The on-demand media revolution

Has it really been this long since someone posted to Opensourcemedia.org? I'm about to remedy that, but let's ponder for a second some of the momentous events that have occurred in the interim: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Runaway Bride story, and the release of iTunes 4.9.

OK, the Berlin Wall was fully torn down by 1990. It hasn't been that long since the last post here, but it's been long enough that this space may be absent of an audience. So I'll just go ahead and scratch a few ideas on the wall and maybe they'll get discovered by some intrepid cave explorer in the distant future.

So here is today's topic, which is a bit of prognostication: The launch of iTunes 4.9 is the tip of the tipping point of the on-demand media revolution. But it is a flawed instrument, and will not by itself finish the job.

Most denizens of Opensourcemedia.org have long been excited about RSS as a means of easily publishing fresh content. When "podcasting" came along as a simple extension of RSS feeds, many of us naturally jumped in. Traffic on my own site grew steadily in the months preceding June 2005, largely driven by MP3 downloads of our local radio programs to clients like iPodder. After June 28th, traffic grew dramatically. I mean it basically doubled, and shows no sign of growing at a merely moderate pace in the near future. I'll be paying lots more for bandwidth in the coming year, that's for sure, and be happy about it.

But I'm not just president of the Podcasting Hair Club for Men, I'm also a member. Suddenly I have found room in my more-than-busy life to become an active media consumer once again. I listen to On the Media when I go running in my favorite park; I take the show I produced for 16 years (Focus 580 on WILL-AM) with me on long trips; I consume the Gillmor Gang and laugh at Steve's grisly bear-ness at the gym. I'm becoming better-informed and -entertained as a podcast user, and it's changing my expectations about what media and media producers can do for me. As a media producer, this has changed my expectations of myself and the demands on my organization. The great part is, we can now serve people even better, reach a much larger audience, and have a global impact.

But the on-demand media revolution remains incomplete. "Podcasting" may actually divert us silly humans from the real pay dirt. What other really cool things could we do with RSS feeds and enclosures? As you know, RSS enclosures can be any media object. Video files sure, but let's think a bit harder about the possibilities. Why not include lesson plans and resources for learning, presenting pathways for understanding subjects in great depth? Links to additional background and source materials, included as a SMIL or Flash module? Instead of simply enclosing audio and video files, why not resurrect the idea of interactive media? We can enclose any media type whatsoever, so why not produce something truly outstanding?

So let's say we do that, and people get busy writing or updating clients to support downloading and managing different media files types and applications. We're still not finished. Because what we really want is persistence and interoperability, and these are properties of media objects that have been endowed with appropriate metadata.

This doesn't mean throwing in proprietary iTunes tags. I mean sure, we want our stuff to work in iTunes so let's do that. But what else do we want our stuff to work in? My argument would be to make it accessible to the emerging global media library. That means endowing all our media objects with library-grade metadata, like Dublin Core, PBCore, and/or the other emerging standards for exposing metadata and harvesting content in the online world.

An RSS client is basically a metadata gathering appliance, but without extended metadata it's not an intelligent client. Title, Subject, and Category are useful in a very limited sense. RSS clients could easily be built to recognize and do more interesting things with extended metadata. And extended metadata could play a very interesting role in creating intelligent media objects that update themselves in the online world.

All for now...I just updated my little iPod shuffle, which is all I could afford on my public radio salary. (Still, at $99 and a few ounces, it's got more computing cahones than Illiac ever had.) I'm going to go run and catch up my favorite shows. I guarantee none of them have anything to do with the Runaway Bride.