Podcast Hosting Services
Is podcast the avenue to grow and reach your audience in Indonesia? To address the potential, it takes us back to the impetus at its beginning that goes back way before advancement of digital platform, which Wikipedia retells as far as the 1980s era.
History of Audio Hosting Services
Prior to being known as Podcast, the term is quite generic to reflect the trend in the past. It is called “audioblogging” which often refreshes in the mind about blogpost as the most used methods to engage the audience until today.
Audioblogging and textblogging provides the simple yet effective communication means. It derives from modern human’s basic capabilities. While textblogging can be exploited on any platform, audioblogging or later popularly known as podcasting takes on the stage as broadband internet access and portable audio devices becomes such mass consumer devices such as iPod catch the market in the late 2004. It is such a convenient way of learning by enabling people to do other tasks by hands while listening at the same time. Its early development could be traced back prior to advent of world wide web which were initiated most of them in the United States. They were download and storage systems in digital format to portable players and later on to PC from websites and jukeboxes.
According to Wikipedia, Eric Rice from Slackstreet.com and Randy Dryburgh of VocalSpace.com launched Audioblog.com in May 2004, as the first commercial podcasting hosting service. Changed to Hipcast.com, it has hosted hundreds of thousands of podcasts. The term “podcasting” took off in 2004 with first suggestion by Ben Hammersley the nascent technology. By September 2004, Doc Searls, a blogger and columnist, kept track of the hits of the term on Google search engine, as the number doubled day to day.
Podcasts became the word that hit 100,000 on October 18, 2004 on Google searches. Almost a year later, on September 28, 2005, it already received more than 100 million hits. On December 3, 2005, “podcast” was named the word of the year 2005 by New Oxford American Dictionary and incorporated into the dictionary in 2006.
Business Models
The adoption of podcast has come along into the 21st century and it seems to pick up again as trend to distribute contents and commercialization. There are more than 115,000 English- language available on the internet, and dozens of websites that made them available for free or small cost to the producer and listener.
Apple has integrated podcasting to iTunes since 2005 with the features available for users to subscribe, download and organize the podcasts, while the production can be made with available software such as QuickTime Pro and MPEG4 Audio. Individual influential content providers have achieved some successes in United States and United Kingdom in the past years, with offerings of on-demand, subscriptions and downloads. However, Christopher Lydon’s blog eventually became Radio Open Source and is now the oldest, still-running podcast which relies on donation for its operations.
The participations from mainstream media is said to have propelled the widespread interest and distribution of the podcast’s contents by some of the celebrity figures in US and UK, not to be left out Apple Inc. which has consistently retain its copyright to the term iPod due to its popularity along with iTunes music store. To name some of the early adopters were BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), The Guardian, and USA Today. There are interesting and encouraging developments of podcast as quoted entirely from Wikipedia “History of Podcasting” as follows:
“Podcasting reached a new stage in 2017 when The New York Times debuted The Daily news podcast. The Daily is designed to match the fast pace of modern news and features original reporting and recordings of the newspaper’s top stories. As of May 2019, it has the highest unique monthly US audience of any podcast.[62]
As of December 2018, Serial is the most downloaded podcast of all time, with 420 million total downloads.[63] According to Podtrac, NPR is the most popular podcast publisher with over 175 million downloads and streams every month.[62] Nielsen and Edison Research reported in April 2019 that they had logged 700,000 active podcasts worldwide. Their research also revealed that South Korea leads the world in podcast listeners, with 58% of South Koreans listening to podcasts every month. For comparison, in 2019 32% of Americans had listened to podcasts in the last month.[64]”
Video Podcasting
In the past decade or more, podcast is audio recording of the people, a dialogue between two people or more and it is purely done for audio-recordings. And prior to 2017 – 2018, it seems to have its own audience without much fanfare about its existence. Radio internet-streaming is gaining traction as a way to listen to talk shows, music and so on, on the other hand.
Video as more popular media takes the centre stage with Youtube becomes the second most popular search engine after Google search. YouTube facilitates the simplicity of filming, uploading and distributing a video content by individual. Podcast as monologs or interviews can be uploaded and shared on YouTube as well. So, it makes the borderline between audio and video blur.
The global pandemic of covid-19 accelerates the adoption and migration of public figures and celebrities in Indonesia to consider other alternatives to have their presence heard and seen with physical and social distancing and restrictions continue to hamper personal appearances. This phenomenon is visibly detected with the existence of Tagar TV channel on Youtube which has been around for more than 2 years. From its first day of creation, it took about 2 years to achieve 45 thousand subscribers, while it takes just 2 months to go from that figure to 83 thousand subscribers as of August 2020.
Other than news video, Tagar TV now also regularly publishes podcast by its board member or interviews with public figures on current and popular issues. Video podcast such as this in Indonesia can be leveraged to reach local audiences with local cultural and language flavours become the ingredient to being familiar faces to the crowds.
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