Cuban and Fatemi's Fireside Chat at Podcast Movement

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At Podcast Movement, Mark Cuban and Falon Fatemi spoke about their new storytelling platform Fireside Chat. Cuban described podcasting as being “old, tired and beat up,” adding “…there’s only one way to monetize - by lying your ass off to secure sponsorships.” The app is available now on iOS. Reactions below.
At Podcast Movement, Libsyn announced a partnership with Fireside Chat. The partnership will “make the podcast distribution experience seamless for the Fireside creator”.
Roman Prokopchuk has posted a recap of Podcast Movement using Fireside Chat. You can listen on the web.

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Spot the difference

“Your ideas are your IP” - Falon Fatemi
“Fireside is very focused on making sure YOU OWN your own content” - @libsyn
“You hereby agree and acknowledge that Fireside and any Associated Parties may use the Recordings … for any commercial and non-commercial purposes … without further compensation or permissions. You understand that all Recordings in which you participate are the exclusive property of Fireside or an Associated Party and you waive any rights to approve of the final images or content in which the Recordings appear.” - Fireside Chat’s terms and conditions (more here)

We’ve asked the company for clarification.

Fireside Chat reactions

As a disclosure - because we are unable to travel and on a wildly different timezone, we were not able to see it. Many people who did see it described it, on social media, as a “45-minute infomercial”.

Edison Research’s Tom Webster says:

A thing that rubbed me the wrong way: the positioning that podcasting was still “1.0” and hadn’t changed substantively since he spoke at a podcast conference in 2005. I don’t think that is true, at all. Podcasting has improved in every meaningful way over the last 15 years. It’s easier to listen, the technology is better, the metrics are better, and the content is better.

Cuban is right that podcasting isn’t an interactive platform. Podcasters don’t get immediate feedback in the way that participants on Fireside or Clubhouse do. Neither do actors or radio DJs or morticians. Nevertheless they persist. But that doesn’t make social audio platforms “podcasting 2.0.”

I think we are already on a higher version of podcasting, especially with dynamic [audio] insertion. We are doing things now that didn’t exist 5 or 10 years ago. Ultimately, I wish Fireside the greatest of success. Anything that grows the audio space is more gooder. … Whatever interactive elements are added to [a] show should make the show better, or they don’t belong. … Podcasters — you’re not 1.0 anymore. In fact, few media platforms have evolved so much in so little time.

Transistor’s Justin Jackson says:

I’m not convinced listeners actually care about any of these things - making podcasts “more discoverable”, making podcasts “more interactive”, making podcasts “more social”, or the “podcasting 2.0” label.

People keep talking about podcasting’s “discovery problem;” but the people I know, who listen to podcasts regularly, seem to have no problems in finding new shows to listen to. If anything, they have the opposite problem: too many good shows to listen to!

You want to make podcasts more like social media? Have you looked at YouTube comments lately? Have you seen how creators get penalized by centralized algorithms? Most importantly: [are] listeners actively searching for these types of features? (I haven’t seen much evidence)

We already have “Podcasting 2.0.” It’s the ongoing effort to improve podcasting’s RSS spec, with new metadata, new tags, and yes, new interactive possibilities. Most importantly, it’s open source.