Those podcast assholes don't know that MY WAY is the real way. I'm ACTUALLY popular: they're just posers. Nevermind their THOUSANDS of listeners: I have nine LIVE listeners, which is much better! They're stupid for not knowing about my obscure and archaic medium. They should be talking about MY way of doing things. I'm the REAL future. Nevermind that fact that no one cares about what I do! Nevermind the fact that I can't even argue for my ideals effectively!
He reminds me of these people:
Davek needs to honestly self-assess. He makes arguments that don't make sense. The few "rebuttals" he made didn't actually address the arguments stated, and in some cases even contradicted themselves.
Think about your arguments. Whether you realize it or not, all you're doing is rationalizing your own failings, attempting to turn them into boons. It's a little sad.
The point of new media is that the cost and ease of production is greatly reduced to the point at which even Joe Shmoe can get it on. Streaming audio has been around for a very long time. Since the mid '90s Real Audio and Shoutcast have been allowing people to listen to streaming audio online. However, its main use has been for the streaming of music, mostly the music of the record companies, and most of that is being done by terrestrial radio stations who are simulcasting their signal onto the net. Notice how there has never really been any significant number of amateurs streaming audio online? It's because it's hard and nobody cares.
Podcasting is easy to produce. Any shmuck can podcast. It's also easy for the listener. Any shmuck can download and listen to an mp3. If you haven't noticed there are a hojillion amateur podcasts out there. A lot of them are very successful. A lot of the podcasts that we make fun of on the show for being crap have a lot more than 9 listeners. In fact, I'm pretty confident that just about every podcast in the iTunes store has had more than 9 different people listen to it.
For a new form of media to succeed in the present or future it must be easy to create, trivially easy to consume, inexpensive to create, free or almost free to consume, platform independent, and unrestricted by time. All the entertainment media that are going down, streaming net radio included, do not have one or more of these characteristics. The new media that are succeeding have all of these and more. Podcasting the win, net radio the lose.
Anyways, as far as figuring out how many people "actually make time for you" or in other words listen to your show, is not that a blatant disregard of how trivial it is to see how many people A) subscribe to your RSS feed,
I guess if you wanted to be draconian you could suggest that people could do A and B without listening to the shows they download, of course that seems like a negligent waste of disk space. Then too, maybe the amount of forum members really has nothing to do with actual listeners; instead, perhaps people join the forum without listening to the show merely to condescend and lambaste other fans.
I can assure you that we're quite popular beyond our crew. ^_~
Of course it's a technology problem. You're dealing with technology, after all.
EDIT: WaterIsPoison and Mr. Period are growing soft in their old age. Glaring error in this post, but alas, it has been amended.
My grand total of 9 listeners is at least a valid statistic. In the panel itself you admitted that your listener count is skewed by web bots to an unknown amount, and you have NO way of knowing how many people are listening to you at any given time. Scoff all you want, but 9 simultaneous listeners is still greater than ZERO.
I also love how some of you argue that my use of perl and ruby in the radio's infrastructure is both nothing to brag about (because its too easy), and at the same time prohibitive to would-be broadcasters (because its too hard). Make up your mind, guys. Thank you, Rym, for knocking out Apreche's point #3. I thought I did it sufficiently, but I'll take your support anytime.
It seems to me that you are no better than the "old media" people, television and radio producers, who think that there is no future in internet produced content such as YouTube. You are hanging desperately on to this thing that you think can't ever die, and are completely blocking out the evidence to the contrary.
''9 simultaneous listeners is still greater than ZERO''
This implies that because Scrym can't completely accurately count their listeners, you believe that they are worth less than your 9 listeners, because you are sure they exist. Don't the forum members here prove that at least more than 9 people listen to geeknights (and definitely more than zero), just check out the ''How did you find us thread''.