Vivisecting Media

SF Podcaster Meetup

I received an IM the other day from my friend Dave C. over at Libsyn. He told me there would be a podcast meetup going on in the city and that Dave M. from Libsyn was in town to talk at it. I have heard of the meetup before and I decided that Dave being in town was exactly the motivation I needed to head over and see what it was all about.

I met up with Christopher and Elise at Sauce (the location of the meeting) grabbed a cocktail and we headed back to the supper club to see what was going on. Walking into the back room I was impressed by the number of people there already. Christopher whipped out a business card, made a button hole in the card and then proceeded to create a name tag. This action instantly got Steve (from WildBeat) and Martin’s (from Network Security) attention and we started mingling with the crowd.

The crowd was made up of a fair mix of current podcasters, people looking into podcasting and people providing services to podcasters (from hosting to advertising). Michael Butler from Podshow headed up the meeting and started out the official gathering by asking all the new people to talk about what they are doing with podcasting.

After we went around the room Michael asked if anyone had any technical questions about podcasting. People asked questions like how to get cost-free hosting when your show grows or how to get more attention to you podcast.

Once all the questions and comments were done Dave from Libsyn and Jonathan from Kiptronic talked about the new integrated services provided by both companies. Kiptronic has a new technology that allows podcasters to charge for advertising space in their show and when an advertiser and podcaster agree to feature a spot the system will automatically insert the segment into the podcast audio file. Libsyn has integrated the Kiptronic module into their servers and they also have seamlessly integrated Kiptronic’s interface into their content management system.

There is a lot more to this but I will save that for another post. After Libsyn and Kiptronic talked, the CEO of Podomatic and the VP of Client Development talked about their hosting and online podcasting technologies. One of the most interesting technologies that Podomatic talked about was their ability to do real-time video capture from web cams using Flash and then convert this to MP4 which is the supported video format for the new video iPods.

Overall, I had a great time meeting fellow local podcasters and talking about different technologies and services that are being introduced everyday. Christopher and I agree that we definitely need to start going to these on a regular basis and I look forward to hearing more about what is going on.