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Recently, I have been enjoying listening to a number of different podcasts. My favorite podcast without question is This American Life. If you have never listed to this on NPR, I absolutely recommend checking it out, their shows are so interesting, I just cannot get enough. I also have been enjoying video podcasts from the TED conference and Zefrank is very funny at times.
This weekend I was going through iTunes’ directory of podcasts and saw The American Experience had a podcast, a great show on PBS. I subscribed and downloaded a number of episodes that looked interesting to me. On my way into work today, I turned one on and began to listen. After about 5 minutes, the damn thing just stopped. I thought maybe it did not download all the way or something when I realized that all of the ones I downloaded were 5 minutes in length.
They were previews… My question is WHY?!?!?! Why of why PBS did you do this? The episodes have already played, it’s not like I am getting an early listening to this? You’re fricken PBS, you don’t play commercials and even if you did, you could just add the commercials in the Podcast, I’ll wait. More importantly, when I went back into iTunes, I could not even buy them if I wanted to.. Boy, that is some great user experience you PBS’ers are putting on over there.
I then noticed a number of customer reviews and they all said the exact same thing I am saying. Why are these only 5 minutes out of an hour episode? Why don’t you bother telling people that they are previews before they download them?
When are TV, radio, newspaper, magazine and music executives going to get it. Technology has enabled and empowered people to do things on their own schedule and not yours! If there is a show that I want to watch, I will DVR it and watch it when I am damn well good and ready. If there is something I want to read in the New York Times, I will sign in and read it at 4 am, in bed, if I so choose.
So PBS, you think by giving me a 5 minute preview, I am going to do what? Buy the episode? HA! You heard me, I said HA! I could not buy them even if I wanted to, but what you have done is forced me to unsubscribe from your podcasts and remove any proof that you ever existed on my iPod. BE GONE! In other words, you are toast…
When are you guys going to wake up and realize the game has changed?
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Technorati Tags: podcasts, This American Life, NPR, TED conference, Zefrank, iTunes, The American Experience, user experience
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Cord,
You hit the nail on the head with this one. I have a prospective client I am working with that does a radio show, I am trying to explain to them that we need to offer the show as a podcast with a full archive, and having a hard time.
They are so used to making a little bit of money off cd sales from archived episodes. They just aren’t ready to realize that attention is what matters.
Attention now equals page views and book sales later.
All we can do is fight each fight, one client at a time.
At the end of the day, the internet will be a better place to browse.
This is once again what we have talked about in the past as two different departments of a large corporation still not seeing eye to eye. Or in this case seeing it from the perspective of an everyday web 2.0 media user.
From this perspective we see that they are still in the 1990’s train of thought. “To give a little and have them come back and purchase the whole thing at a later time.” Now if they had given you the ability to download the whole show you may have become a life long PAYING customer of any new products that they publish. But now you have deleted ever knowing them and I am sure that every time you turn on your TV and see the PBS station you will think of this day!
And now think of this, everyone reading this will think of this post for many weeks when they here about PBS.
Adam - You know This American Life is a great example that you can speak to your client about. What they do is they put out the most recent episode free each week. When the next episode goes up the other is taken down and put into the archives. They charge if you want to listen and download one of the archives. Though since they offer such quality, I had no problem at all, paying a buck to pay for back episodes.
I think the question I would ask your client are your programs good enough that people will actually pay for them?
Mark - You are absolutely right. I have a total bad taste in my mouth as I was all psyched to listen to this episode and then it was ruined when it was only a 5 minute teaser. And you can book money on that when PBS calls me this year for cash, which I always give to, I am going to tell them to stuff their tote bags.
Thanks guys for the comments.