Why Sound Will Be Bigger Than Video | Hacker News Reader

Why Sound Will Be Bigger Than Video

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43 pointsfvryan14 comments

A few points he forgot to mention about audio, without answering it's hard to make a convincing argument:

1. There isn't a lack of sound currently. there are tons of podcasts , and even more video shows that can be consumed as sound(lectures, talk shows) . And there's a lot of music. Lack of content is not a problem or a reason for growth of future audio consumption.

2. People already consume alot of sound. Mostly in the form of music , because of it's emotional content. There's no reason to suspect they'll consume more music.

3. It's easier to communicate in writing, because you can easily edit it. Communicating with sound is more difficult(if you want to offer interesting content).

4. People prefer high bandwidth communication mediums over low bandwidth communication mediums. People prefer communication mediums you can control their speed and skip over content easily.

Why ? Both of this issues help with flow and engagement.

5. lack of good podcast monetization scheme. since good audio is much harder to produce than text , that's important.

EDIT: most of the work on making spoken audio interesting has been done on the content side. Relatively little has been done on the technology side. I wonder if there are some opportunities there.

Agree with all the points - especially #3.

The speaker made a case that recording with sound was a lot easier and that's why it's better. Whilst it's an advantage, I don't see it as a compelling reason.

Frontpage made 'web design' easy - but it hardly lead to great websites by the masses. The best Frontpage sites still took a lot of work, skill, editing, and reviews.

The value with most content is not the generation - it's in the editing. And that is where sound (and video) suffer compared to text - it's pretty difficult to beat the ease with which you can edit text.

And the search cost problem. It's difficult to be findable.

That at least can be solved by technology.

well, I think it's not being solved with technology right now. If individuals need to spend a lot of time in marketing and sales (i.e.: SEO, SEM) then there is not enough time for creation.

The problem with the usual long tail analysis is not that stuff in the tail have few customers, it's a lot of the tail is not discoverable.

Another example: if presented with a podcast with transcript, I'll almost always read the transcript than listen. Unless the speaker is someone I'm really engaged to hear specifically I prefer to skim in order to rapidly gather the information (see NPRs audio/transcript style for example, I love that they do this).

And who would listen to a 'radio' station made of music generated by an iPad app? You can give someone the most advanced creation tools in the world and if they are not inherently a musician it's going to be a series of notes, not 'music'.

I agree with you that his argument is not convincing, though there is certainly a huge space for innovation yet to come with audio creators and connecting them with listeners. Soundcloud is doing pretty well on this front so far.

There seems to be a common problem emerging amongst internet entrepreneurial types -- I know its only a small part of the argument but its something that really irks me since I saw the guy from Khush do a lecture where he did something similar. They equate the generation of content (in minutes, in songs) as being somehow equal without really considering artistic aspects of creation or consumption. Great, some app can produce 30 million songs. They are derived from templates & I'd be surprised if the creators themselves even listen to them in their entirety.

I realize these guys are business dudes who have a tech fetish & have mainly left their artistic streak behind, but it would be really cool if proponents of excessively expanding media had more ideas for how to achieve some quality standard for creativity rather than creating tons of novelty apps. (Props to Soundcloud I guess for being on the BETTER end of that spectrum.)

Irony: "Sound will be bigger than video...If you can find the time to _watch_ it, do that and then let's discuss his arguments" (emphasis mine)

Why do we have to have video of everything from programming tutorials to "guy walking around a stage talking"?

Maybe we should try a new format for tutorials: audio-only lecture with screencast appendix, sort of 30m lecture, 5–10m screencast. This way you would get interested and prepared for understanding the video.

Mute the audio. Watch the video. What value do you gain? Now, turn the audio on, and don't watch the video. What value do you gain there?

It's an interesting way to look at things..

It is next to impossible for me to focus on audio (spoken) only. If I need to listen to something it has to be video or I opt for a transcript instead. Just a random data point that audio without video can be of no value too.

I can find exceptions for every form of media. There are deaf people, blind people, and people who can't read.

However, even if you can't focus on spoken audio, you can realize that a large majority of normal people can. You're exceptions don't make this any less true.

If you recall, Odeo was Soundcloud v1.0, and it failed. Well, it produced Twitter, but from a market perspective that entity failed. The story is that the folks at Odeo were not "podcast people" (and thus didn't really eat their own dogfood) and furthermore, this was exacerbated when Apple added the podcast directory to iTunes, and they called it quits (in a very gentlemanly way). I'm not trying to say that Odeo and Soundcloud are exactly the same by any means, but it does point out a valuable lesson that there is value of revisiting/repositioning/resegmenting an existing market, and how it can lead to momentum, and ultimately success. (This notion is touched on in the 4 Steps to the Epiphany, and is not my original idea). Note that I was/am a user of both odeo and soundcloud, although i really like where SC is going.

No it won't. EOM

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