The Reach - Podcasting and other Portable Media Strategies

Well, this is not necessarily timely, nor is it very earth-shattering.  July 19th, in announcing Apple’s Q3 earnings, Peter Oppenheimer makes a subtle, yet strong statement.  He admits that phones will be the media player of choice eventually - but that for the time being, the iPod is player of choice.  Can’t disagree with him there, at least in terms of U.S. adoption.

He teases the audience by insinuating that Apple will have a phone on the market that will be the best media player too.  Will it be a good phone, though?

Nielsen/NetRatings gets us excited with a report showing robust growth in podcasting and then qualifies it in subsequent conversations when asked questions by, well, people who can ask questions. The right ones, that is.  Frank Barnako pops the balloon here.  Many interested parties are incredulous, such as Robert Scoble.  I, on the other hand, think the report shows such a high degree of fascination with podcasting and therefore the need for speed in releasing the report that a lot of approvals got rushed.  Facts didn’t get checked, appropriate comparisons were not made.  I know none of us have ever made mistakes like that. 

Let’s look past the obvious errors, though and consider what makes a report like this hit the streets a review or two early.  Something is going on in podcasting and everyone knows it - even Nielsen/NetRatings.

This is great news, as ESPN delivers a story about the Colorado Rockies baseball players using iPods and in-house video to improve their games.  I believe that stories like this will finally begin to expand the current thinking about what podcasting can become.  As we’ve discussed here before, podcasting is more than grass roots new media contributors - it’s another distribution channel for radio and tv content, and certainly is effective for training and education for people that would rather not be shackled to their computers.

Great news!  Congrats to the Rockies for being early adopters.

Bruni Giusanni’s Lunch over IP has a post here, discussing the Informa Telecoms & Media research report stating that there are now more cell phones than people in 30 countries.  Bruni discusses the point that some of this is due to personal and corporate phones, as well as businessmen and other travelers using prepaid SIM cards in the countries they’re visiting.

Regardless, this is a stunning number and I imagine we haven’t seen the end of the growth rate on that either.  He lists the countries and some other useful data on total GSM subscribers.

Monday, Macworld UK uncovered a story of Apple’s iPod manufacturing partner in China - originally published by Mail On Sunday and the blogosphere went nuts. At issue was living conditions, monthly pay, and hours worked. Apple was quiet initiallly and now has responded.

Considering that we just returned from a business trip to SE Asia, where a portion was spent in Shen Zhen, China, it’s necessary that I read these articles with an open mind. I wrote about that portion of the trip here. I should read with an open mind, consider what I personally saw in the factories which we buy from, and then act accordingly.

While the factories we were in weren’t the cleanest places I’d ever seen, I didn’t see any evidence of poor treatment of the workers or conditions that were unreasonable. When we arrived, the factory workers were taking a lunch break, and since ostensibly we were there to see the working factory, it was decided that we would go and eat lunch ourselves. Lest you think cynically of us that maybe we were naive, we did see the factory workers leaving the building en masse as we drove up.

We asked questions about working conditions and hours, but didn’t ask specific questions about monthly wages. We generally were satisfied with the responses and attitudes of the people we spent time with.

Now, my response to those that are up in arms about Apple - let me ask you this: In the U.S., we demand ever increasing profits so that share prices and company value will rise, therefore lining our pocketbooks or nests or whatever you want to call them. In order to accelerate that (and keep the buying public consuming at prices they are willing to pay), U.S. companies have been driven offshore to find the lowest possible cost of goods sold. Now, when they do, we have heart attacks over where the companies choose to have their products manufactured. Is that completely fair?

Now, let me be clear. I am FOR HUMAN RIGHTS. People should have the right to work, they should have the right and choice to work in decent conditions and make a decent wage (btw - those wages mentioned in the articles are somewhat reasonable for that area of the world, depending on what neighorhood you live in - just like here in the U.S.). Workers shouldn’t be required to work long, unhealthy hours. I didn’t see anything conclusive in the articles to state that these workers were being abused. If, in fact, they are being forced to work 15 hours days, particularly without reasonable compensation and choice as to work those hours or not, then I agree - that is abusive and Apple has the power to change that. One way is to threaten to end its relationship with Foxconn or completely sever it, if the relationship breaches Apple’s own code of conduct, mentioned here (same link as the response above, but included here for convenience), referring to the EICC.

It is a global economy and we do have to ask the question “What is the cost of low cost?”. And, we do have to ask if we’re closing a blind eye as consumers in order to fatten our bank accounts and get new toys at a lower cost. Hmmm.

Well, it’s nice to be in good company. Apparently, eMarketer is saying the same thing as what’s been running through my mind - the end podcasting device is the mobile phone. Telecomasia writes about it here. Rob Greenlee of mobile podcast pioneers Melodeo, writes about it here, commenting on the Telecomasia article.

As downloading gets easier to accomplish, I see a lot more users actually synching their phone to their computer to copy over podcasts, rather than download them over the wireless network - it gets expensive to do that, although the wireless carriers very much want that to be the workflow.

Several things need to happen to make this come about more quickly - larger storage on the phones themselves and software that easily allows updates to your playlist on the phone. Oh - and increased battery power - let’s not forget that .

Interesting article from CNET about new players from Zing that use Wi-Fi to pull down content when in a hotspot. Conceptually, a good idea; practically poor, since it only has 8MB of storage. I think cell phones will have a much great possibility of impact, as mentioned here before.

More and more cell phones are MP3/MP4 enabled and include Wi-Fi - so what’s the compelling reason to buy a Zing? Upgrade your phone instead, which will have more native capacity, as well as a flash memory/SD card expansion slot (most likely).

To say nothing about “just one device” and the utility of it all….

Pronounced Shenshen, this is a city that 10 years ago was little more than a fishing village, on the other side of the China border from Hong Kong. Now, it is a crowded city of 10 million. Bigger than Hong Kong.

The city is sprawling - from the suburbs to downtown is at least an hour in traffic. And that’s in the middle of the day! It took us a full day to visit two factories.

We met our trading partner in Hong Kong about 9am and took the train from Festival Walk (a very Western mall in Kowloon) up to the border of China. After going through customs, we then traveled by another train up to the end of the subway in the suburbs of Shen Zhen where a company car and driver from the MP3 player factory picked us up for the meeting and tour of the factory. Given the train, customs, another train, and ride in the car, we showed up at the factory at 12 noon, when most of the factory workers were at lunch.

The sales manager of the company suggested we go to lunch as well, so back into the car, for a 2 block, 40 minute trip to a true Chinese restaurant. (They asked if we wanted Chinese food - my wife and I looked at each other as if - what else would we be eating here?! - so we said of course!). I’m not sure if any anglos had ever been to this restaurant - great food, tremendous experience. Our Chinese hosts were very gracious and tolerant of our ignorance of Chinese customs and original food, but we learned quickly and they seemed surprised that Laura and I were eating with chopsticks.

The factory itself was a great assembly process to watch, with good quality control - they can churn out 300,000 units per month, in terms of capacity. They have exciting new products, of which one of them is a 7 inch video display, battery powered, using an SD Card for the source content. This will play any digital audio/video file - MP3, MPEG4, WMA, WMV, AVI, etc. Should be fun to see the applications. it’s certainly not pocket sized, but easily portable - much smaller and lighter than a portable DVD player.

The second factory we sent to was near downtown, in a much older section of town. Dark back alleyways and up a dark stairwell and then you find an entire custom circuit board manufacturing company with Yamaha automatic circuit board pressing equipment. That day, they were making Lenovo webcams. We buy our FM transmitters (similar to the iTrip) from this manufacturer. It’s run by a 30-yr old capitalist who apologized for the appearance of his factory - but, with a grin, he said “We’re profitable” (in only Mandarin to our trading partner). We were impressed - not with the looks, but how determined he was as an entrepreneur to grab hold of opportunities.

We got back to our room in Hong Kong about 7:30pm and then went to dinner to think through our day and what had happened. Our conversation centered around the phenomenal growth of Shen Zhen, the traffic, the new relationships that we had established and the thankfulness for this opportunity to have our eyes opened further to how flat the world really is.

Steve Rubel, on the Micro Persuasion blog, asks if podcasting is evolutionary or revolutionary. He compares it’s impact to blogging, for which he is a professional spokesperson and model, so to speak. He ends up in the evolutionary camp on podcasting, revolutionary on blogging, to no great surprise.

His argument is that podcasting is not very social, and blogging is. A lot of discussion around Web 2.0 is around the social aspects. I agree that podcasting is not social, but then again, neither is broadcasting. It certainly has more social possibilities than traditional podcasting ever did, but social is probably not at the top of the list. On the other hand, just because a trend is not social does not mean it’s not revolutionary.

Podcasting is revolutionary! It is revolutionary because of the perfect storm of portable hard drives with headphones (known as iPods, MP3/MP4 players, portable digital media players ), cheap bandwidth, RSS, and consumers being fed up with poor programming choices from media giants.

Some people have expectations of miracles in this trend of podcasting and the world to change overnight. If it (a new trend) doesn’t satisfy instant gratification needs, it is deemed a losing proposition. My experience says that sea change comes like a Tsunami. It starts with a violent crack way down below the surface. You don’t see it coming until it’s almost too late. Unfortunately, often it is too late for some.

But, the change comes….