| I think it’s a great opportunity. Shoutcast has a greater installed base than Icecast. But more importantly a really passionate user base. However there is broken feature by design on ALL those streaming services: they stop for whatever reason. As a listener it’s a terrible experience. It’s alaways when you start listening something you really like that it stops. And you could think it stops because I try to listen on the mobile, so that’s normal. NO it stops even at home on your desktop. When you start listening a stream, you’re 100% of one thing : it will stop but NOT when you decide to stop it. But it wouldn’t be that hard to build a system that actually use a better caching system and pretend to be live instead of trying to stream a live content. Listeners already grasped the idea of listening events which are not “live” thanks to podcasts. In fact what is streamed nowadays is mainly pre-recorded songs/stories. So the notion of “live” is absolutely not necessary unless you’re broadcasting sports or once-in-a-lifetime events.
And then TV / FM does a much better job. That said, Shoutcast services are mainly non-live type of streams anyways. So there is a great opportunity to buy the installed base of Shoutcast creators and listeners and Winamp userbase (pro-anti itunes). The main idea is you change the sofwtare to make it work even when there is no internet connection. A better caching system needs to be made on the device itself and on the server side. In terms of monetization, it’s easy: audio adverts have already proved financial success. It does work only because of their repetition AND their relation with the audience. The best example of audio adverts are the songs with high rotation counts: they are the adverts of the big labels. Here you got a system of dedicated listeners that you can target repetitively, endlessly, fairly (you don’t have to stream blocks of minutes of adverts) Audio ads on webcast radio start to catch up with Radionomy systems by example. AOL proved they couldn’t leverage that community. I don’t think Microsoft will do any better job as their main focus will be “integrate”.
A strategy that rarely works. Of course “a non-stop stream even without internet connection“ can happen without buying Shoutcast & Winamp, but what a fantastic opportunity and shortcut for those who can. |
It is something that is not available in the Netflix-es, and Hulus of the world (and something that Cable still has).