
Why Sound Will Be Bigger Than Video - fvryan
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/12/why-sound-will-be-bigger-than-video.html
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ippisl
A few points he forgot to mention about audio, without answering it's hard to
make a convincing argument:

1\. There isn't a lack of sound currently. there are tons of podcasts , and
even more video shows that can be consumed as sound(lectures, talk shows) .
And there's a lot of music. Lack of content is not a problem or a reason for
growth of future audio consumption.

2\. People already consume alot of sound. Mostly in the form of music ,
because of it's emotional content. There's no reason to suspect they'll
consume more music.

3\. It's easier to communicate in writing, because you can easily edit it.
Communicating with sound is more difficult(if you want to offer interesting
content).

4\. People prefer high bandwidth communication mediums over low bandwidth
communication mediums. People prefer communication mediums you can control
their speed and skip over content easily.

Why ? Both of this issues help with flow and engagement.

5\. lack of good podcast monetization scheme. since good audio is much harder
to produce than text , that's important.

EDIT: most of the work on making spoken audio interesting has been done on the
content side. Relatively little has been done on the technology side. I wonder
if there are some opportunities there.

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wslh
And the search cost problem. It's difficult to be findable.

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ansgri
That at least can be solved by technology.

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wslh
well, I think it's not being solved with technology right now. If individuals
need to spend a lot of time in marketing and sales (i.e.: SEO, SEM) then there
is not enough time for creation.

The problem with the usual long tail analysis is not that stuff in the tail
have few customers, it's a lot of the tail is not discoverable.

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fat0wl
There seems to be a common problem emerging amongst internet entrepreneurial
types -- I know its only a small part of the argument but its something that
really irks me since I saw the guy from Khush do a lecture where he did
something similar. They equate the generation of content (in minutes, in
songs) as being somehow equal without really considering artistic aspects of
creation or consumption. Great, some app can produce 30 million songs. They
are derived from templates & I'd be surprised if the creators themselves even
listen to them in their entirety.

I realize these guys are business dudes who have a tech fetish & have mainly
left their artistic streak behind, but it would be really cool if proponents
of excessively expanding media had more ideas for how to achieve some quality
standard for creativity rather than creating tons of novelty apps. (Props to
Soundcloud I guess for being on the BETTER end of that spectrum.)

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kbutler
Irony: "Sound will be bigger than video...If you can find the time to _watch_
it, do that and then let's discuss his arguments" (emphasis mine)

Why do we have to have video of everything from programming tutorials to "guy
walking around a stage talking"?

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jasonlotito
Mute the audio. Watch the video. What value do you gain? Now, turn the audio
on, and don't watch the video. What value do you gain there?

It's an interesting way to look at things..

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tuacker
It is next to impossible for me to focus on audio (spoken) only. If I need to
listen to something it has to be video or I opt for a transcript instead. Just
a random data point that audio without video can be of no value too.

~~~
jasonlotito
I can find exceptions for every form of media. There are deaf people, blind
people, and people who can't read.

However, even if you can't focus on spoken audio, you can realize that a large
majority of normal people can. You're exceptions don't make this any less
true.

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phodo
If you recall, Odeo was Soundcloud v1.0, and it failed. Well, it produced
Twitter, but from a market perspective that entity failed. The story is that
the folks at Odeo were not "podcast people" (and thus didn't really eat their
own dogfood) and furthermore, this was exacerbated when Apple added the
podcast directory to iTunes, and they called it quits (in a very gentlemanly
way). I'm not trying to say that Odeo and Soundcloud are exactly the same by
any means, but it does point out a valuable lesson that there is value of
revisiting/repositioning/resegmenting an existing market, and how it can lead
to momentum, and ultimately success. (This notion is touched on in the 4 Steps
to the Epiphany, and is not my original idea). Note that I was/am a user of
both odeo and soundcloud, although i really like where SC is going.

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colinm
No it won't. EOM

