After watching the season premiere of Lost I read references to a video podcast with the producers. “Great!” I thought, “I can download a video podcast and watch it on the way to work!”
ABC did have an audio podcast with the previous season, a rather enjoyable and somewhat insightful program. So I headed over to ABC’s Lost site and scanned it for the video podcast. Ah! There it is. I click the link and… get the ABC video player. What?
That’s right: the video podcast is a video. It is not a podcast because, insofar as I can see, it does not include a file I can subscribe to which updates itself regularly.
This is misleading and, in my opinion, damaging particularly given ABC has done audio podcasts before. I suspect that someone thought it would be a good idea to capitalize on the audio podcast with a video one, and no one figured out a good way to distribute the video correctly via a podcast subscription. Thus, they kept the label and made it standalone.
It’d be like someone telling you they were going to give you a subscription to The New York Times and when you said, “Sure!”, they handed you a copy and said, “Okay – meet me here again tomorrow at this time and I’ll give you tomorrow’s edition.”
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Posted in Technology
kevinenjoi October 6, 2006, 12:35 pm
Yeah that totally makes sense man. It is beyond me why anyone would try to say a video podcast is a podcast at all…
Dave Walls October 6, 2006, 7:21 pm
It’s all about the buzzwords…who cares if they actually work or not.
Anyone who does searches for “PODCAST” “LOST”, or anything like that gets directed. More clicks means more advertising dollars. That’s all that matters.
Besides, I need more than a simple podcast to start restoring my faith in “Lost”, anyways. That ship has been sinking for a while in my book.