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The Subscription Age (part 2): Digital Content Delivery
At FeedBurner I get to see first-hand the many developments in content subscription and syndication technology. This is the second in a series of posts about how these technologies are changing the ways we receive content, stay up-to-date, and keep in touch.
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In this post, I’m going to talk about how digital content delivery is changing in The Subscription Age.
But we can’t do that without talking about RSS, Atom and their role in distributing text content.
Text
Text feeds are Really Simple subscribable content. In the past few years, adoption of feeds by both publishers and readers has skyrocketed.
No matter how you measure, a significant number of web sites — mostly blogs, news sources and other periodicals — offer readers the ability to subscribe and receive content in their email inbox or feed reader.
And increasingly, publishers are offering full content feeds (over partial-content or “summary” feeds), so subscribers receive not just updates and links back to the publisher’s site, but the actual content they want.
This is huge, and it’s transforming the way people stay current.
I think the success of The Subscription Age — our new, “everything is subscribable” age — hinges on our ability to automatically deliver digital content to consumers. It’s not just about alerts anymore.
Podcasting
Once it was feasible (and worthwhile) to distribute subscribable text content, it was a short conceptual leap to do the same for audio, video and other rich media.
Podcasting* came into its own in late 2004, and has since taken off in a big way. (FeedBurner alone manages close to 40,000 podcasts.)
Podcasting is unique because feeds are the primary means of delivering content. Unlike text feeds, which may contain full content, short summaries, or just titles, every podcast has what amounts to a “full content” feed.
This standardization encourages the development of exciting, robust applications and accelerates the adoption of podcasting.
Because podcasts are delivered as feeds:
- Podcatchers can provide seamless integration with other applications and devices (i.e. iTunes and iPod)
- Podcast directories are useful and reliable (can you imagine a directory of text feeds? Only a handful of the content sources would actually come with full content.)
- Podcast content can be easily micro-chunked and redistributed, with the feed as the standard format
Image podcasting (photocasting)
Although creating and distributing image podcasts is no different than doing it with audio and video, we haven’t seen the same kind of boom.
It’s a shame. Everyone takes (and shares) photos. Millions of useful, interesting images are created every year, and sites like Flickr have capitalized on our desire to share and explore them.
I’ve been interested in image podcasting since we added it to SmartCast, and I’m excited by some of the recent developments.
For example:
- iPodderX (now Transistr) automatically loads images into an iPhoto album of your choice
- iPhoto itself (as of version 6) allows you to subscribe to image podcasts (Apple calls them photocasts)
- Both of these ↑ developments mean that you can create an automatically updated screen saver based on the photos in a feed!
- The eStarling digital picture frame can subscribe to image podcasts (so Grandma will always see your latest pictures)
All the above-mentioned advantages of podcasting apply equally to image podcasting. When you distribute your content in a standardized format (like a feed!), people can do great things — and they can do them easily.
TiVo and friends
Lest you think this series is all about RSS and Atom feeds, I must mention TiVo (and a couple other services) before ending this post.
Television content is not yet subscribable, but TiVo (and its generic brethren) do a great job of helping us forget that.
Because of TiVo, people are able to subscribe to their favorite shows and have that content show up “on their TV” automatically. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
The popularity of on-demand television and online video stores demonstrate that a show-based approach — as opposed to an always-on video-stream approach — works.
In the next few years, I expect commercial subscription services (Rhapsody, XM/Sirius, Nerve.com, etc) to make their content truly subscribable so that your favorite shows/artists/articles are always waiting for you.
We’ve come to expect this from free content on the web — it’s only right that the for-pay services should do it too.
Next
Next up is Synchronization (#3 in the list) and then I’ll finish up by talking about the idea of personal subscriptions.
Your comments, questions and input — as always — are welcome in the comments form or via email.
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The series
This is the second in a series of posts.
- The Subscription Age intro
- Subscribable content delivery
- Synchronization (coming soon)
- Personal subscriptions (coming soon)
* When I say “podcasting,” I mean audio and video (and any other kind of rich media!) podcasting. Like it or hate it, “Podcasting” is clearly a word with staying power and I figure we might as well embrace it.