Our interview with Adam Curry is we will have to conduct for Naked Conversations. It was also among the best. He committed to speaking with us for 30 minutes and we went over an hour. It only ended then because Patricia, his wife of 18 years, was calling him to dinner at the legendary "Curry Cottage" in Guildford, England.
Curry came to prominence during his stint as an MTV VJ (video Jockey)”from 1987 to 1994 where he became a teeny bopper's idol as host of the "Top 20 Countdown" and other programs. He recalled that he often got into trouble with management and sponsors for injecting little personal vignettes, such as smoking hashish with Madonna. But it was also during his MTV stint that he became a pioneer in Internet-transmitted audio broadcast. We'll get to that in a moment.
Even as a child, growing up in a New Jersey suburb, Curry was fascinated with the magic of audio, because it projected images inside the listener’s head, rather than a TV or movie screen. Later, when radio characters like the Green Hornet and The Shadow became TV or movie characters, people who had known them from radio were usually disappointed with the mismatch. Something was lost in the translation. As a kid, he was enthralled by Peter and the Wolf recordings, and his geeky side began to emerge. At 14, he built and operated his own “homecast” radio station, dispatching his mother to drive the neighborhood to testing the signal’s range.
Audio tinkering stayed with him. While employed at MTV, he began, operated and owned mtv.com where he bacame the first celebrity webcaster before there was a Worldwide Web and with the blessings of the rock television channel who most likely did not yet understand the potential of the Internet as an entertainment channel. One day, a young developer named Marc Andreessen, contacted Curry in an attempt to interest Curry in a new piece of software Andreessen had developed called Mosaic--the first browser software, which would become Netscape. After MTVV, there were a couple of successful start ups, one of which Curry served as CTO. MTV retracted its blessing and and in 1995 sued Curry over the mtv.com name.
A few years later, Curry met Dave Winer, at a New York City conference and, according to Curry, they shared “one of those epiphanies about using RSS feeds for the last yard of Internet radio. This was at a time when broadband still sucked and streaming wasn’t satisfying anyone.” The two “started messing around” with technology and the result was Winer’s development of the audio enclosure portion of RSS, and Curry's development of the iPodder software that made downloading audio from computers to iPods a snap.
On Aug. 13, 2004, an experiment with iPodder, led to the first podcast, dubbed,Daily Source Code. which remains among the most popular programs, despite the fact there have been seven million podcasts in the ensuing year. But dailysourcecode for him has been just a starting point. He has built the Podcast Show Network that produces 35 other podshows, reaaching hundreds of thousands of listeners.. Now companies and has one of the most popular networks in podcasting, a franchise that is likely to become more lucrative moving forward. He also continues a four-hour weekly, "Adam Curry Podshow" on Sirius Satelite Radio / and had several active blogs including http://radio.weblogs.com/0001014. All this has earned him the nickname of “Podfather,” which he argues is inaccurate. “It was Winer’s DNA,” he told us.
Curry's podcasting network's business model depends for about 80 percent of its revenues on advertising, and , according to Curry, “it has been profitable from day one.” But he sees a need to change how advertising works on podcasting. Why? “Because ads suck. The stuff is boring and people are tuning out.” Currently, he told us broadcast ads are geared toward human emotions and redundancy. For example, when you're watching TV and the program reaches its emotional crisis, you can be certain that the program will cut to an add, leaving you glued to your seat and before reaching resolution. But ad redundancy is worse, he maintained. “I hate this fact, but the guy who gets elected president is the one who has the most ads repeated the most often,” he told us.
As an example of just how podacst ads will become less intrusive, he cited a project he has undertaken with Apple Computer and movie maestro Spike Lee who is making a big budget movie starring Denzel Washington and Christopher Plummer as an example how advertising is starting to become less intrusive while remaining lucrative. Curry is producing a Lee podcast behind the scenes, with a “shadow caster” narrator following Lee around, describing what's happening on the movie scene, sort of like the whispering announcer of a televised golf tournament. The podcast is available exclusively through iTunes. Curry is compensated by the film producers who want to promote the film and by Apple who wants to promote iTunes. Curry gets compensated on two ends.
Hitting on a central Naked Conversations theme, he noted that culture may allow some companies to podacst, even where blogging is discouraged.“Apple doesn’t blog and its not in the company’s DNA to blog. [Steve] Jobs speaks for the company and he doesn’t blog and I'm sure you won’t ever see him blogging. But he just might podcast," he told us.
"Apple has completely bypassed blogging, but it jumped right into podcasting and they did it early. When they launch there’s pandemonium because it doesn’t work right. But now they are in position and when it really happens they have the positionCurry believes that blogs and podcasting, won’t just enhance businesses, "they will become the next businesses."
Curry also sees a “long-tail,” (micro channel) component. There can be thousands of podacast programs, some of which have severely limited, but highly dedicated audiences. Now advertisers can conduct unprecedented targeting spending ad dollars to reach audiences so specialized that the listeners actually wish to listen to the ads.
That sounds pretty watershed to us.
