dekstop: weblog

Via Dave Winer: Apple seems to be caching podcast feeds and MP3 files as part of their iTunes podcast integration. The Dailysonic blog gives several reasons why this is bad for the content producers, and could even cost them money. In a nutshell: Podcast producers need their subscriber numbers for the advertisers. And, worst of all from a listener perspective: The caching mechanism seems yet to be unreliable, which means that some podcasts never reach the listener.

Hm, I see... I was wondering how Apple were keeping track of their subscriber count. Routing it over their servers makes sense for them, as they now can watch the listening behavior of all users. It's clear that the user behavior data is just as valuable to them as it is to the podcast producers. This data is likely one of the reasons they're interested in the technology in the first place:

• They want to know what other content they need to offer. They want to know which content generates which amount of interest.
• They sell advertising space themselves (in the iTMS). For this they need the same data as the actual content producers, for most the same reasons (see the article linked above).
• They probably sell user behavior data to content producers (read: Music/Entertainment Industry) who want to be able to watch the podcasting market.

Essentially, with a single Software release Apple has gained a position to generate lots of interesting data. Their position in this regard is not unlike that of Technorati and Bloglines for the "blogosphere". With an important distinction: they're not likely to make any of that data public. To me it seems likely that Apple will simply not react to the requests to give up their caching until they have another mechanism to get the behavior data (provided they don't already have one; it has yet to be analyzed what actually happens when you subscribe to a feed, or download a podcast).