Talking Voices Ireland

Sales of Guinness was down six percent in Ireland and the company’s CEO knows exactly what’s to blame: gadgets. Rather than while away their hours in pubs, he says that young men have developed another perverse addiction, and are spending their money on “electronic stuff such as iPods”.

Now if Guinness wifi enabled the pub world we could warm our socks by the fire on rainy days in Ireland, as we surf the information bóthar mor. Sounds like don’t blame the smoking ban blame iPods to me. Guinness Podcast any day soon, ah go on.
[picture taken on xdaII; more electronic stuff in pubs; 20/07/2005 by BHG]

On Thursday The Broadcasting Commission of Ireland (BCI) introduced interim policy paving the way for Satellite uplinking by Irish local radio stations. The Commission has awarded contracts in principle to County Media Limited (Cork’s 96FM/103 County Sound), Treaty Radio Limited (Limerick’s Live 95), Independent Broadcasting Corporation Limited (LMFM), and City Broadcasting Limited (Q102). Once finalised, the contracts will allow for the retransmission of these services via satellite.

with ITV FTA these UTV radio’s might be heading for Astra2D.
full details Interim Radio Licensing policy (PDF)

[BHG's prediction addiction]
as of today’s date (19/11/2005)
25,000 Podcasts and counting on iTunes
19,921 are be tracked by PodNova.com
10,276 submitted to podcastalley.com

numbers numbers, Im looking at a magic number 36,000, the number of radio stations worldwide (according to ‘I am an oil tanker‘ by Fi Glover). 5000 of these stations broadcast / stream on the web according to brsradio.com.

OK a podcast is akin to a show not a station, but as these podcasts are independently (of each other) distributed, subscribed & listened to, I will hold the comparison for now.

Now to do this correctly I would need historic benchmarks from the 4 sources above which I only have anecdotally but PodNova was tracking 13,000 6 weeks ago. That’s 1000 new podcasts a week. This week iTunes(>4.8) (with podcasts) is 5 months old and it started with about 8,000 now 25,000+ that’s a growth of 810 a week for iTunes and I wont compare figures for podcastalley.com as there have slowed so much since podshow stepped in.

So with these growth rates in 14 weeks time say February 28th 2006 or St. Patricks Day (17/03), iTunes should be listing more podcasts than the world has radio stations.

This will make podcasts more numerous than radio, but it wont make is bigger than radio. Radio has a 100 year head start. It wont either allow podcasting take radio’s ‘STAR’ any time soon, nor will it eat much of its ad revenue.

Now take 36,000 podcasts as choice. See how trends in radio listening is falling hour by day by week by commute. Add iPod Xmas, and a dollop of press hype and podcasts will eat the socks off banal radio wallpaper.

You see it is not podcasting versus radio, its passion over dominance.
LONG LIVE RADIO (wherever you may be)

“So don’t become some background noise
A backdrop for the girls and boys
Who just don’t know or just don’t care
And just complain when you’re not there
You had your time you had the power
You’ve yet to have your finest hour
Radio” (queen).

I have set up a list at webnet.ie called opencast@webnet.ie

The function of the list is to discuss the setting up of a representative body for Podcasters in Ireland. The list is open for anyone to join and discuss this topic.

The need exists to safe guard the activity of podcasters regards licencing, legal and a range of other issues like standards, training, hosting, product placement & sponsorship.

The body which will be formed from the list will produce an FAQ via wiki at a new domain to be announced.

If you would like to join the list details are below, if you know of any groups or individuals commercial or grass roots independent, that would benefit from the list please cross post this message in other forums or forward them this email.

to join email majordomo@webnet.ie with
subscribe opencast
in the first and only line in the body of a plain text email

regards Brian Greene.

classichits.ie will be launched Nov 30th 2005 using the AAC plus format for streaming. on their site they say

We’re launching our new Irish service on November 30th, 2005, with a full service and a brand new web site.

Check back to listen to our test transmissions and get ready for high-quality audio featuring the 80’s, 90’s and more! We strongly recommend that our listeners use the WINAMP (Vers5.1) player which is fully compatible with our aacPlus audio stream.

Classic Hits .FM plays the best music and the biggest hits from the 80’s, 90’s and more with some of Ireland’s best radio presenters.

Now Ireland or the world could live without another classic hits format radio but at least the tech boat is being pushed beyond WMA or Real Media. Strangely the site shares domains with podcast.ie are they planning to podcast this digital music, we shall try to find out… anyone got a mobile number for Sean Ashmore?

according to podcastingnews Santa is podcasting.

also admanaget.nl quotes a Bridge Ratings report that says

By 2010 podcast audience growth is expected to reach a conservative 45 million users who will have ever listened to a podcast. Aggressive estimates place this number closer to 75 million by this date.

and Christopher Breen writes Podcasting: The profit of passion

TechTV/Twit’s Leo Laporte acknowledged that the chances of making a lot of money from podcasting were slim. So why do it? Because you can and because you care. You’ve got something to say and you want to share that something with the world.

Do you own an Apple iPod® or a device with a headphone jack? Ever wanted to play it through your car stereo? Easy to use, just like plugging in your headphones. For Clean, Clear, and Dynamic Stereo sound right in your own car.

similar kit to the one pictured are on sale in Tesco priced €9.99 [at least I got one in the Carrick On Shannon store last week]

Other means of listening to podcasts in your car include forgetting the iPOD or any MP3 player, just sync your downloaded podcasted shows to a CD-RW, then using something like Sony’s CDX-GT200 car stereo you can playback the shows in MP3 format. Sony’s CDX-GT100 also comes with a 3.5mm stereo socket for input of iPods and other MP3 players.

In the future, your RSS feeds will bluetooth 90 feet down your driveway to be automatically sync’ed to your cars on board media hard disk. Unless your drive is longer than 90 feet….

According an RTE Radio1 show; The Quantum Leap, its newsletter states, RTE will begin podcasting RSS/MP3 today…. welcome montrose.. o domhnaill abu 32bits Erin, loud n clear, QSL?

Please join us at 8pm if you can. From tomorrow we’ll be podcasting the programme with RSS feeds, as well has providing mp3 downloads from the site www.rte.ie/radio1/quantum

I hope we get compelling new content not a repeat service, and access to ‘our’ national audio archive on request for the internet age, it would also be good to lay to rest the ghost of DeValera and his hatred of shortwave which crippled our young nations ability to broadcast beyond our own shores. Ireland is a proud nation, stand up be counted and broadcast to the world.