Local Content Delivery via Mobile

Ewan Spence pinged me this morning to point to his latest venture, The Edinburgh Fringe Podcast. Starting next week, he's going to be doing a daily 30-minute podcast of/from/about the festival with interviews, reviews and all the rest. This got me thinking that distributing this sort of thing to mobile phones could get pretty cool.

Ewan's cracked the nut of one big problem that plagues a lot of podcasts (just like it does blogs): boring content. Producing a tightly targeted show like this around an event is a great idea, particularly when it can act as a resource for people participating in the festival. But getting it right to mobiles would be even better. Events like this can quickly eat up peoples' downtime, and even though sitting in front of a computer waiting for the file to download and sync isn't that big an imposition, it would be even better if it would download automatically to your mobile, so it's there waiting for you when you get some time. It's well-suited to the idea of bite-sized content: I may not sit and listen to the whole thing from beginning to end all at once, but rather in little bites throughout the day: one interview here, one interview there.

The podcast isn't unlike the daily papers published at trade shows or festivals, although it's got the potential to be much more compelling. But part of the problem with those publications is that you've got to sit down and read them -- but listening to audio content can be done while doing plenty of other things, as we do already with our iPods or phone conversations.

We're going to see more and more of these types of podcasts pop up, and there are going to be a good number of them that get significant commercial sponsorship (speaking of which, I'm sure Ewan wouldn't refuse some ads!). For instance, Perrier sponsors the Comedy Awards that are a pretty big part of the Fringe -- they could do a show centered around the comedians up for the award, which could help extend the audience beyond just those that get tickets to their shows. But making the leap to getting podcasts sent right to mobiles is a bit of a stretch, requiring some tinkering with data pricing and so on. But mobile operators sponsor plenty of events with some real fluff content -- here's an opportunity for them to do something cool, whether it's for the Fringe or other events.

There's a lot of potential for the mobile audio market outside just music. We're already seeing travel content for iPods -- things like a DIY audio guide to the Museum of Modern Art in New York and other travel guides. But why not make these available for downloads or stream to mobiles (yes, I'm aware of the file sizes, speeds of GPRS, data costs etc etc etc, but let's look a little ahead), so if I'm out on vacation, I can access the content at any time, without having to remember to sync my MP3 player or walk around with my nose in a guidebook? I'm going to have my phone with me anyway, so just put the content on it.

Image from The Edinburgh Fringe Podcast Moblog.