AudioBlog is Turning Japanese (iTunes). They recently secured the funding to take their critically acclaimed service into Japan’s tech-savvy, ultra-mobile society by partnering with TransCosmos, the investment arm of TCI Japan and one of Japan’s biggest streaming media/infrastructure providers.
Today, a month ahead of schedule, they launched Castella.
“The United States is a PC-based society, while Japan is much more mobile-phone oriented. They really fly on those phones over there,” said Rice, “We knew that being able to podcast instantly from anywhere would translate well.”
And with many Japanese phones capable of receiving podcasts and even videocasts, the phone-to-phone workflow means that computers are suddenly not a requirement to be up and running in the blogosphere.
As my Japanese is limited to a few choice phrases about the sexiness of Ichiro, I consulted AudioBlog’s English site to figure out how this all works. “On the go with a video-enabled cell phone?” their marketing copy asks. Not a problem, “you can record and email the video directly from your phone.”
So what’s to stop would-be pirates from simply using a cell phone to make bootleg recordings at a concert and podcasting right from the nosebleed section? Or videotaping Angelina Jolie’s sexy love scene with Brad Pitt from the first showing of Mr. and Mrs. Smith and podcasting it for all the world to see free of charge?
According to Eric, nothing but quality. “You know it’s funny,” he says. “You hear a lot of people criticizing the video iPod because the picture quality isn’t as good as a DVD when they hook it up to their state of the art plasma television. People want quality, and they’re not going to get it off a mobile phone. Maybe it will be a problem ten years from now, but at this point it’s a nonissue.”
But with pirates, any new technology is going to be exploited. And eventually they’re going to get very good at it. It’s possible that in the future, companies like Castella and AudioBlog will carefully filter what gets posted, or face the media industry wrath that has been leveled at such file sharing protocols as Napster and BitTorrent.
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