33 PODCASTING Profile
offering. In fact, the majority of National Public Radio (NPR) stations in the US do both their streaming and podcasting through StreamGuys. “Our main goal is to help our customers maximise the hard work they put into their content on a daily basis,” says Eduardo Martinez, director of technology at StreamGuys. “We want to help them find ways they can easily repurpose that content, and to be able to monetise that and reach a wider audience.” The automatic distribution of content across multiple platforms is a must in a world where budgets are tight and schedules are tighter. StreamGuys allows its broadcast customers to port their livestreamed shows directly into downloadable podcasts quickly and easily with its enterprise podcast CMS. “If a customer has a live radio stream and they have a show that happens on a fairly fixed schedule, they might want to turn that into a podcast,” explains Martinez. “But they might not have the manpower to do that production and clipping, so we offer tools that let people take that programme off the schedule, archive it in our cloud and turn it into a podcast automatically. And then we give them the ability to publish that to other platforms as needed.” Though its employment by US public broadcasters has grown steadily over the years, StreamGuys also provides a podcast publishing platform for commercial broadcasters, including Cox Media Group. “Our growth with public broadcasters has been kind of organic through word of mouth,” says Martinez. “Stations see how we help customers and see the bespoke services we offer. You’re definitely not a number at StreamGuys. It’s a white-glove treatment. We offer a dedicated account management team and do monthly check-ins. We take a look at a station’s roadmaps to see what its goals are for the year and how we might modify our internal roadmaps to meet those goals.” PEOPLE WERE DOING PODCASTING EVEN BEFORE IT WAS CALLED PODCASTING. ITWAS JUST ON-DEMAND AUDIO
as platforms for podcast hosting. Odeo was another short-lived platform, started by ex- Google employee Evan Williams, who later became CEO of a little thing called Twitter. Podcasting has moved on from the days of The Dawn and Drew Show , Keith and The Girl and Leo Laporte’s This Week In Tech – although all three of these are still going a decade and a half later. Podcasts have now become a major, low-cost branding exercise for companies, attracting huge, global – and very loyal – audiences. WORD OF MOUTH StreamGuys has been in the streaming media game since the very beginning and is helping major media organisations, particularly in the US public broadcast sector, add podcasting to their content
osting episodic audio on the internet is almost as old as the internet itself. But the age of podcasting started in 2001, when
a device for downloading and listening to this content conveniently appeared in everyone’s back pocket: the iPod. Early podcasts (also called audioblogs) were downloaded directly from a creator’s website and listened to on a computer or synced to your iPod via iTunes. But when protocols for downloading audio via RSS were established, loading up multiple episodes on your device became automatic – and podcasting became a phenomenon. It didn’t take long for dedicated podcasting platforms to appear. Libsyn (Liberated Syndication) and Blubrry were two of the biggest and both are still thriving
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