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.
