The Reach - Podcasting and other Portable Media Strategies

The UAE was just a short visit for me - 2.5 days with a flight out to London at a mortifiying 1:45am.  I was locked up in meetings for most of the time and only got to break away to The Mall of the Emirates for a few hours.  Ski Dubai, in the mall, was the most amazing thing.  Talk about some real estate developers who had too much money.  I heard a comment that someone had once said - “who would ever fly to Dubai to ski at the mall”?  The nearby UAE citizen replied - “We didn’t build it for you.  We built it for us.”  ‘Nuff said.

With all the money they have, the infrastructure (in terms of roads) are horrible.  My 4:30pm trip to the mall (25km) took 1 hour and at 7p on the return, took 1.5 hrs.  Unbelievable.  Dallas friends - we’ve got it easy, baby!  I remarked to a taxi driver that while UAE has 5 million citizens (for the entire country), I’d just come from a city in China that had 10 million people IN THE CITY and the traffic wasn’t as bad.
I didn’t make it out to the “Sailboat” hotel, although I saw it from a few miles away.  A stunning piece of architecture, even from there.  I’m confused - some say it’s a six-star hotel, others say 7.  Who cares - apparently it costs 60 Euros to peak in, if you’re not staying. 

Starbucks, Pizza Hut, Chili’s - it’s such a western place, it amazes me. While the Middle East might not like Americans, they do like our stuff, I will say that.

Speaking to the title of today’s post, as you can imagine, with the amount of money they roll in, it’s more normal to see Ferrarri, Rolls Royce, Bentley, Maserati, Lamborghini than it is to see a Mercedes.  It seems in that country, you would be embarassing yourself if you were to try to make a financial boast by driving one of those.  It’s all relative.

Working Late, originally uploaded by Ed Weaver.

This guy was always working (as a part owner of his MP3/MP4 manufacturing company, it should come as no surprise). This picture was taken during dinner around 10pm after a long day. The restaurant was the only place I saw a rat the whole week in Shenzhen.

Wow, it’s been a while again.  For those of you that read this blog from time to time, I apologize.  It’s been a bit of a whirlwhind.

I’ve started a new project, which has put me on an around-the-world trip, starting in Hong Kong and Shenzhen.  We are touring factories of MP4 players, whether flash-based or HDD-based.  Flash capacity for most manufacturers in Shenzhen has increased dramatically, but not yet to the capacity of the iPod Nanos.  For example, the highest capacity I have found that someone will sell me is 4GB, with an SD card slot for an additional 4GB.

HDD based manufacturers are able to support easily 20GB, and some 40-60GB.  We have one supplier now that can support up to a 120GB HDD Media Player.  That will hold a lot of music, movies, training, education, etc.  That’s bigger than the HDD on my notebook I’m writing this post on!!

6 factories in 4 days.  Considering Shenzhen has about 10 million people in the city, that’s a lot of traffic to navigate, my friends.  And, we’ve collected “city” coffee mugs from some of the many Starbucks in Shenzhen and Hong Kong.

Next stop, Dubai.   Then on to London.  Then home (Dallas).  17 days; 25,000 miles (give or take a few); 4 major cultural groups, 4 languages; Starbucks, McDonalds, Chili’s, Pizza Hut, KFC - they’re everywhere and the same.

Tatum Anderson, writing for the BBC, delivers this article today from Delhi. Half the world that currently doesn’t have cell phones is getting creative in finding ways to afford them, use them and profit from their use. Farmers are even getting better prices for their crops due to greater access to information.

While in this blog, you’ve read me postulating regarding the advent of media on phones as the new “iPod”, but this is fundamental change that ulimately can enable worldwide use of phones for media. If farmers don’t get better prices by using their cell phones, there is no perceived value for the phone. This alone will make a huge change in adoption rates and the interest in the carriers and manufacturers serving these geographies.

Mike Shields, from MediaWeek, posts this today, indicating that eMarketer sees an uptick over the next several years in advertising buys for podcasting.

James Belcher from eMarketer sees Google as the catalyst - with Adsense for Podcasting coming into play.  Given that the dynamic duo from dMarc, Chad and Ryan Steelberg, left Google/dMarc last week over strategic differences, could it be this becomes the best platform dMarc is used for?  This would assume Google can’t convince traditional media buyers or traditional media platforms to play the game their way - and while podcasting may be a great platform to use it for, I haven’t found anyone that wants to bet against Google attacking the traditional media advertising model.

Tracking and reporting is still an issue for podcasting, but according to the article from MediaWeek, that’s not holding anyone back from including podcast media buys in the  mix.

Ignore my sarcastic view of the PR sweet-spot words in this otherwise notable press release from Adobe.  Flash has made a big comeback with it’s popularity driven by applications in YouTube and other media aggregation sites.

Some of you may say - “Comeback - have you been under a rock or something?  Hasn’t Adobe’s Flash been a critical element of web design, rich media ads, etc for years?”  and to some degree, rightly so.  Here’s the reason for my choice of words “Comeback”:  Flash grew popular in the late 90’s and early 00’s for visually stunning mulitimedia websites.  Then came search engine optimization and search engine marketing best practices, which looked down upon the use of Flash in websites, as search engine spiders could not “read” a Flash file.  So, it’s been out of vogue if you wanted your website to be search engine friendly.

With the advent of YouTube and other media aggregation sites, Flash has become the new poster child for media distribution capabilities.  Now that it has an even newer lease on life on cellphone platforms, it may be here to stay.

So, strategic question - will the use of Flash media files take the place of MP3, MP4, due to the ubiquity of the Flash Player?  Of course, you technology strategy geniuses out there are saying “Ed - I had that figured out 2 years ago - what took you so long?”. 

This would have just a LITTLE impact on the current technology that drives music, film, podcasting and iPods, etc.  If cellphone MFRs implement Flash as their media technology of choice, the ramifications are pretty large…..I’ve already said that cellphones replace the iPod and other MPx players in the end game.  Maybe this accelerates the end game.

John Battelle unearths a post here that should make us all quiver.  Originally found on the Xooglers (ex-Googlers) blog, and THEY found on Reddit.  While the core content is still unchanged - the story of how Google/YouTube got from point A to point B could be a little fuzzy.

Bottom line, apparently there is no “Free Speech” on YouTube (now owned by Google) and those that criticize a religion based on direct quotes from that religion’s main text will be deleted.  Not only the content, but your account. 

So, videos which show demonstrative violence apparently are ok, but textual fact is prohibited.  Hmmm.

Leander Kahney, of Wired Magazine posts earlier this past week an article discussing Apple’s new agreement with Apple (Corps that is) saying that iPods could become the new physical media medium.  While that’s possible, why has no one else done it yet?

As you can see, the title of this post is somewhat sarcastic, as we do that for non-profit organizations all around the world - although not with music, but with a message that the non-profit “owns” and wants to get in the hands of others.

But, let’s explore the music side of this a bit.  Apple would have to be reasonably prescient to pick which artists and “records” to load in order to sell them profitably.  The beauty of today’s business model for Apple is that they don’t care what gets put on the iPods.  Selling a device with content on it raises the price somewhat and may take it over certain “psychological” pricing barriers.  Leander is careful to mention low-priced shuffles, etc, but in general, Apple is not in the low-price game.

Neat idea, but not sure it will happen.  In the mean time, we’ve been doing this almost a couple of years now and we’ll be just fine continuing regardless of Apple’s content distribution strategy.

Well, the ugly side of the Creative Commons License got exposed via the naivete of one brilliant marketer, Seth Godin.  The big oops is detailed here and Seth encourages us not to buy the book, because we can get it free (assuming we want to help HP out and buy a bunch of print cartridges if we want it in print form) off the internet.

Publishing is going through massive change (just ask the major record labels what Steve Jobs did to them this week) and I’m sure we’ll see more change - but lets not be “bleeding edge” and then get surprised when things work out slightly different than we expected.

Being agressive and trying new things will not only give us the possibility of breakthroughs, but also the possibilities of breakdowns.  Don’t sign up if a couple of bruises and scrapes will make you sit out for a while.

I guess it’s about time to discuss the iPhone.  I’ve procrastinated on writing this post, due to the potential impact the iPhone has on the market and yet weighing the risks to Apple and other phone manufacturers.  It’s somewhat difficult to be unbiased on either side of the battle that has begun.

First, let me say that the pictures of the iPhone (check here with my friend Blake Burris of CocoaRadio for some great firsthand shots) look great.  The concepts of the OS and Software the phone is built around sound great.  Watch Steve present the Keynote at MacWorld for details.

Question - how will we like typing on a completely flat surface (the phone screen)?  It may take us a while to conform to a new manner of typing.  We’ve all gotten comfortable over the course of our lives with the raised keys with “finger curves” and the feeling of pressing down to create a keystroke.  I’m sure we can adjust, but wow - it will take some committed early adopters to stick with it!

Visual voicemail is new to cell technology, but old hat to VOIP users.  I’ve had it for 3 years now - a great invention.  Glad it’s finally coming to cell phones, although, since I have a Blackberry, technically I’ve been able to do this for a long time.

As usual, Steve blows people away, generally until they walk away and go…”hey - I’ve been doing this for a long time - how come he made it seem so special?”  Welcome to the mystique that is Steve Jobs.

Don’t get me wrong - I’m looking forward to seeing this on the market and how it will force all the other manufacturers to get moving on some creativity.  We, the consumers, will all benefit.  Let’s be glad!