Updated
At 3pm BST Splashcast launched a new feature for podcasters, called My Podcast Network. Previously Splashcast allowed users to create a ‘channel’ of various different pieces of media, allowing formats including audio, video, images and PowerPoint presentations. This media had to be either hosted by Splashcast or online at a small number of locations including Flickr and YouTube.
The rubbish part, as I understand it, is that you couldn’t make the channel update automatically in any way, unless you were using either Flickr or YouTube. That made me initially ignore the tool (despite the fact that ex-TechCrunch writer Marshall Kirkpatrick helps run it).
Now, however, Splashcast has made the link from essentially being a content provider to being an aggregator and re-processor, by allowing the input of new shows into the channel via RSS. This immediately makes it vastly more useful for many people, including us. We can use Splashcast to create a widget for the GizBuzz podcast. This updates whenever we add a show and allows easy playing right on our site. Previously this would have been achievable, but only after what I imagine would have been a lot of coding by either Peter, Jacob or Chris (or some or all of them!).
Update: Since the post has been live, I’ve tried to put the widget in the sidebar to use as a player for the GizBuzz podcast (I couldn’t publish it before because of an embargo). It turns out that Splashcast won’t do what we want it to do. It won’t actually produce a widget of all the items in an RSS feed as far as I can tell; I want an option to display all our podcast episodes, but it will either display one episode at a time or the whole feed as one option. However, Marshall Kirkpatrick has told me that this is a feature currently in development, and that he may be able to think of a work around. It would be great if it came together, because it would be genuinely valuable to us.
They also have a few usability issues with the console used to create the widget, which aren’t present when initially creating it (all I did yesterday), but are present when you’re trying to tweak it. To some extent this is down to confusing vocabulary (players, shows and channels are all very different, but in the context of Splashcast I wasn’t initially sure what was what), which is perhaps inevitable given how unique the service is.
Embedded below is a video from Kirkpatrick which probably explains the feature more clearly than I have. It also demonstrates the nice Splashcast video player, which doesn’t show any branding or controls unless you hover over it (unlike YouTube etc).
