Two years to the month after launching its large podcast search and listening site, Yahoo! has announced that Yahoo! Podcasts will cease operation on Halloween, October 31st. The site never came out of Beta before the plug was pulled. There's not much information available beyond an underlined non-link now at the top of the site reading "Yahoo! apologizes deeply, but we will be closing down the Podcasts site on Oct. 31, 2007."
Some would argue that podcasting hasn't caught on like it was expected to, that it's been dominated by existing media giants and beaten as a medium by the rise of video. I still love me a good episode from ITConversations, Briefings Direct or our own new show Read/WriteTalk when I'm walking the dog - but Yahoo! users looking for podcasts will soon have to look elsewhere. I don't know how many people ever cared for the site anyway. I hadn't looked at Yahoo! Podcasts since just a few months after it launched, when there were no RSS feeds and you had to login with a Yahoo! ID in order to download audio files instead of listening to them through a pop-up Yahoo! audio player.
The exact date of the closure seems to have fluctuated a bit already, but whenever it happens there are plenty of competitors ready to give podcast search outside of iTunes a go for themselves. See, for example, Podcast.com (from whose Tweets I found this news) and the recently funded Pluggd, who are doing some interesting speech-to-text technology for both audio and video and licensing it out to other media companies.
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It's one thing to write a blog. It's another to produce a radio show. It takes far more effort and technical skill.
Posted by: James Thomas | September 26, 2007 1:18 PM
Marshal - Wow. That is sad news for the community.
Your readers may also want to check out:
http://www.podcastpickle.com
Plus there are about 150 other podcast directories out there. But Podcast Pickle does the best job from a community perspective.
Rob W
host - podCast411
Posted by: Rob | September 26, 2007 2:49 PM
Y! Podcasts had a wonderful interface since you could subscribe to several shows and then monitor a single RSS fee to know when new content was available. It also worked with the Y! Music Jukebox so new content was automagically plumbed into your MP3 player.
But it had serious backend problems keeping content updated. It only worked in spurts it seemed. Maybe that was because it had lost support early on and was just twisting in the wind since.
It was a great front-end implementation. Sad to see it get pulled.
Posted by: Joe Beaulaurier | September 26, 2007 4:13 PM
This article nails it. Audio podcasting is dead. It never caught on because most people got tired of listening to all the amateur hacks trying to be amateur d.j's and pundits without the talent. Yahoo is getting out before the whole audio podcasting thing crashes to the ground. I'm sure it wasn't an arbitrary decision.
Posted by: Dave H. | September 26, 2007 4:21 PM
I think this reflects a few bigger changes at Y! or maybe it is just all rumor? Seriously, this I'm sure goes deeper.
Posted by: David Stone | September 26, 2007 4:50 PM
I know the real reason it's closing:
http://www.centernetworks.com/yahoo-podcasts-close
Posted by: allen stern | September 26, 2007 4:56 PM
Of course I'm personally glad to see the end of the Yahoo! podcasts site as I coded the whole of http://podcast.com ;) (single handedly, I might add! ;) phew! still am, actually!)
The funny thing is that once upon a time, Yahoo! was a huge collection of links 'curated' by people at Yahoo! All set in to nice categories etc. rather like DMOZ. Taxomony. Yummy!
I've been building a similar model over at podcast.com, which as well as being a huge podcast search engine, also allows members to build their own directories of feeds - letting them tag them too and build playlists to share as rss too.
It's taxomony PLUS folksonomy. There's also open OPML data for every folder in the system for people to build their own version of iTunes or widgets from this data, if they so wish. Mobile UIs too!
We're just about to throw open the doors to the beta, so this is pretty timely!
Fun times ahead! :)
Cheers!
Kosso
ps: Who knows?? Maybe Yahoo gave up after seeing the lights of podcast.com on the horizon. Maybe they'll want to buy us?
;p heheh - Oh well. I can dream :)
Posted by: Kosso | September 26, 2007 6:29 PM
TiVo, as part of their partnership with Yahoo!, offered applications for several Yahoo! services. Now both Photos and Podcasts are going away. One would hope this will cause TiVo to actually develop something useful since they have pretty much let the whole apps things languish since right after introducing it.
Posted by: Michael Pate | September 27, 2007 4:04 AM
I am not surprised Yahoo has decided to close down its podcast directory site. It jumped on a hot trend and did not have a long-term vision. Yahoo just has to many businesses to focus on and this one just did not work for them.
This is a sign that podcasting is maturing into a model that actually works for the audience of listeners and is not just another poorly done site that only caters to podcasters.
I think that any podcast directory needs to be directly linked up with an easy to subscribe process and a portable media player or mobile smart phone player to be successful. Listeners and directories need to have a one-click to subscribe and listen process. This explains the success of iTunes + iPod solution. Any other successful platform needs to have the same equation and Yahoo just did not have this connection to a portable or mobile phone player. I do think that topic segmented web-based podcast directories can be successful, but will need to eventually be merged with a simple one-button to subscribe and listen platform for them to have long-term success. I think we will see a few more directories close down or merge with other companies.
Rob Greenlee
http://www.mobilcaster.com
soon will be changed to http://www.mobilecasternews.com
http://www.webtalkradio.com
Posted by: Rob Greenlee | September 27, 2007 11:56 AM
They key with any multimedia search product is understanding the contents of the files. Titles and tags are simply inadequate for robust search. EveryZing (http://www.everyzing.com)(formerly Podzinger) had the first text to speech interface into podcasts, and today indexes more podcasts more fully than any site on the web. Yahoo closed their product down becuase they couldn't add enough value to the experience and therefore couldn't attract the users.
-Tom Wilde
CEO, EveryZing
Posted by: Tom Wilde | September 28, 2007 7:01 AM