Dear Adam Curry: Bandwidth Solution!
Hey Adam, I love the show. I’ll keep this short since I know you’re busy.
The main problem that I see with the bandwidth issue is the format of the shows.
I’ll use the fantastic “I heard it on a Podcast” song which you’ve played twice:
4mb x 20,000 listeners (conservative number) x 2 = 160 gigs of traffic, that’s 80 gigs of traffic more than nessesary. As the song gains poplarity it will bounce around the podisphere and potentially generate thousands of gigabytes of unnessesary traffic.
Once the music is on my computer why should i need to download it again and again and again? The same goes for mashups, or promos.
The solution is really simple. Instead of serving up raw MP3s, create a format which describes the data being served. The podcatcher will keep a catalogue of the information on your computer, when it reads the format it decides what it needs to download and then fetches only the data that it does not have. The Podcast can then be listened to directly, or the segments can be compiled back into an MP3 file and dumped onto your iPod.
Using a system like this will allow authors to better index the podcasts themselves, not only using the descriptions in the metadata file, but also using standard technology like using regular mp3 players to index the actual content of the podcasts based on the ID3 tags.
It will also allow data to be served from central points. For example I have a music podcasts which plays music from the Podsafe music network, I will not have to supply the storage space or the outgoing bandwidth for all that music, but it will be streamed by the podsafe music network. This will also allow the artists to know who is playing which of their songs.
I understand that this will be a radical break from everything that has been done so far, but shuffling around 20mb files will never scale, and there is no way the 100 million listener march is going to take place with this technology. It’s better to break it now when it is only a year old than be faced with a much bigger problem in a year from now.
Aaron
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<awormus> anyone into podcasting here?
<thesaur>not if you want me to listen to yours
<awormus> lol
<thesaur> it’s useful, but only if the content is released under creative commons
<awormus> I emailed Adam Curry this morning about bandwidth issues posted the email on my blog
<thesaur> that’s a good post!
<thesaur> you’d need to have unique identifiers, though, I suppose
<thesaur> or register the content…. something like that
<awormus> yes, details
<thesaur> heh… do you think people would go through that trouble?
<thesaur> might turn off potential podcasters (well, that might be a good thing…)
<awormus> they have to, todays “solution” is totally unscalable
<thesaur> yes, that’s true
<awormus> the other problem si that if you want to pause the music, or sing along with it, and regular DJ stuff, you would have to create a derivative and host it yourself
<thesaur> hmm… a p2p podcast network…
<awormus> but with my solution, I could create a podcast which delivers my favorite tunes without any bandwidth cost
<thesaur> yes…
<thesaur>I’ve looked into broadcasting… boy that eats bandwidth if you serve up a constant stream
<thesaur>and the problem with podcasts is that they aren’t just a constant stream, you’ve got people going back through the archives, too
<thesaur> and all that good stuff
<awormus> the main problem I see is that they are not indexed, so if I want to find that bit where… then I have to resort to some VERY unscientific searches
<awormus> if all the segments were properly ID3′d then it would be no problem to search for something
<thesaur>lol… semantic web for podcasts
<awormus>
<awormus> plus I could listent to the music from the podcasts without listening to the podcast itself. for instance if I like a song, I just click “add this song to my favorites” and it’ll be in my playlist
yes…
<thesaur> it’s not a bad idea at all
<thesaur> if you’d write up the tool that would automate that…
<thesaur> sorta like google’s tv transcript service… you’d become a rich man
<awormus> thesaur: mind if I post this discussion as a comment?
<thesaur> not at all
<awormus> by the way, did you see my comment on podcasting and bandwidth on my blog?
<ramsey> not yet
<ramsey> I think I may do some audio blogging next week during OSCON, but I probably won’t make a regular thing of it
<ramsey> awormus: I really like your idea
<ramsey> awormus: you should patent it
* awormus runs off to the patent office
<ramsey> awormus: I was actually thinking to myself yesterday how podcasts completely destroy the movement toward a more semantic web
<ramsey> there’s absolutely no interactivity in a podcast
<awormus> I totally agree, it’s good content being thrown away without any good way to find it
<ramsey> if I mention your name, for example, I can’t link to it like I can in my blog post
<awormus> Well, I think in iTunes they are trying to change that, but they have created some proprietary format which they use
* awormus has never seen the format before
<ramsey> even with video, you could create linkable sections… I don’t know how you can do that in audio
<awormus> so has no idea about what it looks like
<ramsey> hmm
<awormus> Well, audio will always primarily be for listening
<awormus> and podcasting will be primarily for mobile listening
<ramsey> I paid for a song on iTunes the other day and looked at it… it’s an .m4p format, which is apparently MPEG-4, but I wonder why they didn’t use .mp4
<awormus> so hardcoding links isn’t really logical… but with my meta format, the “player” could very easily read the URL tag which is specified in the XML metadata and display a link on your screen
<ramsey> yeah
<ramsey> I like the idea
<awormus> I haven’t though about how the format should look like, but I am sure it would be fairly easy to whipup a plugin which would work for winamp, and a lot of the popular players
<ramsey> if only you could easily tag portions of the broadcast so the links show up at certain times (i.e. when a name is mentioned, etc.)
<awormus> and the cool thing is that it is totally backwards compatible and if you just want the mp3 file like it is now, the podcatching program just generates it for you
<awormus> ramsey: you could do that based on the time
<awormus> <segment>
<awormus> <audio>
<awormus> http://www.wormsu.com/aaron/podcast.mp3
<awormus> </audio>
<awormus> <url timestamp=”35″ lenght=”5″>
<awormus> http://slashdot.org/
<awormus> </url>
<awormus> <url timestamp=”65″ lenght=”35″>
<awormus> http://fark.com/
<awormus> </url>
<awormus> </segment>
<awormus> that would show the url starting 65 seconds into the segment and show it for 5 seconds
<awormus> or whatever
<awormus> you get the idea
<awormus> then you could very easily create a GUI for this, very much like Audacity, but instead of dragging a sound into the timeline, you type in a URL, or link to a picture
<ramsey> yeah… very cool
<ramsey> you came up with this on your own, or were inspired by somewhere?
<awormus> My mom and dad have always been an inspiratino to me
<awormus> Hi mom!
<awormus>
<awormus> I’d also like to thank my agent, Billy-Joel and little Suzie
I may be wrong, but isn’t this the idea behind bit torrent ? Here is the publishing process if you use bittorrent
1. Create a “.torrent” file — a summary of your file which you can put on your blog or website
2. Create a “tracker” for that file on your webserver so that your downloaders can find each other
3. Create a “seed” copy of your download so that your first downloader has a place to download from
Raj, the bittorrent solution still involves the streaming of the ENTIRE mp3 file across the internet.
Also .torrent files doesn’t describe the actual content enough to be of any use in the larger picture. Listen to my latest audio blog entry, will give you a better idea of what I’m talking about!
The problem with this is that it gives you individual songs, and it doesn’t let you fade into/out of songs. One of the reasons radio is free (besides commercials) is that it makes it hard to get a clean copy of the song, without fades, and the song is not clearly demarcated. If you started slicing podcasts into individually “piratable” pieces, you’d definitely have “The Authoritah” on your ass faster than you can whistle Happy Birthday.
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