Apple wants to stitch it all up
© 2008 regularjen All rights reserved
AppleInsider this week presented some speculation of Apple placing more control of podcast content in the hands of the consumer/audience.
iTunes will enable you to stitch together a series of podcasts into a single assembled episode containing only the content of your choice:
A 20-minute customized podcast, for instance, could consist of a 5 minute segment from CNN on the day’s national news, a 5 minute segment from a local news station, and a 10 minute segment on sports highlights from ESPN
I can see this being a huge advantage when trying to organise short segments of content. There’s nothing more painful on a busy commuting journey than having to wade through your podcast downloads every few minutes to get all the content you want. Admittedly, the iPod has an on-the-fly play-list capability allowing easy selection of a series of items to be played in sequence, but this enforces the need to manually select the series of content segments each time.
We quickly get to the reality of this idea, however:
a “podcast creator” would then stitch the segments together appropriately into a single podcast file, and in some cases embed advertisements between the segments
Ah, yes, advertising. What we may have here is a good trade-off: user get the content they want in the way they want, business gets to earn through advertising, iTunes takes a slice. Sounds like an all-round, everyone is happy deal. In reality, it’s old media remixed with ads in the middle, as ever.
There is no word at this time as to whether all available content from iTunes’ podcast listings will become available in this way or, as I suspect, only particular media partners who will have specific agreements with iTunes for this form of distribution, probably with an accompanying advertising revenue share deal.
It would be a big concern for me if this capability did indeed stretch to all content available on iTunes as advertising would then become directly associated with independent content without the producer’s direct consent or control. I’ll be optimistic and hope Apple/iTunes are not that stupid.
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Well if apple do this on my show then that copy write infringement. As my show is Creative Commons, it’s Non-derivative, so it can be copied as a whole, but not in parts. If this comes about then people could just take the music out and not listen to me, or the other way around.
I must admit to thinking the same myself, but reading through the report I did not spot any hint that they might be slicing content up in any way, just stitching whole chunks together into a longer piece. Still infringes licenses to inject ads if they open this up to all content, of course.
Very interesting and points well made. I’d be surprised if they did extend this to the indies though. I think they needed indie content a versions ago, but now they have their eyes on different pies, indies are very much a stone which has been stepped on. Apple are aiming at all the major media industries now, film, tv and of course, mobile.
a versions ago = oops. a _few_ versions ago..
I can’t see the need for this service.
I have a couple of Smart Playlists set up on my iTunes: One for Audio Podcasts, and one for Video.
I can alter the running order before synchronising my iPod.
This surely negates the need for a Podcast Creator service. And anyway, how much more time would it take to encode and produce one of these podcasts, in comparison to what I do now?
As a listener, I’d like to have this option.
I can see the attraction of 5 minutes of tech news, 5 minutes of world news, 5 minutes of sports, an indie track of the day, then 10 more minutes of tech news.
I want my tech news from Laporte, world news from the BBC, sports news from Crazy Jim’s soccer show, etc.
To continue…
I think producers would have to package their content to fit in with certain guidelines, so this would all fit together. For instance, the length of the segment, etc.