Spashcast - Cool New Service, Needs Some Work
Monday, April 30, 2007
Someone asked me today about Splashcast, and then I saw an article on Podcasting News about their new service, so I thought I would take a look.
Its a very interesting concept: Splashcast provides its users a way to create a "show" from video, audio, images, and even documents, and play the latest content on their web page or blog using Splashcast's management system and flash player.
Splashcast also has support for adding podcasts to your channel from either their directory or by adding the feed yourself. Since I'm mostly interested in podcast promotion and audience acquisition I made a channel of video and audio podcasts, although I did include one of my images from flickr that was tagged 'ppme' for the Podcast and Portable Media Expo.
The directory is a little light, and although it lets the user add podcasts by the show's feed directly I wasn't successful in getting this to work with one of my favorites: Riding with the Window Down. (It did however work just fine with the feed from Geeknews Central.)
| My Splashcast Channel |
The user interface takes a little getting used to - the flash interface is small and cannot be expanded to take up the browser window. Its simple enough though: add the podcasts that you like, organize them into channels, create a player, and assign the channels to players. My player above contains my one channel I created.
There are a couple of things I think podcasters might take issue with regarding how Splashcast handles their content: caching, and repackaging feeds. The caching was discussed in the comments following the Podcasting News post and I think the response from the Splashcast team shows that they are already on top of the potential issue.
The feeds that Splashcast publishes for each show is not the podcaster's original feed, but rather a repackaged feed coming from Splashcast's own server. Odeo did this in the very beginning, as did Podcast Alley, but both companies changed that very quickly. Its been an issue in the past (that led to a rather overblown [IMHO] news cycle) and quite frankly I was a little surprised to see anyone still doing it.
The thing I found more troubling is that the feeds they do provide have no "enclosure" statements, meaning that a would-be subscriber to my show cannot plug it into iTunes or myPodder and automatically receive my content. The feeds do work in "standard" RSS readers such as Google's and the latest episode is presented there in Flash, but it does not link back to the content owner's original content and the credits are a fuzzy. (For instance, the feed for GeekbriefTV reads: "GeekBrief.TV | Video Podcast by SplashCast Feed Agent")
At the end of the day, its really up to the individual podcaster to decide if any of these are real issues; I'm assuming they can choose to participate or not. I think its a very interesting service though, and will give podcasters a good tool for creating content, promoting podcasts and grow ing their audience, as well as users the ability to show off their favorite shows.
Labels: podcast, podcasting, splashcast
posted by Russell @ 10:56 PM,
1 Comments:
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At 6:53 AM,
Rob Safuto said...
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I think the feed issue is really important to podcasters. I added one of my shows over there to check out the new features. And I was surprised to see that the feed linked in the player went to SplashCast.
I've commented over on the SplashCast blog and I hope to see them make adjustments in the coming days.
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