Now if your podcast is just you talking then you can take a much simpler approach. Read no further.

However this investigation was inspired by the “live recording” of the 2 Web Crew. Having an audience contributing comments and questions via text chat created an interesting dynamic — similar to talkback radio but less formal. I wanted to explore further.

The technical challenge is combining all of the audio elements before the audio or video stream is piped up to Ustream or wherever. There’s probably quite a few ways to do this, but my starting-point was The UStream Tool Kit — which also covers Windows.

For an audio podcast, you can use either Ambrosia Software’s WireTap Studio or Rogue Amoeba’s Audio Hijack Pro to prepare the original sound. You can use a microphone for one voice or something like Skype or (yes, I am paying attention, Simon Rumble) Google Talk to record online conversations with others. Both tools can mix in audio from any running application — sound effects and music from iTunes, for example — and both can stream the audio to uStream or Justin.tv or wherever.

Once your program is recorded, you can use any number of audio editing tools to clean it up and remix it before uploading it as a “permanent” podcast. Audacity is a free open source multi-channel audio editor for Windows, OS X and Linux.

For a video podcast, you can of course record vision on any digital video camera or webcam and edit it in any video editing application. However an amazing free tool called Cam Twist turns your Mac into a complete live video mixing desk.

Cam Twist has camera switching and fades, text overlays, special effects, drop in pre-recorded movies and more. There’s even things which are possible only on a computer, like automatically turning a Flickr photo set into a slideshow, or running a text crawler across the bottom of the screen which is pulled in from an RSS feed. Again, you can use Ustream or Justin.tv to involve a live audience, and even route it through Skype to involve remote participants.

Cam Twist doesn’t do audio mixing, but you could run one of the audio tools in parallel, or have a second Mac doing the audio mix, or route the signal to an external audio mixer and then bring it back in. which approach you take depends on the complexity of your mixing needs.

The video in Cam Twist is standard “video chat” 320 x 240 pixels. However as computers become more powerful and bandwidth increases, Cam Twist or its successors will surely handle broadcast-quality material.

The final step is publishing the podcast and its associated RSS feeds. The simplest method is probably to use WordPress as your blogging platform, and add the podPress plug-in to deal with everything else.

podPress uploads and inserts your media file (audio or video) into the blog post with a player for formats including MP3, RM, OGG, MP4, MOV, QT, FLV, ASF, WMV and AVI. It automatically generates feeds for RSS2, iTunes and ATOM and BitTorrent RSS, and automatically submits the new episode to podcast directories including iTunes, Yahoo! Podcasts, Podcast Alley, Podcast Ready and Blubrry.

OK, that quick overview skipped a lot of important details. However each tool has comprehensive tutorials, and my main aim is to record my thinking as I develop my own podcast toolkit.

Tonight I’ll produce a test video podcast as a proof-of-concept exercise. Stay tuned. Details posted later today.

I’m not expecting too many problems. When I was with ABC Radio and elsewhere, I produced some fairly complex outside broadcasts. One involved tying together a program from Port Adelaide where one presenter was up in a lighthouse and the other was 300m away on a wharf without line of sight, and we had to incorporate live crosses to a cricket match at Adelaide Oval, a rowing race in Launceston, Tasmania, and of course the news on the hour. Oh, and did I mention we took talkback calls and had a live band? This is a doddle.

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Crikey has just published my article ABC Playback is a backwards step as a “Crikey essay”, no less. It combines the themes of my pieces about ABC Playback and the CBC BitTorrent trial.

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According to the last100 report, the CBC’s media release was clear:

“The show will be completely free (and legal) for you to download, share & burn to your heart’s desire.”

In a follow-up post Inside story: the making of a legal TV ‘torrent’, freelance producer Interactive Producer for CBC Guinevere Orvis explains how they got the approvals sorted within the CBC.

The issues, as always, were ownership, demographics, tracking, monetising and rights and approvals — especially the last two.

Rights are hands down the number one challenge to getting traditional TV online. It’s also not an unreasonable request for content producers to demand rights to work they made, it can just be a very difficult process to get them all… think dribbling a football type difficult. If the idea of a legal TV torrent was going to die, it would likely be in the chain of approvals we had to get including: union agreements, music licenses, lawyer approval, co-owner (Magna International Inc) approval, marketing and sales okay, business development reps, communication strategy, and finally approval from the network programming office. Yep, that’s a mouthful…

So why isn’t your favourite show on BitTorrent already? Officially I mean Take your pick: licensing, rights, approvals, sponsorships, business partnerships, control, business model, statistics, or simple resistance to change. I expect it would take a pretty big fight to get shows shared that are co-owned by multiple companies or which have extensive licensing contracts, like NHL games. There needs to be a fundamental shift in thinking about digital distribution before all of these stakeholders realize it’s a good idea and that’s one of the reasons that our experiment is so important. There will be no precedent, no metrics and no business model will ever develop if broadcasters don’t start somewhere. What we’re learning from this could help form the basis of a broader understanding and acceptance of BitTorrent among rights holders.

As I said yesterday, this is exactly what the Australian Broadcasting Corporation should be doing with ABC Playback.

The CBC had one factor working in their favour, says Orvis:

As a public broadcaster, our mandate to “be made available throughout Canada by the most appropriate and efficient means” really helped the cause.

And, as I said yesterday, the fact that the ABC Charter keeps repeating the word “broadcast” probably doesn’t help here. (Hat-tip to Boing Boing.)

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On Thursday an email told me that I’m a beta tester for ABC Playback, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Internet TV trial. So here we go…

I’ll gloss over the geeky stuff because the massively-brained Simon Rumble has already done a technical reconnaissance. Just three key points there from me:

1. It uses a Flash front end over XML program listings. Simon reckons it’ll be easy to hack up a Linux version for those who can’t use the official Windows and Mac interface. Or who want to avoid the pointless animations. Or who’d rather an easier-to-read high-contrast interface than trendy translucency.
2. A 30-minute program is compressed to a mere 130MB, which seems a reasonable compromise between quality and bandwidth — at least for infotainment — given the ABC’s need to serve regional audiences out on the Information Super-goat-track.
3. Did we really need to spend taxpayers’ money putting a clock in the top right of the screen? Computers already have clocks.

Technically it works just fine… but that’s not the real issue…

Disappointingly, ABC Playback seems more like the last gasp of old-style broadcast TV than a prelude to something new and wonderful.

Currently we’re offered three channels — though “channel” is a curious word in this context, since they’re just menu items.

1. ABC CatchUp has a selection of programs from ABC1 and ABC2 available for a week after their original broadcast. Right now that selection is limited: The Bill (inevitable, I guess), games review program Good Game, At The Movies, The New Inventors and How Art Made The World.
2. ABC Real is archived “factual and documentary” material — currently only the Sex in the Bush series about Aussie fauna on the bonk and the “magnificent documentary” The Kimberley: Land of the Wandjina.
3. ABC Shop is just “previews” (i.e. advertising) for DVDs you can buy. I shall not mention it again. I shall not view it again: the ABC Shop already has a website.

This article seems to be about threes, so here’s a third set: the three reasons I was disappointed.

1. The program selection was unappealing. OK, it’s only a test. I’m guessing the programs on offer were chosen to be “representative”. I can almost hear the dialog: “Well, The Bill is popular, we’d better have that, and David and Margaret too. Better have something for young people, what about Good Game? Oh, and something arty…” But why not have, say, The 7.30 Report and Lateline and the many other programs which are already available for download? Apart from How Art Made The World, everything on ABC CatchUp was disposable.
2. The catch-up is still tied to broadcast schedules. Only episode 2 of How Art Made The World was available, and because it was originally screened on Tuesday night, it’s only available for another 3 days. Who wants to start a series from episode 2? The Bill has already disappeared because it’s Saturday and new episodes are broadcast tonight — but this is precisely the time that a fan would want to catch up if they’d missed out last week.
3. I can’t save things for later. Perhaps this is the same point, but as ABC CatchUp is currently structured I have to watch episode 2 of How Art Made The World this week. I have to watch episode 3 next week. Why can’t I just spend a quiet evening watching the entire series? After all, it’s already been paid for, so the ABC’s aim should be to increase the audience, not put blocks in the way.

Actually there’s a fourth disappointment. I have to go to this “special place”, ABC Playback, to watch the programs. This isn’t how people are choosing to view online media.

Increasingly, people watch media where they want to watch it — in a proprietary system like iTunes or Windows Media Player, or an open system like Miro TV.

They expect to be able to use the media aggregator of their choice, to compile playlists of material from any source, and consume it when they want. In this respect, ABC Playback is a backwards step. It can’t be integrated with an existing media-consumption framework (unless someone like Simon hacks it), the playlists can contain only the ABC programs on offer, and things disappear according to arbitrary rules.

And there’s a fifth disappointment: I can’t schedule program downloads to happen late at night during my ISP’s off-peak time. I can only download as I watch.

Actually there’s a sixth disappointment too: where are the RSS feeds?

Again, I have to go to the special website and log in, just to see if there’s anything new. Wrong.

I do understand this is a trial. I do understand that storage space might be limited, or that there might be copyright restrictions — but they’re not my problems. This is precisely the old-medium thinking that needs to be overcome. And that’s where the effort needs to be expended — not on meaningless Flash animations to impress senior management.

Delivering broadcast-quality video to lots of viewers over the Internet isn’t rocket science. It’s just storage space and bandwidth — routine engineering problems. And as Norway’s national broadcaster has already demonstrated, it’s easy if you use BitTorrent instead of fearing it.

What the ABC needs to address is how it delivers its Charter obligations in the new age of the Internet.

(a) to provide within Australia innovative and comprehensive broadcasting services of a high standard as part of the Australian broadcasting system consisting of national, commercial and public sectors and, without limiting the generality of the foregoing, to provide:

(i) broadcasting programs that contribute to a sense of national identity and inform and entertain, and reflect the cultural diversity of, the Australian community; and
(ii) broadcasting programs of an educational nature;

(b) to transmit to countries outside Australia broadcasting programs of news, current affairs, entertainment and cultural enrichment that will:

(i) encourage awareness of Australia and an international understanding of Australian attitudes on world affairs; and
(ii) enable Australian citizens living or travelling outside Australia to obtain information about Australian affairs and Australian attitudes on world affairs; and

(c) to encourage and promote the musical, dramatic and other performing arts in Australia.

Perhaps in the case of ABC Television, that word “broadcast” keeps causing problems…

“Broadcast” still has that sense of “we spend millions of dollars making packaged entities called ‘programs’ which we then transmit at you”. In radio — and perhaps especially in the 4000-odd hours of talk and talkback radio I produced for the ABC — there’s already the sense of “broadcasting” as “managing a dialog”.

And this is the real challenge. How does the ABC contribute to “a sense of national identity” when everybody who isn’t totally poverty-stricken has a computer or telephone with a camera, a microphone and editing tools? When they all have access to broadcast services like Ustream or Justin.TV?

Talking about “national identity” is no longer the purview of a professional media class… and that’s where I’ll leave this already-long thought for today.

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While the music and movie companies rail against BitTorrent, Norwegian broadcaster NRK recently used the torrent’s capabilities to distribute a HD TV program to 80,000 people for just $350 total in storage and bandwidth.

[P]roject manager Eirik Solheim… estimated that the bandwidth bill would have been roughly $8000 had NRK chosen a more traditional delivery method…

All the HD video files were stored and delivered using Amazon’s S3 data service, which has optional bittorrent capabilities. NRK syndicated the .torrent episodes over an RSS feed, which allowed the program to work something like a podcast.

NRK recommends that people use Miro to subscribe: it’s the easiest way for folks to use BitTorrent and it fits their public-interest mission. The estimate that a high percentage of their downloaders (50% or more) are using Miro.

[...] Technically, the cost to the producer for distributing to a handful of viewers, say 300, is basically the same as doing so for 1,000,000 people. This is because after a point, distribution is handled by the viewers themselves; as the number of viewers rises, the work that NRK does stays constant.

I think I should be playing with Miro more…

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As the screenshot shows, Underbelly was online within two hours of broadcast. By mid-morning today, 6500+ people had downloaded it from Mininova alone.

As with the Corey Delaney episode before it, this highlights the stupidity of the law in the bold new age of the Internet. I have no complaint with Justice Betty King’s decision. She’s just upholding the law as it stands. The law, alas, is hopelessly inadequate.

Who, I wonder, has this kind of law reform on their agenda. Anyone?

Bonus links:

• My article for Crikey today: A torrent of interest in downloading Underbelly
• Mark Pesce’s presentation Unevenly Distributed: Production Models for the 21st Century, which includes a detailed discussion of how new distribution models like BitTorrent will change TV forever.

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