Why is there no YouTube for Podcasts?

At the InnoTech conference yesterday, one of the speakers there was with Yahoo!’s marketing department, which drew my attention to Yahoo! Podcasts.
There are many non-technical people who really could use a solution that allows for easy podcast creation, embedding in blogs, and hosting. In other words, a “YouTube” for audio and podcasters.
But this isn’t what Yahoo Podcasts is. Yahoo Podcasts is just a directory of podcasts. And it’s shutting down at the end of this month, anyway.
For many of us, a podcast isn’t an onerous burden. Install WordPress, install the podcast plugin of your choice, upload the podcast – that is, of course, assuming you’re familiar with FTP, WordPress, Installing plugins for wordpress, and have your own hosting provider.
There are options, but most of them have caveats. Odeo is free, but limited, painful to use, and although a friend of mine uses them, I can’t figure out where you’re supposed to upload your MP3 file. Podbean is free for very limited services (5GB bandwidth/100MB hosting) but requires paying for the service after that.
It seems that there would be room in the market – especially for one of the major players, such as Yahoo! – to create an advertising-supported “YouTube -for Podcasts” with hosting, automatic file conversion, and embedded flash web widgets. But there is none. There are literally dozens of options if you want to put video on the Web – YouTube, and Google Video are just the basics. It’s gotten to the point where there are specialty video hosting services – “Helpful Video” for how-tos, “TeacherTube” for educational videos, “GodTube” for Christian religious videos and “JewTube” for Jewish religious videos. This all makes me wonder if God could create a Web site so bandwidth heavy even He couldn’t host it.
If you want to put audio on the Web, though – as far as I can tell, you have to host it yourself.
Which makes me wonder why.
First, is there a lack of demand? I don’t think so. While video producing is getting easier, it still requires expensive equipment and some video editing knowledge. With free tools like Audacity, podcasters can record with a $10 microphone plugged into the sound-card – that’s if their computer doesn’t come with a microphone already. Who hasn’t fooled around with SoundRecorder.exe in Windows, at the very least? Sure, YouTube may appear to the TV star in most of us – but all of us sing in the shower.
What I think may be scaring potential service providers from creating a site like YouTube for audio is – seriously – litigation.
YouTube has enough problems with litigation from major television companies – but they’ve managed to avoid it because of the nature of video and the artificial limitations placed upon it. First, a YouTube video that violates copyright does not give you anywhere near the quality of broadcast, SD TV. Heck, it doesn’t give you the quality of most pirated TV Xvid files! The compression introduces artifacts which make any illicit copies a poor substitute for the real thing. With a 100MB filesize maximum, the quality of the original file before transcoding probably wasn’t that good to begin with. Audio takes less bandwidth and thus requires less compression – meaning any streaming audio service will sound pretty darn good, compared to the CD or the digital music file sold by the record companies.
Secondly, YouTube’s 10 minute max-length limit prevents uploading 22 minute television shows. However, if an audio version of the service existed, 10 minutes is plenty for most songs – even “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer” is pretty darn long – at around 8 ½ minutes. But for a talk show or an audio podcast – 10 minutes is very short.
And as we well know by now, the RIAA is very litigious in its “War on Fun.” What podcasting service would take the risk these days – when you can just wait for the labels to self-destruct and start your service up then?
Right now I’m helping friend-and-boss Pam with her side-project blog, built on WordPress, with PodPress. It’s somewhat technical and, while I’m glad PodPress has made podcasting much easier, I’m also dismayed that it’s still likely beyond most end-users. Hopefully, someone will finally create that killer Web SAAS project that bring podcast publishing to the masses.