For many years we were very grateful to have the support of Red Hat. the global technology leader who funded a huge amount of our growth 2011-2017. Stephanie Wonderlick, Gordon Haff, Jim Whitehurst and Bryan Che were pivotal to helping find the cash to create the foundations of what we now know as Voxiferi Group. Without their belief, support and ultimately the cash investment for me to travel the world for seven years, this would not exist. What I learnt on those hundreds of thousands of miles travelling with recording equipment, recording in seventeen countries, was there is an easy way to do things in the podcasting world, and the hard way.
The hard way is often the better path.
We have continued, as we evolved into Voxiferi, to navigate how to be sufficiently different to engineer not just the best sounding audio we could using everything we have learnt since 2011, but how to use the platform technology knowledge that thirty years in Open Source has provided us.
One of the decisions we had to make was around how to serve our content to syndication networks and to listeners. The easy path, the quick route that everyone else goes down, is to simply record raw podcast content, for example in an MP3 file mixed down to it’s constituent parts. Once recorded, uploading it via a client, a command line or a user interface in a webpage to a host such as Spotify, LibSyn, Acast, Podbean or wherever you upload to get your content online. The content ending up discoverable via your RSS feed that is unique to your show.
Your show, depending on your legwork and popularity, then gets syndicated by the podcast directories and your content finds its way into listeners ears.
That is the easy path and allows you, as a podcaster to get your show into podcast directories. And for 99.9% of all podcasters and content creators – that’s enough. Job done, show recorded, show mixed, show broadcast, now relax.
We don’t believe that provides the sensible route to getting content to-air, and we know that podcasters and content creators who have taken that path are making huge mistakes. Mistakes because they don’t understand data, mistakes because they don’t understand product and show development, and fundamental errors that once they’ve gone down this route they can’t walk back from easily.
What they are doing is bizarre. Imagine being The Beatles. Imagine recording all your singles and albums, then uploading them to one source, one provider, and then just handing them over and walking away to make more singles, without being able to understand whats going to happen to or be able to monitor what is happening with each track as they are released.
That’s where the vast majority of podcasts are, a gazillion podcasts fighting for audience share and relevance making fundamental broken decisions simply to get to air. Even the big podcast hosts are making that same mistake of not being able to understand data and analysis.
What do we do differently ?
When we record a show we want to know if it works, if it sticks, if it resounds with listeners. We want to learn lessons from each individual segment of the show. We want to know infinite amounts of telemetry data at a service level to understand where our shows are popular, audience data and also we want to know who is syndicating it well and who we can help to syndicate our shows better. We also want to be able to understand social media interaction at a finite level and the interaction at show title and show episode level.
We need to be able to understand where to try harder, we need to know where to put more focus based on feedback and also on platform and node information and to be able to understand historic usage and predict future planning.
We also want to own our own content and to be the only place where our content ultimately comes from. We are, if you use old fashioned record company examples, the label. We don’t upload our content to an established media partner such as Spotify or LibSyn. There are plenty of podcasters who do and will continue to do so, but we decided to build our own platform.
There Be Dragons
The path of least resistance is to create content, upload to a host and relax. The difficult path is to build the layered technology that will host that show series and those episodes. That will manage your interactions on a per episode, per show level with social media platforms. That will deliver out detailed data on shows, episodes and trends on a level that you simply cannot ever get working with a podcast host provider platform.
But to build out that scalable architecture, to populate it with fast SSD harddisks that are mirrored and redundant to allow shows to remain on-air, and that will always be available, and to ensure that you have the fastest possible links at a hardware level when a show peaks and caching technology and load balancers that keep everything afloat.
And that takes money, coding and hard work.
But it means that we also protect our partners from AI harvesting (which is a massive issue) and we always have data we can analyse and share.
Yes we are different, but in years to come when people realise Patreon and dynamic ad insertion were the very worst things to happen to podcasts, people will look back and realise we were right.