Spank Ministry

Quite often, some of my friends and acquaintances don’t really think open source is something that they need to pay attention to, that it’s a quaint little hobby for tinkerers and doesn’t have a really large place in their day-to-day internet life.  While I’ll be the first to admit that the products of the open source community are not a panacea, it is probably the only group that has nothing other than the satisfaction of end users in mind.  Corporate entities, while often appearing benevolent, will inevitably limit choices or features, or use the product to further their own interests, be it building a user base, or mindshare, or whatever.

An example of this is Apple’s iTunes including PodCasting.  It’s a double-edged sword; by making podcasting much easier to subscribe to, shows are getting much wider exposure and more listeners.  The cost of this is that now Apple has a great deal of control over podcasters since they are now the point of entry for the listener base.  If an RSS feed works with other podcast clients, but not with iTunes, the number of people who will subscribe to your show will drop precipitously.  If, for whatever reason, your podcast doesn’t show up in the top/featured podcasts, you won’t get the coverage that a podcast that Apple features will.  Apple has the mindshare and market clout, as well as the content delivery software in place to establish this hegemony on what was once a community-led phenomenon.  Now, I’m not stupid.  For Apple, this was an incredibly smart business move.  While they may not have invented podcasting (i.e. the simple act of putting MP3 URLs into RSS) they get to become a primary supplier for the content.  Why should you care?  Simple.  Without bittorrent, podcasting will not be able to scale well to a larger listener base.  Already, a lot of my favorite podcasts are taking on sponsors and ads for revenue to offset bandwidth costs that keep rising.  Podcasts are already recorded on sub-par equipment and downsampled and compressed to appallingly low file sizes to cut back on bandwidth spending, but if podcasting keeps growing, it won’t matter.  If podcasters don’t start using bittorrent, small, independent people may not be able to attract and sustain a larger listener base.  And I don’t see that happening unless iTunes supports it.  This may not seem like a big deal, but I think the strength of podcasting lies in independence and free speech (like blogging).  I just don’t want to see a day where Clear Channels and Time Warners move in and become the only game in town for podcasting.