Dancing About Architecture

There's a mini-phenomenon happening right now on the web called "podcasting". People essentially record their own little radio shows on whatever topic interests them and then "publish" them through something called a "feed" or an "RSS feed". Then, some collection of people way bigger than you'd ever expect "subscribe" to this feed with a program that sits on their computer. The program, sometimes called a "podcatcher", does a really cool thing: overnight, while you're sleeping, it sees these radio shows packaged as digital audio files, downloads them to your computer, and then syncs them right up with your iPod or other MP3 player. So you wake up, grab your iPod, and you have all these little radio shows that you are interested in available to listen to for your commute.

At first, I thought podcasting was going to be a flash-in-the-pan fad, but after a few months of seeing the growth and actually listening to some of these podcasts, I have to tell you that I think it's for real and represents the beginning of something big. On-demand, automated delivery for even the most obscure, niche content is going to work just because there are so many doggone people out there: some people refer to this as The Long Tail.

Okay, now what exactly does this have to do with Comedy Central? Well, a natural evolution of podcasting is that you're going to see other types of media distributed over this content delivery mechanism. It doesn't take a brain surgeon or even a marketing exec to figure out that the next thing to travel down the wires is going to be video. Content publisher puts the video in the feed, subscribers use their clients to download the video overnight to their notebook computers or portable media players, and wham – now people can watch the video that they are truly interested in on the train ride into work.

As you're probably aware, there are ways that people can kind of do this now. TiVo has recently released their TiVoToGo service, which does most of what I'm talking about, but unfortunately doesn't work for me – and please don't forget: this is all about me. You see, I have a TiVo (well, okay: three TiVos) that I love dearly, and I have a Season Pass to The Daily Show. But I'm a satellite subscriber, and the brainiacs at DirecTV have decided that I'm not worthy of any of the new TiVo features that have been developed in the past couple of years. So, NoTivoToGo for me.

"Hold on", you say. "If you already record every night's show on your TiVo, then why do you need it on your computer?" Well, the sad, sad truth is that I just don't have a 30 minute block of time past 10:00pm that I can use to watch a television program. The perfect time for me to watch The Daily Show is during my half-hour train ride commute into work each morning. If I had this show available on my notebook computer every morning, I'd watch it four times a week. As it is right now, I'm happy if I find time to watch it once a week.

"Just release our content onto the Internet? Are you crazy?" I can certainly sympathize with your plight of figuring out how to continue to realize a return on all of your investment in programming in the new world order, but stick with me a second. The Daily Show is perfect for this delivery mechanism: it's a topical, current show that quickly becomes stale. As opposed to a program like South Park, I seriously doubt you're going to be able to package up The Daily Show reruns onto DVDs ("The Daily Show: Volume XII February 9 – February 26, 2004") and have any success selling them through any channel. So go ahead and leave the commercials in and make the most recent show available for download every night at midnight. Yeah, people will be able to fast forward through the commercials if they want to, but that's no different than what anybody watching via a DVR or even a VCR can do. Being able to get the content from a trusted source instead of relying on file sharing peer-to-peer networks is huge: you retain control of the content and packaging because you've lowered the barriers for users to access your programming.

The other reason that I think you should get behind this is a little more "viral". Have you seen all of the portable media players with 5-in LCD screens that are being released on the market from companies like Creative and iRiver? These guys are screaming for appropriate content to be put on these devices: all they can really offer now is "copy your DVD onto this device to watch it on-the-go". If you made something like The Daily Show available as a video podcast, I bet you that these companies will start to package it as a "preset" for the software that is responsible for managing the content on these devices. Bam! A fantastic tool for expanding your reach over time and you get cited over and over again as a media company that "gets it".

If you're at all interested in this, I'd be happy to help point you in the right direction, but it all really boils down to this:

1. Package up an episode of The Daily Show in some digital format: the Windows Media format or the QuickTime format will get you the most reach. Skip anything to do with RealMedia: nobody likes them.
2. With some content management system that knows how to generate "RSS feeds", add an entry that represents the day's show (just a short description like what appears in programming guides is sufficient) and includes a link to the video file. There's a little mumbo-jumbo that you have to be concerned about when generating this feed, but there are lots of people that can assist you at this point.
3. That's pretty much it. Computers everywhere will "poll" this feed every hour or so, and when they notice that there's a new item, they'll go ahead and download this video file in the background and it will be available for viewing in the morning.

I hope you have an open mind enough to consider this suggestion. It's radical and scary, true. But the opportunity is immense. Speaking just for me, I would be exposed to your advertisers' messages four times a week instead of once a week because you would have given me an additional context in which to view your programming that I didn't have before. But mostly, I just want to watch more Jon Stewart, and this would let me do that.

Please don't hesitate to contact me with any questions. Thank you for your time.

Eric Lunt
//www.burningdoor.com/eric