Brewing in the Engineering Lab: Announcing Podcast Pingback
Since joining the team at Aiir, one thing I’ve been keen to push forward is conducting more research and development and wherever possible to conduct that work “in the open”.
What do we mean by research and development? Typically, conducting experimentation and working on ideas that are not tangibly linked to our day-to-day work. That’s not to say we start going out and designing fashionable sneakers, or solving world economics — the area of exploration is still firmly rooted in radio and audio content. We always strive to better the workflow of our customers. How can we help them achieve their goals more efficiently with the increasing commercial pressures on resource?
Sometimes it’s a balance of spotting a trend early on, looking in to our crystal ball at the future, and trying to work out what the dotted line between the two looks like. One such trend that is clearly growing and growing is the recent “renaissance” in podcast and on-demand audio. There’s a huge buzz around podcasting at the moment and some fantastic content out there from new and established outlets alike. But one thing that’s still challenging podcast producers is getting reliable, all encompassing statistics that demonstrate who is listening, when, where and for how long.
On Friday our engineering team released one of our first public R&D projects, Podcast Pingback. The concept is an open specification that anyone can pick up and use. The method defined in the specification provides a way for podcast app developers to implement a simple, lightweight way of “pinging” information about a listener’s habits back to the author/publisher/host of the podcast being listened to.
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This then allows the host of the podcast to provide detailed statistics about how many people listened, what they listened to, what they skipped past, and potentially provide demographics such as where they’re located and how old they are.
If you’re technically minded, I’d seriously encourage you to take a look at the site we’ve created for this project which gives a more technical introduction and features the specification itself alongside a proof-of-concept demo.
Our desire to sponsor this kind of work isn’t a direct indication of a forthcoming product. But within Aiir we’re always thinking about all areas of our offering, even if they’re not currently under development. We’re keen to take our podcast offering forward in the future and sometimes there’s a piece missing in the jigsaw of what we’d like to offer and what is currently technically possible.
This is where R&D comes in and, whilst not a scientifically 100% failsafe way of moving things in position how you want, it allows us to spin up a small piece of work to suggest how things could be and float it out to the wider community for consensus and validation.
If you’re interested in the project and helping take it further, please visit the website or get in touch, we’d love to hear from you. If you’re a fan of a particular podcast client, why not reach out to the developer and make them aware of the effort?
The future development of podcasting is really exciting to us at Aiir and we’re keen to do our little bit to push the industry forward.
Photo: Bio Lab by Amy on Flickr.
