News Ricky Gervais takes podcasting paid-for

[WilHarris]

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2006/02..._podcast_paid/

[Kipman725]

fair enough there professionals and at least non of the money goes to the people at sony . The price seems ok, it's less than a two cd set and the artists by distribuiting themselves will be getting more for their work.

[The_Pope]

I'd pay that tbh - if you divided $7 by the sheer number laughs per half hour, it's a BARGAIN. You can't even see a film these days for £4.50, yet you get 120 minutes of comedy genius. Seems fair enough to me.

[Tim S]

I will be paying, no question

[Shadowed_fury]

£4.50? Not bad at all for a month.
I'd pay.

[WilHarris]

I'll be getting it. 120 mins @ £4.50 is a bargain.

[The_Pope]

Price elasticity at it's best

(meaning if it was £10 a month, few people would bother, but at £4.50 a month, more than double would now pay ie disproportionately more.)

[Fusen]

I got quite bored of the constant theme of the podcast which was just plainly laugh at karl acting like a retard, and shouting about his bald head. I REALLY can't see it being as successful as it was when people are expected to pay for it.

[Tomm]

Hmm, I really enjoyed the first series of Podcasts, but I'd hope they're gonna step it up a bit if they're forcing everyone to pay. I probably will pay the £4.50, but grudgingly. As Fusen said, the show was pretty simple.

[NuTech]

Just read the Audible.co.uk site and I'm pretty sure it's just a one-off payment of £4.50 (not a monthly subscription) with a minimum of 4 episodes. They've said they'll most likely do more at no extra charge (4 is probably just a bare minimum in case the sales are really low).

[BioSniper]

Where can I obtain the first series of pod casts from? Mind you ive kinda been living under a rock as ive never actually seen any point/reason in pod casts, guess its because I dont even actually have an mp3 player (as I listen to music in the car I use mp3 cd's)

[Tomm]

http://rickygervais.com/podcast.php

[Boon]

Originally Posted by BioSniper

Where can I obtain the first series of pod casts from? Mind you ive kinda been living under a rock as ive never actually seen any point/reason in pod casts, guess its because I dont even actually have an mp3 player (as I listen to music in the car I use mp3 cd's)

It seems you can only grab the latest 4 episodes from http://www.guardian.co.uk/rickygervais or iTunes the archive will apparently be available on Audible along with the new content.

I have to say, this might make me unpopular, but the popcast started well but the last few (read 5) have been quite poor and as mentioned above consist of insulting Karl rather than anything more substantial. I'm a Gervais fan as much as the next guy, the Office and Extras were great, but sometimes I feel he misses the mark like with Politics and this podcast. Bear in mind I never really got into anything other than a few clips of Little Britain and thought Series 3 was terrible.

I can understand why the podcast is so popular but pure content is not reason IMO. Will I pay for it? well as you have guessed probably not but I'm sure it will continue it's massive popularity as a paid podcast.

Also I'm not sure it's the first paid-for Podcast as LBC has been offering a paid for podcast service in addition to free clips for a few weeks now at £2.50 a month. I'm sure other media outlets offer similar. Bill O'Reilly offers a podcast of his radio show as a added bonus of being a premium member.

[Firehed]

IMO, the interface of how you listen to podcasts (at least on actual iPods) needs to be improved first. If you're like me and get a bit lazy about it, you listen to a bunch at once, and the current setup is just a repeat-one loop (so 43 Folders' 4min podcasts aren't really a viable choice if you've hooked the player to the car in some way or another).

And for me, the whole perk about podcasts was that they're free content. In some situations a paid-content approach makes enough sense, but for a lot it's just silly. If they were good (they meaning those who have 'podgrabbing' apps, iTunes included), a P2P distro method would be incorportated, so the bandwidth costs are now for just a few users, rather than absolutely everyone who listens. The logistics of implementing it would be tricky, but I think this is one situation where P2P is not only a great approach but easily the best.

I think it's just as much covering bandwidth costs as actually making money, and while I have nothing against premium content, P2P'ing it would definately negate the need for paying for bandwidth, at least for the most part.

[Boon]

Presumably the new podcasts will be DRM'ed, of course presumably you could do the old burn to CD and re-rip removal method if you were fussed.

[AlexB]

I wont be paying. Bit of a shame. now everyone will follow suit, and blah de blah.

[Firehed]

Originally Posted by Boon

Presumably the new podcasts will be DRM'ed, of course presumably you could do the old burn to CD and re-rip removal method if you were fussed.

I dunno how that would work, unless they plan to make it an iPod-exclusive podcast. The whole nature of podcasting makes it hard to protect anyways, seeing that all a podcast is are mp3's linked to in an RSS feed. But whadda I know?

[yodasarmpit]

Originally Posted by bigz

I will be paying, no question

So will I, and it's all your fault bigz

I have not laughed so much in years.
It's comedy GOLD

[RTT]

Definitely won't be paying. Insanely funny but not for a price. Given that they've already got ads for channel4, the guardian and the hosting company (the name escapes me) I'm sure they're doing well enough already. Cashing in?

Edit: They should make it a donation based system, and by donating you get the show a few days earlier. That way everyone is happy, and i bet they'd make roughly the same amount of money as they will under the proposed changes... (i.e. people who will gladly donate will be the people who will buy the podcast).

[Anakha]

Wow. Way to go cashing in on something that Audible's been doing for YEARS.

Back in 1999 I was listening to "Robin Williams @ Audible.com" and "AudibleProops", the first being a weekly half-hour segment with Robin Williams and various comedy partners (Whoopie Goldberg, Bobcat Goldthwaite, Eric Idle and so on), and the latter being Greig Proop's take on current events, handed out in bi-weekly doses.

And these weren't the only things available on Audible at the time. There were all kinds of weekly (And daily!) shows available to download, for pennies per show (Or a 6-monthly or yearly season-ticket), from the Wall Street Journal read daily, Time Magazine, Interviews with Authors and all kinds of things.

I used to listen to these gems on my Diamond Rio 500 player (Which is Audible compatible) as I took the London Underground to work every day. 64Mb onboard, plus a 64Mb SmartMedia card meant I could listen to 58 hours worth of Audible Content, from one AA battery, and the Rio 500 was more than smart enough to know EXACTLY when you stopped so there was no need to seek through the file to resume on the journey home.

But now it's called "Podcasting". Well isn't that extra special.

Oh, and for those of you worried about DRM, Audible has a very unique system. You bought it, you can use it as many times as you like. With no restriction on when you can get it (That reminds me, I must re-download "Black House" by Stephen King. I love that book). And for the sadist in you, you can freely burn the tracks to audio CD (Though, for something like the aforementioned "Black House", you'll be looking at a collection of 24 CD's for one book). They compress the audio very carefully, with custom codecs in the lower quality ranges, so you can get the most out of your content (And the most out of your player).