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Apple iTunes 4.9 and Podcasting

Posted on June 30, 2005
Filed Under Podcasting |

A-ha, iTunes 4.9 downloadable from the web is here long before the July 7th mystery press conference. There’s been a lot of waiting for this, and in the last 24 hours, podcasters and listeners the world over are diving in and finding out what Apple are doing.

Okay the basics first, adding a feed to a Podcast manually is hiding under the Advanced tab with the most user unfriendly dialog box possible. It’s simply a text box with “url” as the title. In here you need to drop an address to the feed - (try http://www.thepodcastnetwork.com/rock/feed/). Great for experienced users, but not for the newbies (and there are a lot of newbies).

What’s nice to see is that there are no ‘pre-installed’ podcasts seeded actually in the application. My fear before seeing 4.9 was that a list of podcasts would come bundled (as is the online radio stations) and people would sit with those and not explore the world of Podcasting. So I breathed a sigh of relief.

Actually, hold on a moment, they’ve been a bit more subversive and underhand than that. Because most people are going to add podcasts through Apple’s online catalogue, powered by ITMS (iTunes Music Service). Let’s have a look in there then, and see what we find. Cripes it’s all commercial old school media conglomerates… and Adam Curry.

Interesting to see who is there in Apple’s initial choice. Here’s the list from the press release… ABC News, Adam Curry, BBC, Clear Channel, The Dawn and Drew Show, Disney, Engadget, ESPN, Newsweek and NPR member stations such as KCRW in Los Angeles and WGBH in Boston. I guess it would be a given that Adam Curry is in there, and the “top rated on Sirius” Dawn and Drew would feature as well. The only other “non mainstream media” cast included is Engadget, so that at least will keep Weblogs Inc onside as the debate intensifies on how Apple have (a) forgotten to include a million shows and (b) made Dave Winer (remember him in Podcast lore?) explode over his keyboard as they add a bundle of RSS 2.0 extensions specifically for iTunes.

Okay this isn’t what podcasting is all about, although I can’t blame the old school for leveraging Apple as much as possible to get them a foothold in podcasting - I’m pretty confident that other content (such as, ooh, I don’t know, my rock music podcasts will overtake them when people start to explore - but what is completely unbelievable to me is ID3 tags. Or Apple’s non-use of ID3 tags in existing Podcasts. I mean, all the TPN Podcasts are tagged correctly, but do they get picked up? Nope, you have to use Apple’s “we made them especially” RSS tags that are so non-standard to have Winer jumping off the deep end. You think it’s trivial? Ask Mick how easy TPN was to reconfigure after the 4.9 launch.

If Apple had released the specs a few days before the launch (after all, we all knew this was coming) then everyone could have been ready and it could all have worked at launch. No such luck (Apple having to take lessons from Microsoft on RSS and the Open Source community? Who’d have thought it), the only “amateur” podcasts to get the info ahead of time and get in place were in Curry’s Close circle (ie Dawn and Drew and a few other PodShow contributors). Sneaky, underhand, and made everyone else (except Big Business) look bad. And why strip out URL info of the information they do get from RSS? No exporting of my subscribed feeds? Corporate lock-in (and lock-out) of the highest order. But cloak and dagger with an ‘i’ at the start, so it’s okay.

Obviously the first check was to see what Podcast Network shows got in there - the final cut was 12 shows out of 29. While my Movies Show and The Mobiles Show are listed (badly, with no supporting info, see above), surprise surprise, the Podcast featuring free music from non mainstream bands wasn’t included (so everyone scurry off and add http://www.thepodcastnetwork.com/rock/feed/ manually from under the Advanced menu).

Apple are clearly trying to carve themselves a space out as the dominant podcast resource in the same way as they control online music. Whether the existing Podcast community will accept them, or look forward to what Windows Media 11 comes up with, remains to be seen. Podcasting is not just about time delayed mainstream radio and listening to Adam Curry suggest what I should listen to, it’s a grass roots movement to break free of the exact people Apple is promoting in their Podcast Directory.

In short,…a missed opportunity, but with enough fanwank to misdirect the masses.

Comments

3 Responses to “Apple iTunes 4.9 and Podcasting”

Mobile Phone Fan on June 30th, 2005 18:19

“Interesting to see who is there in Apple’s initial choice.” — you forgot msmobiles.com Podcast that was there in initial choice!

Also: no wonder Apple doesn’t want your music podcast - it would spoil their music store…
Jim A Syler on June 30th, 2005 20:53

It’s not as hard as you think to add a podcast. Dragging a link (like yours above) into the Podcast window works great.
Ewan on June 30th, 2005 21:11

Jim, thanks, but apart from 5% of Mac Users, I see most regular end users (the people who apple are now targeting) as using full screen windows on PC’s so the drag and drop, while useful on Mac, is a bit less IMO on Windows. Ah well.