NPR defining new Podcast strategy

I con­tacted NPR about some of their shows and adding pod­casts to them (the job of an evan­ge­list never stops.) How­ever, when I did, I did not expect I would end up get­ting some­thing that few oth­ers are aware of and maybe even a scoop: NPR is not renew­ing its con­tract with Audi­ble and is work­ing on a new strat­egy relat­ing to pod­cast­ing. This is pretty big news.

It all started when I emailed them, ask­ing to start pod­cast­ing “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me”, a very funny quiz show. The time at which the show was broad­cast on my local sta­tion changed, mak­ing it more dif­fi­cult to catch it. As a result, I decided that I should con­tact them about pod­cast­ing it. After all, the local sta­tion has been pro­mot­ing pod­cast­ing heav­ily and I fig­ured that adding one more show would not hurt.

Over the week­end, as I clean­ing through the moun­tain of email I get, I found the fol­low­ing mes­sage (empha­sis is mine):

We appre­ci­ate your inter­est in the pod­cast­ing of NPR programming.

As you might be aware, in 1999, NPR signed a pod­cast­ing agree­ment with Audi­ble when that com­pany was one of the few explor­ing ways to make audio down­load­able and portable. Using Audible’s ser­vices at that time was the best way for NPR to explore this new dis­tri­b­u­tion tech­nol­ogy, deal with the emerg­ing and com­pli­cated rights issues related to down­load and begin exper­i­ment­ing with how to best serve NPR lis­ten­ers who are on the go.

In the six years since then, the land­scape for con­tent down­load­ing and porta­bil­ity has changed dra­mat­i­cally. Begin­ning last year, we rec­og­nized that new tech­nolo­gies in the mar­ket­place might enable us to bet­ter serve NPR listeners.

As we for­mu­late a more com­pre­hen­sive strat­egy, we chose not to renew our agree­ment with Audi­ble when it recently expired.We are now devel­op­ing a new strat­egy for mak­ing NPR con­tent down­load­able and portable. Once the plan is final­ized, we will announce it publicly.

NPR is com­mit­ted to explor­ing emerg­ing plat­forms that will best serve lis­ten­ers and our sta­tions, in ways that will add more value to the NPR expe­ri­ence. This com­mit­ment includes a strong online pres­ence with NPR.org, exten­sive involve­ment in satel­lite radio and lead­er­ship in the devel­op­ing dig­i­tal radio indus­try. We look for­ward to extend­ing that phi­los­o­phy with a new down­load and porta­bil­ity strategy.

The first thing of inter­est here is that NPR did not re-sign with Audi­ble. Con­sid­er­ing the rich library of pro­gram­ming NPR is offer­ing, this will, no doubt, be a major blow to the pro­pri­etary approach Audi­ble is tak­ing. It may also be a major issue in terms of Audible’s busi­ness model: will they sur­vive in the world of pod­cast­ing? What hap­pens when Ama­zon and the iTunes music store start sell­ing books in mp3 for­mat? This is a pretty big set of ques­tions that the Audi­ble man­age­ment will need to deal with.

The sec­ond part here is that NPR is work­ing on a down­load­able and portable strat­egy, which goes against the core of Doug Kaye’s argu­ment that pub­lic radio is doomed. It will be inter­est­ing to see what comes out of that strat­egy and I, for one, expect to see great things come out of that new strategy.

Update:

Wait, Wait is now in the NPR pod­cast directory.