My new favourite iPhone app: Instacast

I love podcasts. I listen to a lot of podcasts. And almost exclusively, I use my iPhone to listen to podcasts.

But heres’s the thing: subscribing to and downloading new podcasts to my iPhone is fiddly. Syncing with iTunes on my Mac is fiddly. Downloading new episodes a-la-carte via the iTunes app on iOS is fiddly.

Which is why I was absolutely delighted to learn about Instacast. It’s a standalone podcast downloader and player for iOS, and it’s exactly what the iPhone’s built-in should have been. I wish I’d known about it sooner. Here’s a video:

Introduction to Instacast from Vemedio on Vimeo.

If you listen to or download podcasts regularly, and aren’t satisfied with iTunes, Instacast is well worth the $1.99 asking price.

Jim Dupree returns with Moon Enthusiast

Yup. He’s back:

Episode 56 – Jim Dupree: Moon Enthusiast

Jim Dupree is back

Ever since the final episode of Jim Dupree: Enthusiast about a year and a half ago, people have asked, “Are you ever going to make more episodes?”

The answer for a long time was, “No.”

But as of yesterday, that answer changed. Starting on Groundhog Day 2008 (yesterday), we started to release season four of the podcast series, on a schedule that can only be described as “Fibonacci.” Here’s the release schedule:

Season 4, Episode 1: February 2, 2008

Season 4, Episode 2: February 3, 2008

Season 4, Episode 3: February 5, 2008

Season 4, Episode 4: February 8, 2008

Season 4, Episode 5: February 13, 2008

Season 4, Episode 6: February 21, 2008

Season 4, Episode 7: March 5, 2008

Season 4, Episode 8: March 26, 2008

Season 4, Episode 9: April 29, 2008

Season 4, Episode 10: June 23, 2008

That’s right. The time between episodes gets exponentially longer.

Head on over to the Jim Dupree website to check out the new videos or subscribe.

Jim Dupree: Official Festival Selection Enthusiast

So a year ago, Tristan and I made thirty episodes of a video podcast called Jim Dupree: Enthusiast. It was reasonably well-received, so we stopped doing it.

Now it turns out that videoblogger extraordinaire Steve Garfield is a curator at The American Film Institute’s Pixelodeon festival in Los Angeles this year. And he’s included Jim Dupree: HDTV enthusiast as part of his collection, I Watched, I Laughed, I Vlogged. So not only will our ridiculous video be shown on a big screen, but I also get to use this official-looking badge:

So if you happen to be in LA on Sunday, June 10, consider checking out the big show.

How Democracy changed everything, and what the CBC needs to do to compete with the pirates

Well, perhaps Democracy hasn’t changed everything, but it certainly has changed the way I watch television shows.

Democracy is a free, open-source, Internet television platform. Its guts are made of:

1. An RSS aggregator
2. A Bittorrent client
3. A video player based on VLC

When you put these three things together, magical things start to happen.

Let’s say, for example, that I’m a big fan of the TV show The Office. I can visit a site like tvRSS, and get a list of torrents of The Office episodes, or an RSS feed of torrents of The Office episodes. I can then plug that RSS feed into Democracy, and it’ll monitor the feed for new torrent files. When a new episode becomes available, Democracy grabs the torrent file and starts to download the episode.

So in effect, I’m subscribed to a TV show.

Of course, Democracy also lets you subscribe to regular video podcasts (like Brian Hogg’s excellent dotBoom — which I’m really enjoying these days), but it’s the RSS/Bittorrent stuff that I think is really slick.

If this type of television distribution becomes more popular, I wonder if any major broadcasters will decide to make their shows available in this way. From television consumer’s perspective, RSS/Bittorent distribution is a much nicer option than on-demand website-based streaming. But of course, from the broadcaster’s perspective, the latter’s much more attractive, for advertising reasons.

A while back, MuchMusic offered full episodes of their VJ search as a video podcast. Right now, the CBC offers segments of The Hour as a video podcast. I wonder how much could be saved in bandwidth costs by using RSS/Bittorrent distribution.

And if there was ever a broadcaster that should be distributing its programming this way, it’s the CBC.

Take for example, Little Mosque on the Prairie. I’m not a huge fan, but somebody, somewhere, liked the show so much that they decided to digitize it (or make an off-air HDTV rip, or whatever), and seed it as a torrent. Right now, tvRSS has a listing for all eight episodes of Little Mosque. If I wanted, I could download the entire season illegally, for free, right now.

But let’s imagine, for a moment, if the CBC had forseen that they’d have a show on their hands that some people would enjoy enough to pirate it on the internet. Let’s imagine they’d worked out the right deals with the right unions. Let’s say there was a way for the CBC Television to actually legally distribute full episodes of the-closest-thing-they’ve-had-to-a-hit -in-years, via some type of RSS/Bittorrent system. Once an episode aired, it’d be released and seeded by a CBC computer. As more people downloaded it, the episode would be seeded by actual viewers of the program.

This would be a monumental step for the CBC.

Light years ahead of making selected CBC clips available on Google Video.

Light years ahead of weekly-updated content on a video site that no one uses.

It would mean that in this age of digital media, Canadians could actually house content they paid for. What a concept.

Canadians are smart. They know what they like. Give them full shows. Entire newscasts. Open up the archives. Let Canadians subscribe to whatever they want. Let them watch it on their computer, or burn it onto a DVD, or put it on their iPod. Wake up and realize what people in the real world want to watch, and how they want to watch it.

I know the legal stuff is a nightmare. I know there are no precedents for how to pay actors, or writers, or producers. So figure it out. Work out the deals. Make it happen.

Because otherwise, people are just going to steal your stuff. And no one will buy the DVD box sets.

The Hour Podcast

Scanning through the iTunes podcast directory today, I came across something called The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos Video Podcast.

Now, iTunes doesn’t easily let you see the feed information for podcasts listed in its directory, but if you ping a feed (using its ID from the Music Store URL) like this:

https://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/pingPodcast?id=215119383

You get:

Podcast Ping Received
Podcast Feed URL: http://www.cbc.ca/thehour/rss/itunes_video.xml
Podcast ID: 215119383

Thanks, iTunes.

I haven’t seen this published anywhere (not even on The Hour’s site), but it’s listed in iTunes, and discoverable by mere mortals.

Update: Seems like all that sleuthing may have been in vain. CBCer Paul points to a post on The Hour’s blog that announces this podcast dated February 15th. Also, there’s an audio podcast feed too.

Filling in on Editor’s Choice again

Angela Misri’s on jury duty for a while, so in her absence, I’m filling in for her on the CBC Editor’s Choice podcast.

You can download individual episodes from the program page, or subscribe to the RSS feed.

The Prosecast is back

Good news in my inbox yesterday. My former podcast-labelmate Cathi Bond (of The Sniffer fame) has launched the second season of her Prosecast for HarperCollins Canada. The first edition features an interview with Vikram Chandra (NYT review of his novel “Sacred Games”).

Congratulations Cathi, and best of luck with the new season.

Interview with Dave Brodbeck

Dave Brodbeck interviewed me over Skype tonight. We talked about the podcast, the band, and the miracle of Craigslist.

Dave is one hell of a cool guy. We met at Podcasters Across Borders a couple of weeks back. Since meeting, I’ve been amazed to discover that he does three (!) podcasts: Broca’s Area, Thunderbird Six, plus a feed of his psych lectures at Algoma University.

The interview was really a lot of fun. I’m flattered to have been asked. Thanks, Dave.

The kids these days and their podcasts

Tristan and I have started another video podcast. It’s called Canadian Heritage Vignettes. It is short, subtitled, shot entirely with my digital camera, and will probably be updated infuriatingly infrequently.

You might also want to check out the newest Collective Production. It’s called The Podcast of My Discontent, and it features (probably) more Tristan Homer than you could possibly ever want. It’s cleverly edited.