VoloMedia’s Podcasting Patent

[Note from ADM Chariman: The following blog post has been provided by Volomedia, a member of ADM.   The contents of this communication do not necessarily reflect the opinions of ADM's Executive Board or its members]

[Volomedia Elaborates on Podasting Patent, and responds to ADM questions]

Our company, VoloMedia, was awarded U.S. Patent 7,568,213  titled “Method for Providing Episodic Media” yesterday. The relative breadth of the issued claims under this patent has given rise to many questions. I’d like to take this opportunity to provide some context to our announcement:  ”VoloMedia Awarded U.S. Patent for Podcasting”.

Over the years, I have heard arguments, pro and con, to the utility and necessity of an intellectual property (IP) system.  One one hand, there are arguments that say exclusive rights to ideas awarded on a patent excludes others from doing what they want to do and, therefore, IP systems close down access to knowledge. On the other hand, patents and intellectual property rights do drive innovation, as well as investments in new ideas. I do not wish to debate the merits of the U.S. patent system, but just acknowledge there are two sides to the issue of patent awards. VoloMedia has filed a dozen U.S. patent applications since 2003. Patent no. 7,568,213 is the first in the pipeline to issue. We expect the others to follow suit.

With specific reference to our newly issued 7,568,213 patent, it was filed in November 2003, almost a year before the start of podcasting.  This helps underscore the point, that for nearly six years, VoloMedia has been focused on helping publishers monetize portable media…. and has continued these efforts with the addition of a wide array of smartphone-based applications.  The patent that issued yesterday helps to tie together and reinforce the value of the various technologies and services that VoloMedia has developed to help accomplish this objective.  VoloMedia’s intent is to continue to work collaboratively with key participants in the industry, leveraging its unique range of products to further grow and accelerate the market.  Today, podcasting is 100% RSS-based.  However, the patent is not RSS-dependent.  Rather, it covers all episodic media downloads.  It just so happens that, today, the majority of episodic media downloads are RSS-based podcasts, which is why we titled our announcement the way we did.

Podcasting and The Value of Scarcity

With all of the recent kerfuffle surrounding Chris Anderson’s new book Free, it’s worth noting that one basic economics lesson continues to hold true: scarcity creates value. In fact, economics is essentially the study of scarcity, and when a good or service becomes common, it becomes devalued.

I was reminded of this crucial distinction when I perused the results of RAJAR’s latest MIDAS research. RAJAR, the UK’s radio measurement entity, publishes a semiannual look at British consumption of Internet-delivered audio that examines trends in digital radio, streaming and podcasting akin to our own Internet and Multimedia Research Series here in the States, and I am always interested to see how the behavior of UK digital consumers agrees and differs from our own here in the US.

I’ll have more to say about the podcasting statistics in a later post (they show continued growth in uptake, from 7.2 million podcast consumers in October 2008 to 7.8 million today,) but for now I wanted to focus on this telling statistic: while 4.2 million say they listen to podcasts at least once a week, only 28% find time to listen to all the podcasts they download (the typical user reported subscribing to 5.2 podcasts per week.)

I freely admit that I rarely listen to everything in my queue, and often weeks will go by before I will listen to an episode. Some subscriptions I have never caught up with, and others remain weekly staples. The vast stew of unlistened-to podcast episodes in my iTunes folder is very reminiscent of my TiVo “Now Playing” page, which also contains dozens of shows (and one entire series) that I’ve never watched. I suspect, if you own a DVR, that you have had a similar experience.

It’s easy to subscribe to episodic content–less so to find time to fit it all in. If you are a podcaster with a program centered on information or news content in a given niche, you know that listeners have multiple ways to get the content you offer (after all, you also got it somewhere.) What keeps listeners coming back, week after week, is you–character development, roles, trust, and your story. Even the most compelling podcasts, however, can pile up in someone’s feed reader amidst the plethora of audio and video available on the Internet.

An Update on ADM Projects

Since joining the Association for Downloadable Media staff…ok…since becoming the ADM staff in January, we’ve focused on some very key projects. I wanted to take an opportunity to update both members and potential members, of their progress.

These projects directly reflect the focus of two main initiative of the ADM in the last six months: Provide value to our membership and build awareness.

Clearly, any member organization must provide value to those who, through their membership, show belief in the mission and provide funding to advance that mission. It’s our goal to provide real tools and resources to help those who produce and distribute downloadable content to monetize that content.

To that end, I’m happy to say that we’re just weeks away from launching an ADM Member Directory. This directory is designed to be a point of direct access for advertisers and media buyers to the offerings of our membership. ADM members will be able to post information about their shows, the audience they reach, and the various types and amount of inventory they offer, as well as the all important contact information that will allow buyers and advertisers to reach these providers.

As far as I know, no directory currently exists that allows those with marketing and advertising money to spend  such easy access to a wide range of outlets and the audience they provide in such a fast growing medium. ADM Committee members Dave Hamilton and Matt Snodgrass are currently tweaking the current beta version of the Directory, so look for information on the member release soon.

Finally real iTunes metrics, free via Google Analytics

I founded VoloMedia in 2005 to bring Analytics and Advertising technology to episodic media delivery, “Podcasting”.  As the years have rolled by,  Podcasting has grown from user generated audio to professionally produced video, from mainly an audio iPod  media, to consumption on a variety of screens – increasingly the iPhone. VoloMedia has had tremendous success signing up many of the major TV shows as customers – ABC, NBC, G4TV, How Stuff Works, etc. Today we manage over 45 million monthly media requests, 75% of which is video and the volumes are growing, we had nearly 2 million media requests yesterday. With all of these downloads over all of these years, one fact has remained stubborn -a vast majority of the traffic originates from Apple’s iTunes Media player. This should not be very surprising given that the iTunes store hosts 140,000 podcast feeds – and this is where most consumers are discovering podcast shows.

I helped ADM standardize the measurement specs around downloads, and the process was contentious around the metrics question, “download requests” or “completed downloads”?  The most final of all metrics , “plays”, was not considered because it simply was not feasible. During the current economic downturn, the need for the best metrics has become even more important for publishers and advertisers.

Over a year ago our engineers decided to resolve this issue in the most practical way we could – connecting iTunes to Google Analytics. We are announcing this product today. Before I go into the specifics, I would like to emphasize one important point – this free service does not require any relationship, contractual or otherwise, with VoloMedia.

VoloMedia’s Bridge-to-Google Analytics is a plug-in to the iTunes Media player, now installed with over 100 thousand iTunes consumers in the US – precisely 94,296 iTunes plug-ins were active over the last 5 days. Publishers are free to use this free service if it meets their needs, i.e. collect annonymous usage statistics regarding usage of their content on iTunes and to analyze them using Google Analyics: a free and robust industry-standard platform. If you have ever used Google Analytics, then you are familiar with “GA_ID – Google Analytics ID”. With a simple modification of the RSS feed to incorporate the GA-ID the publisher can start flowing aggregated play and download data to their Google Analytics account.  More information is on our website: http://www.volomedia.com

Continue What You’ve Started!

This week much of the ADM Membership received an email reminding them that, among other things, it’s time to renew their membership. While membership is of course important to the growth of an organization such as the Association of Downloadable Media, so is the benefit it supplies to it’s members.

In his email to the membership, Board Chair Chris MacDonald took time to do just that and outline some of the ADM’s many accomplishments since it’s inception.

They include among others:

• We created the first set of industry standards for measuring delivery and consumption of downloadable media.
• We created the first set of industry standards for ad creative and insertion.
• We developed a core presence within emerging advertisement markets seeking new ways to reach target audiences.

He also pointed out the major undertakings of the organization for this year.