The Inquisitr » podcasting

Patents finally jump the stupidity curve – Podcasting gets patented

Steven Hodson — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 00:40:00 +0000

I can understand the need for patents as companies, and individuals, can spend same fortunes creating new products and need some way to protect those large investments. What I don’t get is how some of the simplest things whether they be common Mexican beans right through to technology related things even see daylight without getting tossed.

Case in point VoloMedia a portable media analytics and advertising company, has just been granted patent number 7,568,213 for “method for providing episodic media” – in other words, podcasting. Well that is how they are interpreting it at least, as the patent covers the fundamental mechanisms of podcasting, This includes providing consumer subscription to a show, automatically downloading media to a computer, prioritizing downloads, providing users with status indication, deleting episodes, and synchronizing episodes to a portable media device.

In the press release Murgesh Navar, founder of VoloMedia says

“As consumers recognize the convenience of automatic downloads for episodic media, podcasting has gone mainstream with major media companies and more than 37 million U.S. consumers engaged. This automatic downloading of episodic media closely resembles how one-third of U.S. households are using a DVR to watch television today. This patent recognizes our technical leadership in setting the trend for a broad-based movement towards downloading episodic television shows and making them portable,”

As Mike Masnick over at Techdirt points out there is more than enough prior art that should have made this patent application laughable

I have a lot of trouble understanding how this is possibly patentable. I would think that Dave Winer’s work on enclosures for audio content in RSS would be seen as significant prior art. Beyond just the prior art, you have to wonder how this passes the "bilski" test (what was transformed here?) or the KSR/Teleflex test on obviousness (this is simply combining things that were already out there).

Ii should be interesting to see what happens when the company decides to start going after podcasters (Leo Leporte anyone?).

Webb Alert goes tits up

Duncan Riley — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 22:37:27 +0000

Webb Alert, the Morgan Webb hosted daily tech news video podcast is no more.

The show, launched in August 2007 gained strong initial interest at a time tech video podcasts were starting to become popular. Webb fronted the camera to share the days news in traditional television news format, professionally edited and top of its class in presentation.

Webb said in a post that her decision to abandon the show is due to increased demands from TV show X-Play. Allen Stern at Centernetworks though questions whether the show was paying for itself, with low page views, although notably that’s not a great metric for video podcasts.

I did try regularly watching the show for a while, and while it was reasonable to watch, it wasn’t compelling viewing. That’s no criticism of Webb, who did a sterling job as host, but more a reflection of the format. Do people really want to watch a news broadcast style show that summarizes the news from the day before, when most people would already be aware of it? The show suffered the same issue newspapers and television news do: delayed timing. While we’ll undoubtedly see new online shows emerge in the space, it’s never going to be a hugely popular vertical. News needs to be entertaining if it’s old (What the Buck comes to mind), not read out in a staid, traditional way, to attract scale.

BREAKING: Podango in trouble

Steven Hodson — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 04:25:37 +0000

A little while ago when I was doing more in the podcasting space on my home blog I had taken the time to join Podango which was suppose to be one of the premier podcasting services out there for hosting your podcasts. Well by the looks of the email I just just got things may not be looking all that well in Podango land. Below is the email I got in its entirety

Dear Podango Customers (Podcasters and Station Directors)
We at Podango believe that you, our customers, are our most valuable asset. Given this belief, we have always done our best to be honest and forthright in our dealings with you. The current uncertainties of the financial market has affected many of us in this nation. As of this morning, Podango is no longer immune to it’s effects. Our ability to continue operations past the end of this year (2008) is in question. We do not want any of you, or any of your shows to be negatively affected by this uncertainty and so we are encouraging you to begin taking all necessary steps to secure your data or begin moving to another hosting provider. On Monday we will have a more definitive direction. As of today, the last day to move or secure your data is December 31st. RSS feeds will need to be redirected by this date as well. It is our hope that the events of the next few days will allow us to continue providing you a service based upon a subscription fee. Again, we will know more on Monday and you will be notified of any changes to the above plan as soon as we are made aware of them.
We will have a link in the My Podango section of the Podcasters login page by Monday which will allow you to redirect your RSS feed off of the Podango feed to a new feed. Instructions will accompany that tool. Also on Monday we will provide you with alternatives for show hosting.
Inactive accounts, those without recent uploads or downloads, may be already been deleted from the system. If you need to contact us, please use .
Again I personally apologize for this notice of caution. We truly appreciate your business.
Doug
Douglas G. Smith
President – Podango

Guess the economy isn’t being nice to anyone. Nothing is on the main page of Podango yet but I imagine that will be changing if indeed the company is in trouble.

The Podcast Network suffers major outage

Duncan Riley — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 22:01:31 +0000

The Podcast Network (TPN), the Australian founded global podcast company suffered a major outage over the weekend, taking show sites offline and destroying show archives.

In an email to TPN podcasters, CEO Cameron Reilly stated that the main hard drive on the network’s server in Texas suffered a “massive technical failure” and that data on the drive is unrecoverable. In a subsequent email, Reilly stated that while backups were available for show blog posts and comments, there is no backup of site architecture, stats or media; or in other words, their entire archive of podcasts is gone.

Reilly went on to say that blogs/ landing pages for each show on the network would be rebuilt, but appealed to network members for archival recordings of old shows, or “if not, we’ll have to ask the audience if they have archived copies.”

TPN has had a difficult year, with the network being hacked earlier this year due to an old version of WordPress being run, causing widespread outages and some discontent among its podcasters. A number of podcasters left the network after the earlier issues.

I’ve asked Cameron Reilly for his comment on the outage and we’ll update the post if we get a response.

From the outside though I’d think a loss of data along these lines would be a serious issue for any company. That they were not backed up externally, or that they were archived on a single hard drive to begin with may suggest that the company may have already fallen on hard times after having claimed at one stage to be delivering 800,000 podcasts a month (total downloads) on 8 million page views across the network. TPN was the worlds first podcast network, and I know I’m not alone in thinking its sad to see it in this state, and we wish Cameron the best in his attempts to survive through this difficult time.