PodTech Exclusive: Yahoo! Launches Podcasting with Yahoo! Podcasts

13:07 | Admin | Oct 9th, 2005 3:28pm |

YAHOO! LAUNCHES PODCASTING. Yahoo! Podcasts, A New Beta Service, Lets Consumers Find and Listen to New Audio Programs

PodTech Exclusive: Yahoo Podcasting Interview

Yahoo: Geoff Ralston, Chief Product Officer
Host: John Furrier, Founder PodTech™

John Furrier - PodTech:
Welcome to a PodTech exclusive podcast release of Yahoo!’s announcement for their new podcasting platform and solution. We’re here at Yahoo with the exclusive podcast launch of Yahoo announcing Podcasting.

Introducing Yahoo’s Chief Product Officer Geoff Ralston.

Geoff Ralston - Yahoo’s Chief Product Officer:
We’re excited about a new product called Yahoo Podcasts. You can find it at http://podcasts.yahoo.com in beta. It will be the best place on the web to find, discover, and consume podcasts to really find the podcast that you’re interested in. Yahoo is helping podcasts grow into the mass market. It will be extremely easy to get what you want there.

John Furrier - PodTech:
Yahoo is launching podcast. It’s a big site. It’s huge for podcasting. iTunes started in the summer. Yahoo now follows suit. How do you see this evolving?

Geoff Ralston - Yahoo’s Chief Product Officer:
We’ve been watching podcasts for a long time. It’s the way people want to consume this kind of content out there. Podcasts are where Internet radio meets Web 2.0. At Yahoo we’ve been really focused on the experience of consuming whatever kind of content - text, audio, or video - the concept of personalized experiences and community based experiences and that is what podcasting really is. We think this (podcasting) is just an example of how people in web 2.0, 3.0, and 4.0 are going to get this kind of content. To bring it to whatever device they want to consume it on and wherever they want to consume it, and then take it home with them and use it.

John Furrier - PodTech:
This is great news for podcasters. What is your message to podcasters? Are you going to be open? Are your reaching out to the community? Explain your approach to podcasters? What is the message that you’re sending with this system?

Geoff Ralston - Yahoo’s Chief Product Officer:
We want this to be as open as possible on both ends. We want to work with every device - however a user of Yahoo! Podcasts wants to consume their podcast, wherever they want to do it, whatever device, and on whatever jukebox. We’re going to work with them (jukeboxes) and we’re going to work with as many standards as possible using the standard pcast format to integrate with a jukebox. You can listen to podcasts right on your computer, or you can listen to it right on the web itself. On the other end, we want to be as comprehensive as possible. If you have a podcast, we’re going to find you, and if we haven’t found you then you can come to our website and give us your RSS feed and we’ll get it into our index within 24 hours.

John Furrier - PodTech:
You’re creating an open registration for podcasters so no real closed network. You’re embracing the people to submit their content. Talk about how Yahoo looks at this as a search engine? It’s not just a search engine. It’s a portal completely integrated environment. How is Yahoo looking at Podcasting from the “ivory tower”?

Geoff Ralston - Yahoo’s Chief Product Officer:
What we are releasing this week is an experience that allows you to find and discover podcasts, but we think it’s a broader relevance to Yahoo. We think that podcasts should show up where it makes sense on Yahoo. They will be integrated across Yahoo. Right now we’ve done an interesting integration into the Yahoo Music Engine where you can have the same kind of experience as on the web directly in the Music Engine, or you can download it to your device right there. You’ll start to find podcasts showing up throughout Yahoo if it makes sense, like in Yahoo News. There (Yahoo News) you have blogs, so why wouldn’t you have podcasts? Take Yahoo movies, for example, there are already some great podcasts out there like Ebert and Ropet and others by a bunch of guys just talking about movies. Why shouldn’t those be findable by Yahoo Movies? And, if you’re interested in a particular set of podcasts, we think there ought to be a personalized experience for you. So when you go to Yahoo Movies, and when we know that it’s you, we should show you the podcasts that you’re interested in.

John Furrier - PodTech:
So it’s a huge coup for podcasters to get distribution across all of Yahoo’s assets and properties, but talk about (podcasting) from a user’s perspective. Most users have heard of podcasting, and everyone is talking about them. But the consumption side has been weak. They have been hard to find. How are you guys handling that piece?

Geoff Ralston - Yahoo’s Chief Product Officer:
That’s because most users really don’t know about podcasts. Here in Silicon Valley we do have our own view on the world, and it seems that everyone knows about podcasts. I don’t want to insult one of the leading podcasters (PodTech), but the fact is that what we really want to do at Yahoo is to bring podcasting to the mainstream, and for that to happen people have to learn about it. So we’ve created a site where it’s really easy to learn about it, and like I said, you’ll be able to find podcasts eventually everywhere on Yahoo. So as you’re reading your news, which of course many millions of people do every day week, and month on Yahoo, you will start to be introduced to podcasts and start to be introduced to the podcast experience of the site (http://podcasts.yahoo.com). And that will actually start to bring you into the community of podcasters. And it is a community! One of the key aspects of Yahoo Podcasts is that the community is what gives it strength and gives the feeling of the site. The site also allows people to rate podcasts to create the ability for people to find the podcasts that matter.

John Furrier - PodTech:
It’s an awareness issue. Joe Sixpack and the average Yahoo user are going to get exposed to podcasts, and you have to make the user experience pleasant and that is what you’re focused on. Talk about the new features of the product that you’re rolling out and about the user experience.

Geoff Ralston - Yahoo’s Chief Product Officer:
I think that it (the user experience) has to be not just pleasant, but it’s got to be simple and easy. A podcast is a program that comes to you on an ongoing basis - how does that work and how are people going to understand that? It has to be as easy as taking your mobile device, plugging it in and getting the podcast or podcasts that you listen to the next day automatically on your device. We have been careful to integrate as seamlessly as possible with as many jukeboxes as we can. We’ve also made it really easy to find the podcasts that you might want. We call it the ‘needle in the haystack’. So we’ve used Yahoo search technology to index as much as possible about a podcast, so that if you’re interested in a specific podcast about something or a specific episode, you’re going to be able to find it. We’ve got some cute things. Like when you listen to a podcast on the web you can actually speed it up and listen to it a higher speed - if you want to jump through it to get to the content that you’re looking for.

John Furrier - PodTech:
Does it make us podcasters sound like “Mickey Mouse”?

Geoff Ralston - Yahoo’s Chief Product Officer:
Actually it doesn’t because you can hear someone and understand someone talking at a much higher speed. The problem is that when you speed it up naturally the pitch goes up, but we’ve done some work to lower the pitch down. So it actually stays relatively normal and much more comprehensible.

John Furrier - PodTech:
Talk about the community piece again. How are you integrating that aspect of the social connectedness of podcasting?

Geoff Ralston - Yahoo’s Chief Product Officer:
I think that it’s something that is great and new about podcasting. It is about taking this audio content and injecting community into it. It’s injecting community with the people who are listening to podcasts, injecting community to those who are creating those podcasts, and then allowing them to publish it and get it out in a real time basis to those people. That’s been a core part of how we’ve thought about creating a site around podcasts. So the community can go in and take a look at the podcast and rate them, review them, and create a tag space around them. The result is that the community on a ongoing basis is talking about podcasts on Yahoo, and telling the rest of the community what’s cool, what’s new, what’s happening, what is a great podcast, and what you should be listening too.

John Furrier - PodTech:
That’s awesome — the community is key. Talk about some of the technology behind this that Yahoo’s applied to podcasting and where is it going?

Geoff Ralston - Yahoo’s Chief Product Officer:
It’s natural for us to take the core search technology which is about being great at indexing, being great at crawling the web, being great at taking that index; and taking the data that you’re getting and finding relevant results, and displaying those relevant results very rapidly to people (taking that and marrying it with the ability to handle all these feeds). We have been learning a ton and really have become a leader in taking feeds, learning how to process them (feeds) in real time, and getting them in — so that we take real time podcasts that are happening every minute and every hour, and put them (podcasts) in front of users. We put those two together and tied them together with a community infrastructure that we’ve been building over the past several months and years — and created a single cohesive site that ties together the search, the community, and something that Yahoo has been known for – its personalized aspect of allowing you to create and find content that is specific to users.

John Furrier - PodTech:
Talk about Yahoo’s goal from the beginning which was about simplicity. Web 1.0 was about search results, and Yahoo made that simple. How did you approach the podcasting world from the user perspective in making it easy?

Geoff Ralston - Yahoo’s Chief Product Officer:
Web 2.0 is great! It’s really cool. It’s about all this stuff. I’d say that it isn’t about simplicity yet. It’s been about “more”. There is more stuff. There is more community. There is more content. It’s kind of crazy. When we look at that (the concept of “more”) we say, “wow what users do need is to be able find what they want, discover what they want, and just make their choice in a much easier fashion”. We’ve really thought hard about that as we created this podcasting site. How can we make users’ lives better with all the incredible choices in front of them now? You do that by helping them to bring their community with them, and by helping them make choices like we do now. If there are 10 different things you want, you ask someone who knows about it. You can bring your community in and help yourself make choices. We will do that by creating recommendations that are tailored to the way that you use your application and/or the way you use a particular service — the kind of content that you’re consuming. I think that allowing people to make their choices by creating simplicity and by creating an experience that - with a richness of which - allows you to see what’s going on and make it happen. Those are key differentiators of this service.

John Furrier - PodTech:
What you’re saying is that it’s a social filter. You guys are using the social fabric of what Yahoo already has built and letting that social community filtering be part of the system.

Geoff Ralston - Yahoo’s Chief Product Officer:
There is nothing so web 2.0 as it being a social experience. The web went from being very static and very impersonal to being much more humanistic and social. To me Web 2.0 is about nothing more than that.

John Furrier - PodTech:
How do you see podcasting evolving over the next few years?

Geoff Ralston - Yahoo’s Chief Product Officer:
We think that podcasts, audio content, and all sorts of different content will find themselves wherever there is content, wherever there are events that occur. There are going to be lots of different ways for people to consume that information as well as - and this is important - to create that information. So we will have a huge growing group of people who are going to create podcasts, videocasts, and any kind of casts you want. And that content will appear “automagically” - by the intelligence of companies like Yahoo - in the right place at the right time.

John Furrier - PodTech:
Yahoo launches podcasting. Geoff Ralston, Chief Product Officer, launching Yahoo Podcasting.

This has been an exclusive PodTech Yahoo release.

About PodTech
PodTech is a media and technology company focused exclusively on Podcasting as a real time communication platform for corporations and individuals. PodTech helps corporations and individuals use podcasting to register and distribute their voices in order to connect with customers. PodTech also produces the leading technology podcasting, InfoTalk with host John Furrier.

For more information on establishing a developing podcasting release or having a dedicating podcasting channel on the PodTech Network email PodTech at john@podtech.net

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 9th, 2005 at 3:28 pm and is filed under PodTech, Yahoo, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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