Sonibyte Podcasting Blog

Blackberries can now get Podcasts easily

One of our customers asked me if Blackberry devices can get Podcasts.  I told him "of course," and then realized I should check.

It seemed to me that any device that is:

• Connected to the internet.
• Has a Web browser.
• Has local storage.
• Can run simple programs.

Should be able to find and download podcasts.  I knew that Apple iPhones were good at grabbing podcasts--I've seen big pick ups in the traffic for all of our feeds, partly because of the iPhone's popularity.  I also had heard that the new Android phones (based on a Google operating system) were good for podcast listening.  So, why would Blackberries be different?

Well, it seems that until earlier this year, there were limits on how much bandwidth Blackberries could use in a given time period.  This limit seems to have been imposed by RIM and its network providers, to keep from overwhelming their networks.  If you wanted to download a podcast, you had to either go after one that was really small (under 5MB) or use a work around method.

The new Blackberry Storm handsets seem to have come with improved bandwidth and new "apps" that make it easy to find and subscribe to podcasts.  So, my original answer turns out to have been somewhat right--newer Blackberries can get podcasts.

However, there is a cause for caution in this story.  The iPhone has caused a huge run up in network traffic that is already causing delays, lost connections, and dissatisfaction among some iPhone users.  As more smart phones ship from more vendors, this problem is going to get worse.  A point could come in the future where streaming video, video downloads, and podcasts are all "throttled" by carriers in one way or another.

We could try to cope in several ways.  A simple change would be to force podcatchers to be intelligent about their file requests.  As I have mentioned before, some podcatchers will request the same file many times because they do not bother to check to see if they have already downloaded it.  We could also compress our files more or lower our audio sampling rate (although that might bother those who are trying to podcast high quality music!).  And, we could break up our episodes into smaller sub episodes--perhaps with instructions to stitch them back together, once they have all been downloaded.

In any case, something good happened and we don't have to worry yet, about the bad stuff.  We welcome another community of 28.5+ million users to podcasting.  There is plenty for you to listen to and enjoy, and we are glad to have your attention.

Battling Bots

Hope the title of this post doesn't raise fears that we are working on Terminator 5 (or that we are anti-cyborg!).  Instead, we thought we'd offer a couple comments on the ongoing struggle we face with what are known as "bots."

In case you are not familiar with them, bots are programs that "harvest" files from sites that have "interesting" content. They run off servers in places like China and Russia.  Podcast files like those our clients offer perfectly fit the profile of the type of material they are looking for.  Our clients' posts have exciting topics, lots of tags and keywords, and hefty enough file sizes (2MB to 20MB) to seem worth snatching.

Once a file has been found and collected, the bot site will turn around and feed it to other users. Some bots load the files they distribute with viruses and other nasty things, but most seem to use them as a way to attract traffic.  By exposing tons of interesting files, bots bring in visitors who can then be shown ads and monetized in other ways.  Their activity is both illegal and sleazy--but it is not especially dangerous for either the bot owner (who is out of the reach of our law) or for the file owner (who is not directly associated with the bot site).

Like spam emails, bots are annoying and increase the cost of serving legitimate users.  We try to block the IP addresses of known bots.  However, there are more than 3,000 bot types tracked by our favorite bot tracker ("Bots vs Browsers").  These bots use more than 300,000 different IP addresses--so it is virtually impossible to block them all.

In case you wondered, I have not found a scientific way to spot bot traffic.  My current approach ugly and quite manual and has these three steps:

1. Grab our log file and summarize it by IP address (down the side) and month (across the top).
2. Scan the resulting matrix, looking for instances where there are a number of requests from IP addresses that are contiguous.
3. Check one or two of the IP addresses to see if they are known to be used by bots.

We are not the only site afflicted by bots.  I suspect that all major podcasting sites serve files to bots.  Our entire industry's download statistics are inflated, as a result.  Of course, the same is true for a lot of other media businesses that count TVs that are on but not listened to, newspapers that are delivered but not read, etc.

I had time in the past few weeks to hand-check traffic from several of our clients, to see how much of their traffic came from bots.  I was pleased to see accounts with less than 5% of downloads going to bots and disappointed that some of our accounts showed 40% or more going to them.  The percentage of downloads going to bots varies a lot.  Here is about twenty months of data on a typical client:

As you can see this podcast saw as much as 20% of its downloads going to bots and as little as 1%.  This makes it hard to suggest any across the board adjustment for this problem.  Instead, until we can weed out these pests entirely, we must just recognize that all of our download counts are somewhat inflated.  Users of our statistics (such as advertisers) may adjust the value they attribute to each download down a bit, as a result.  They might also ask podcast distributors for proof that they have made reasonable efforts to block bots.  Otherwise, there could be an incentive for podcasters to open up their servers and use bots to increase their download traffic and their "ad inventory."

Podcasts can be an educational tool

We have mentioned in previous posts that many people use audio podcasts as a way to learn or practice a language.  Sites such as Chinese Pod (a Praxis site) and LearnItalianPod show that canny entrepreneurs are starting to build businesses around this concept.

What about other types of learning?  Should podcasts be considered as an educational tool?

I spotted a study in New Scientist, that looked pretty encouraging.  Dani McKinney, a psychologist at the State University of New York in Fredonia, had some students listen to a live lecture, while others listened to a podcast of the lecture.  Then, she gave the students a test on the material that had been presented.  The students who listened via the podcast got a significantly better score on the test than those who did not.

The SUNY researchers speculate that the students who listened to the podcast benefited from being able to "rewind" to listen again to material they didn't understand.  They may also have benefited from not having to take notes (we humans are not very good at walking and chewing gum--or doing any other two tasks at the same time!).

It struck me that podcasting could be a perfect solution for a number of educational challenges:

• Home schooling.  Children who are studying at home would benefit from being exposed to a broad variety of material and teaching styles.  Parents would not have to worry about exposing their kids to the Internet--they could directly control which podcasts went into their child's curriculum.
• Distance learning.  Students who study at home suffer from endless distractions and interuptions.  Adult students may have to squeeze study time into their commute or during breaks at their regular job.  Podcasts are portable and a student can listen to an episode as many times as he or she requires, without any extra cost or trouble.
• Students with disabilities.  A number of students have trouble handling long hours in a classroom, carrying and reading books, etc.  Podcasts take almost no equipment and are easy to play and control.
• Giving top teachers more exposure.  Most great teachers only get to reach one or two classes of students at a time.  it is a shame not to give them the chance to influence hundreds or thousands of students--around the world.  Some of the material that a top teacher presents may be suitable for only a few students.  We can gather these scattered audiences together and move them all forward at once, using a podcast.
• Covering academic fields that generate a lot of new stuff.  Doctors and lawyers need to stay up to date on new medicines, scientific studies, court cases, appeals rulings, new laws, etc.  Podcasts of abstracts are an easy way to help them.

The folks at Finding Duclinea have done a super job tracking ideas like these, and pulling them together in various posts such as this one.  There are already some good examples of educational podcasting sites.  (E.g, The Education Podcast Network and Education.podcast.com.)  We hope that more Internet entreprenuers will see these opportunities and start pursuing them.  Of course, when they do, we encourage them to use our great tools for creating and managing podcasts!

We are adding another Podcast directory

We help our clients by automatically uploading all of their Podcast episodes to a variety of Podcast directories.  These include the well-known ones like Apple's iTunes and Microsoft's Zune, plus several others we believe add value through their indexing approach or who have interesting and unusual feeds.

Our friends over at Tomorrow Will Be Televised recently found a new directory site that we had not heard of before, Syndic8.com.  As with most of the other sites we list on, Syndic8.com hosts many types of feeds other than audio Podcasts.  In fact, we didn't see many Podcasts yet on their site (only 70 or 80?).  Unlike some other sites, Syndic8.com seems to rely on crowd-sourced/user-generated input.  The two founders of the site have tech backgrounds--and that is reflected in the site's look and feel.

For instance, their tag page practically SHOUTS its tags at you and their stats page is awfully data heavy.  Things work a bit randomly...but the Podcast marketplace is pretty randomly organized, so maybe that's the way it should be?

Anyway, we are glad to know about these guys and happy that they are helping people find interesting Podcasts to listen to.  Our Tommorw Will Be Televised Podcast feed is up there, now.  Got another directory we should consider working with?  Please let us know and we'll consider integrating it into our system.

Tomorrow Will Be Televised Joins Sonibyte

Sonibyte just added a new customer who takes our service in a new direction.  Tomorrow Will Be Televised is an interview program that has been produced for several years by a well-known media journalist--Simon Appelbaum.  The program has been broadcast as a live feed over the Web, and is currently hosted on BlogTalkRadio (http://www.blogtalkradio.com/simonapple04).

We were impressed with the high-level guests that Simon has attracted and enjoyed listening to the give and take his interviews generate.  For instance, his June 1 show featured Kelly Goode, programming chief for GSN.  Other recent shows have featured guests such as FX President John Landgraf and Rescue Me co-creator/executive producer Peter Tolan.  It seemed a shame to tie a good program like this to a one-time, weekly distribution cycle.  A lot of the material in the shows will remain interesting and relevant for many months and perhaps even years.

We discussed our ideas with Simon and he welcomed the opportunity to repurpose his show to produce a parallel podcast feed.  We did not feel that his standard one-hour show length fit the typical podcast format.  (As we have discussed in an earlier post, the average podcast runs around nine minutes.)  However, Simon tends to have two or three guests each week, so we felt we could break his shows into two or three distinct podcasts.

Our trusty sound engineers went to work.  We added a new intro and outro (including a bit of music we created specially for the show).  We both began processing Simon's current shows and also went back and reprocessed eight of his best old shows.  The result is a pretty cool podcast feed that already contains more than 20 episodes.

We have only been working with Tomorrow Will Be Televised for a few weeks, and we can't be sure how quickly this feed will get traction.  However, we feel certain that our podcast format will both broaden the impact of the show and bring in new listeners for the live broadcasts.  We expect soon to add sponsorship and other ad opportunities to the feed.  (Please feel free to contact Simon directly--he announces his email address of simonapple04@yahoo.com during each episode--if you have any interest in participating as an advertiser.)  The show is now listed on iTunes, Microsoft Zune, and several other directories, and we hope many people will subscribe to it and listen "asynchronously."

Our automated podcast creation tool kit and low sound engineer and voiceover support costs make it easy for us to provide this type of content conversion service.  We hope that other content creators will give us the chance to help them soon, in similar ways.