Guest: Alex Castro - Pluggd
Host: Robert Scoble - Scoble Show

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
Tell me a little bit about Pluggd and what sort of journey you are on?

Alex Castro - Pluggd
So, I left the Amazon last fall and I was just -- kind of, had the edge to do something and I knew I wanted to do something in Digital media and Social media and then around kind of, early part of the year so, I had the first ideas of what Pluggd would be and I thought you know, there is lot of interesting programming, like the stuff PodTech.net puts up, stuff like RocketBoom -- lots of audio variance at that and I said, there is some inserting, kind of, pain points. And around February we actually incorporated and started pulling together a team. Now we shipped the first version of our site in June -- end of June, and now we just announced kind of our -- one of our first what we call -- really exciting things that makes us different this past week at the demo conference called HearHere.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
Yep. And how did that go for you guys?

Alex Castro - Pluggd
It was fantastic.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
Did you win a Demo God award?

Alex Castro - Pluggd
No, we didn't win a Demo God award but we did get a lot of buzz and a lot of interest from partners and press and so, I think we -- Kevin Rose was telling me that he has coach six great Demo God Award winners and so, unfortunately I think, us cut some scrap blogs and let him down - sorry Kevin.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
So, he didn't win an award this year?

Alex Castro - Pluggd
He did not win an award; his feet is broken.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
Tell me, so you venture-backed or you...

Alex Castro - Pluggd
We have been bootstrapped with some initial angel from some -- actually only one local guy and one guy...

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
And we're up here in Seattle; this is Downtown Seattle...

Alex Castro - Pluggd
Yeah, we're in Pioneer Square, Downtown Seattle.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
Cool neighborhood by the way.

Alex Castro - Pluggd
Awesome neighborhood; it was part of the reason why we wanted to be down -- there is a lot of startups right now -- these kind of few blocks.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
I can see why -- this is like -- in San Francisco, the South Park neighborhood is very similar to this, there is a nice park with a lot of startups around the park, but -- and a lot of VCs -- it's sort of dinner mingled in between you guys.

Alex Castro - Pluggd
Yeah, the VC's are all like three or four blocks up into the mid town area where nice (Inaudible) offices are. But they are a little more grungy. You don't like the grunge?

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
Yeah. So, you just announced your first product at Demo or did you have it prior to having this one?

Alex Castro - Pluggd
We had our initial website out -- it's essentially an aggregation directory of audio podcasts. And that launched in June; and then, at Demo we announced HearHere, which let's people browse within a particular episode and search for exactly what they are looking for.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
In video or audio or just audio?

Alex Castro - Pluggd
We demoed audio but we were pretty upfront, saying, I will plan and do that for video. And we kind of feel like, we are starting to get close to a tipping point, where there is more of -- I don't know what the right word for it is, people call it blogs or Video Casts, but it's not the stuff on YouTube; it's a little more structured, it's episodic -- stuff like the Scoble Show and stuff like RocketBoom, stuff like Diggnation is now trying to invest more in -- I almost feel like we are getting to a point where that type of content is starting to be where a lot of the energy is -- it's not to say that the America's Funniest Home Video clip stuff is bad. That stuff serves a purpose and it's very entertaining. But there's other types of videos, just like there's lot's of different HTML sites. So that's kind of an exciting space for us...

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
Oh, it's certainly a feature that people have been asking me for, is the ability to go right into -- because I do longer videos, I do these hour-long interviews with CEOs. The best part might be minute 33 and when you say something really controversial and say, if -- starts talking smack about your competitors or something, and people want a link right to that, instead of linking to the video and saying hey, you got to go to minute 33.

Alex Castro - Pluggd
Come on Robert, don't you have all that spare time to carefully index every segment of the audio yourself? I mean, that's (Voice Overlap). I mean it's not...

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
Never looked at my counter.

Alex Castro - Pluggd
No. So, it didn't take us long in conversations with both real people and then people like yourself, who are creating all this great content to realize that you are really, really busy. And even if you try to tag it all yourself, you probably just tag it in a different way than maybe a lot of other people who wouldn't even think about it. And then we also found that people like -- it's actually really funny, so we -- ESPN has a lot of other regular shows like 'Pardon the Interruption' that air on their cable network, and they turn them into podcasts. And we have taken people and sat them down on a couch and have them watch 'Pardon the Interruption' on their TV. And they will go through like, three or four different topics, golf, tennis and the person (Inaudible).

I really care about is the football stuff, but they kind of just mentally tune out -- wedge out until the football stuff starts. It's sort of, looking at magazines on the coffee table, you take the -- they have learnt to just be passive. You take the exact same person, the exact same show, you put it on a computer, so all you have done is changed the box. They get agitated, they're like -- I don't want to hear all this Michelle Wie golf stuff; I don't give a damn, I want to go right to the basketball or the football - and I am like, wow! It's like really interesting to see how people's expectations over control of media have shifted based on the computer, they're feeling like they should have more control and...

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
Does it bother you that everybody time shifting us and scurrying past all of our interesting content, just looking for cool shit?

Alex Castro - Pluggd
At the end of the day, you are not going to be able to control consumer behavior so you can just kind of adopt...

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
Let's say if you are trying to find where I don't laugh, so they'll just skip a little laugh - because they know that's the one being Goofy.

Alex Castro - Pluggd
I don't think we can catch the laughs; I don't think Scoble app will work maybe in a future version.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
Okay. So, the pluggd store might -- would I have to upload my content to you to get this feature or do you...?

Alex Castro - Pluggd
No, no. That's a good question. So, what we kind of do there is -- in a lot of ways, it's something like Google does with text-based web pages; they crawl, they find them; they download them once to analyze them and to extract the metadata and the ranking. We do the same thing; we will find the stuff out there, we look for RSS feeds, so it's not encapsulated in an RSS feed, we can overlook it. We download it once, we run it through our system, we extract all this metadata - and we only store the metadata, we never keep copies of it, we never actually have to force the content owner to do anything and we also don't control the content owner's content because I don't think people would feel comfortable saying, now you are serving my stuff, that's wrong. And so, what our player does is, it basically takes the content from wherever the actual place it's been hosted as, by the content owner and then intermixes our information in the scrubber play bar and let's you search over the metadata.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
Sounds very cool.

Alex Castro - Pluggd
So, it's -- in some ways, it doesn't have to be a web-based player -- I mean, Apple or Windows Media Player could incorporate this functionality, or TiVo could incorporate this functionality.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
So, do you have an open API that I can...

Alex Castro - Pluggd
We don't -- not right now, but we will. We are going to have an API that basically says, if you are searching for this term, here is like, basically the matches or the ranking across the duration of the audio and video; and then I like people to kind of, innovate on top of that. Then quite figure out exactly what the licensing model around that should be, but we just kind of believe that it's the right thing for the ecosystem and to help this kind of evolve.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
Right. Interesting. What's your business? How are you are going to -- is it advertising or is it (Voice Overlap) or something or...

Alex Castro - Pluggd
Our model is primarily predicated on advertising; we have a consumer destination site and we hope a lot of people come to our site to discover 'The Scoble Show' or 'RocketBoom', who are maybe not totally in the 'Technorati' world.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
So, you are trying to be the next YouTube or... I mean when I think of destinations that are sort of what I...

Alex Castro - Pluggd
I would definitely say that we want to create a great consumer destination for people to discover, manage and consume all those great, kind of, more programming based audio and video content. We are different than YouTube in that we don't host stuff and it's a different type of content so, we don't -- we actually even do see them as kind of, separate market segments. And so, we can make money by advertising on that site - the other things that we're thinking about doing as well. If we can advertise in a way where we target things because of our ability to know what's being talked about in certain places, that could be an interesting thing and that's something that we think the content owners might be interested to have even on their own sites so that if they use our player, use another player that's built on our technology or some of this is TBD, but it's kind of the AdSense model, where if you are a content owner and maybe you are not a big enough company to have your own sales force, its an opportunity for you to monetize some of your content perhaps in a way that's not disruptive to your users. So we are really open to that and we think that's also kind of, good for the ecosystem.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
Now, if I want my Scoble Show in Pluggd, what do I -- do I have to do anything, do I have to tell you guys about my video show or -- and Scoble Show is a metaphor for any videos -- any guy like me, or a girl who is going around with a video camera and doing video content, video blogging or video shows...

Alex Castro - Pluggd
All that stuff.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
...just like you mentioned Diggnation.

Alex Castro - Pluggd
The Asterix's casts or Asterix's blogs or those like nomenclature soup (ph) right now. There's two answers to that question; so we kind of figure that -- God, you know, there is a lot of places where people are trying to aggregate stuff and if you require the content owner to always go and tell you about it, that's kind of a pain in the butt; that's not scalable as you get more and more content.. It's kind of like the early days of the Internet, we had to go submit everything, then Google and AltaVista I think were the two that said, "Now, lets go out and crawl and have spiders and do this kind of thing."

So, we just kind of really believe that there is going to be a lot of this content, and we also thought that it would just be really inconvenient for folks like yourself to kind of keep track of all those. So, we go out and proactively try to discover things, and discover feeds and index that and then go back and look for updates. That said, we are not Google, in that we don't have like a thousand servers. So, the Internet's a big place and sometimes you miss stuff... It's more a matter of how many machines we have our crawler working on and how the crawler works. So, if you really want to make sure it's on the site and the site's aware of it, you can just go and submit the RSS feed or maybe one of your audience members can do that. And so that's kind of a secondary kind of method.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
So, when your machines find me, whether I submit it myself or whether you found me by surfing the Internet with your spider - what happens? What do your machines do to it and then what happens when -- tell me a little bit about it?

Alex Castro - Pluggd
Okay. So mechanically what happens is, the crawler would say, "Ah, here is an RSS feed, and it looks like an RSS feed because it meets all these requirements and then it will say, "Oh is it audio or is it video?" If it is video it says, "I am going to go put a little bit next to it because we don't show video on the site until another couple of months." If it's audio, it says, "Have we seen this before?" If we'd seen it before, it says, "Oh, is this the newer one, or should I update this right now?" If it's the first time we've seen it, it says, "Okay, let me create an object in the database that's for this particular Podcast and suck out some of the metadata in the feed and populate the right columns in the database table. And then we are going to put it in our scheduler, put an entry in our scheduler and the scheduler has some smart math that kind of basically say, I am going to keep going back every once a while and looking for updates to the feed."

And the scheduler will pretty quickly realize that this feed gets updated every day; so, this feed gets a separate priority than a once a month feed. And so, it does that and then for users it will -- you have like, some kind of detail page on the site that kind of displays some of the metadata, its kind of, I think like an Amazon book detail page and has actual links back to the RSS feed, because to not do that would be rude, has links back to the website because to not do that would be rude. But it also has a flash player for people who don't want to download stuff because a lot of like, mainstream consumers don't want to do that, but click a button, start doing (ph) it right there, maybe subscribe to it using Arc Feed Aggregator or they can just take the feed and add it right on to you iTunes and enjoy it that way.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
Now what's the advantage of watching -- for the end-user person at home watching video? What's the advantage of watching the show on your site rather than just coming and subscribing Scoble show? What value do you add to my shows or let's say I am watching "This Week in TECH" with Leo Laporte, what will you do to Leo Laporte's show to add some value to it? Why would I visit it on Pluggd instead of on Leo Laporte's (Voice Overlap)?

Alex Castro - Pluggd
I think that's a great question. I think the value -- there is a couple of different places where we add value. So number#1, we do provide a central place where you can kind of subscribe to a bunch of things. So, it's kind of the same value you have in iTunes or something like that where some people just prefer to have the centralized locations, like feed readers and net lives and things like that have been successful. And so, that's part of it. We also have ratings and reviews and some community features although some of those sites like Leo Laporte site may have some of that as well. So those are some, kind of, value ads. I think moving forward, things that I HearHere that lets you kind of, scan within his show and say, "Oh, he is talking about this gadget; let me just skip right to that section."

That would be a piece of value ad that we would have on our site and maybe he wouldn't have on his site, unless you chose to say, your player is so cool, I'll use it on my site too. So, to some extent I think our business model and the way we thought about it is, there is no notion of a -- this notion of a portal in a very strict sense is almost as arcane and antiquated as the Walled Garden of yesterday and so, if we are going to try and build a business model with the Internet and the way it is today, where you are basing it on this notion that people are going to come to your site and you have to keep them there, you are just thinking about it the wrong way.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
Yeah. So, are you competing with RSS aggregators then? And so, I think of iTunes or firenet.tv...

Alex Castro - Pluggd
Those are aggregators that let me down -- subscribed to media Podcasts -- video and audio Podcasts or netcasts or whatever you call them now.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
So now that you are calling podcasting one of the things (Voice Overlap) computer. Actually, I am just joking, but are you trying to compete with iTunes as being a place that I come every morning and check out what cool new video shows are out there on the internet or...

Alex Castro - Pluggd
I don't really think of it in terms of competing with iTunes, because I just generally feel that that is in a particular user scenario that Apple is investing a lot of time into. But in general, we have this notion of building up playlists and creating a great environment where people can consume lots of this content in sequence. And that's something -- yeah, we think there is hole there and we think there is some (Inaudible) and we think that's part of pushing this more into the mainstream and getting more and more people excited in using this on a daily basis.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
What are you learning about the audience, now that you are out there? Are you learning what shows are popular, are you learning how -- can you see how long people listen to my show for instance if I was on pluggd? Can you learn some of that metrics data and start telling advertisers and me saying, "Hey, this guy is really hot; you should be on his show or..."

Alex Castro - Pluggd
We've started to just -- we've just started to keep track of that -- its funny you should mention this -- we've actually kind of said wow, we should just have some kind of like, content owner service or something where people can just go and like, claim their show, kind of like you can on "Technorati" with your blog and then get a lot of metrics and stuff on it. And so we don't have that today, but it's kind of become obvious that that seems like a good thing to do and it's is just a matter of -- we have a long list of things we want to do, but its lying there in somewhere and it seems like Technorati's functionality in that way has been well received and so, it seems like just an opportunity then for audio and video.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
Can you see how long people actually listen to it because I put out hour long shows, so maybe somebody stops listening right now (Voice Overlap). Well, I'd love to know that right? See which subjects were most interesting and gathered people's attention and kept them engaged all the way to the end.

Alex Castro - Pluggd
And present it in a really easy way for you to kind of scan through it?

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
Yeah. Well, and also that way I know what to report to advertise -- because maybe I want to advertise it right now, I'm like, "Hey, thanks Seagate for sponsoring my show -- which they did -- and I want to put in an advertisement in there, and I want to report that back to Seagate and say, 439 people listened to -- into your advertisement and heard your advertisement, and I would love to have that kind of stuff which I don't know because on an Mp3 file, once you deliver it to your computer, I have no way of knowing if you listened to it - one, or how long you listened to it, or if you listened to it repeatedly, because it's like something you really love because it's so entertaining.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
I actually have had people say, they have watched like, Photowalking, they've actually emailed me and said, I had to watch it three times, because it was cool; that was different and I was learning stuff from it.

Alex Castro - Pluggd
I think you are bringing up like, kind of, one of the biggest challenges with this medium is that it can be consumed in so many different ways; on your PC, through a website, on your phone, eventually to your TV with the iTV stuff and measurement right now is just not good enough. Certainly with our player, we've gotten that feedback and we plan -- as soon as we can, we are going to start tracking some of the stuff and basically allowing people will claim their stuff and then basically get like a little report and all this information, because lots of folks have said that so someone is like oh, well, this kind of -- this would be a good thing for us to do, quite having figured out a way that fits into the business model but we just think it's -- at this stage, we spend a lot of time thinking about the ecosystem, and monetization second. Its not that we don't want to make money, we do; because I don't want to go back and work for a big company, this is a lot more fun. But at the same time, you got to recognize that things are early and on and -- we are all trying to grow the pie right now.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
I think for people who come to your page, that could be an interesting metric. I'd love to watch the videos that a large number of people actually watch the entire video because that tells me that, that video actually is really rocking all the way through and it's not boring. Where other video might be really interesting at the beginning or at a certain point but it's really boring after that.

Alex Castro - Pluggd
I am getting a lot of good feature ideas from you.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
Yeah!

Alex Castro - Pluggd
This is good. I don't know, should I pay you a consulting fee?

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
Well, you can.

Alex Castro - Pluggd
I haven't thought about that but I think that could be really interesting, and I think the notion of kind of, breaking down the linear nature of audio and video, although I think it makes people more comfortable on the content creation side, but I think its just going to end up blowing out the audience. So much, much bigger number; and I think that it will be good for everyone.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
Yeah, that's pretty cool.

Alex Castro - Pluggd
I think I've got something to talk about that with the rest of the team.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
Is there anything that guys or people who are creating content with camcorders or podcasts should do to help -- help make your viewers a better experience for -- is there metadata that I should give you, is there something I can do in the video...

Alex Castro - Pluggd
Sure.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
...like take -- you are not analyzing the video; are you looking for breaks in the video or something like that.

Alex Castro - Pluggd
Right now, we analyze the audio stream and audio, and the audio stream and video and that's how we were doing all of our smart stuff HearHere and...

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
So, what do you do to the audio stream?

Alex Castro - Pluggd
So, we run it through a speech recognition process where we try and extract out key words that people are talking about, so that we can say this segment has these key words mentioned at this time, time spots. And then second step after that as we do semantic analysis where we say, "okay, golf - Tiger Woods, film - Nicholson." These are all related, so then we tried to group in the -- using the heat map and the player where there's a topic of discussion that's all about one topic. And the ideas early on we are just thinking, "Oh, just a key word search." Entering a key word and then find the spot where that word is mentioned, but then we use the ability test of it sometimes it would be like two minute discussion about the PGA championship and then the last sentence would be like, we'll see Tiger Woods win this one too and then we will go in the football. Someone will search for Tiger Woods, now he is in PGA and then we just hear Tiger Woods and then football. And the conclusion for us was people are not looking for Chris Berman from ESPN to say Tiger Woods ten times over.

They were looking for Tiger Woods because we were saying there is a minute or two minute of a segment in a show that's about this topic and so that's when we kind of said, "It can't just be key word and straight up speech recognition, it has to be semantic analysis where people can find a discussion and they can go right to the beginning of that discussion and hear all of that and not lose any of the context like imagine if you -- yet, we all have this experience of walking into the middle of a conversation and be like, what, what are you guys talking about? Well, he is saying thanks, so we try to do is find the beginning and the ends of a continuous discussion. It's not a prefect just like Google is not perfect in searching the Web but more or less we've got to the point where people can segment out topics of discussion and browse right through them very quickly.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
Is there something that I can do in my shows to make it easier for you, for instance, if we are going to switch into a discussion about Seattle's weather should I start, should I pause, should I say now we are going to talk about Seattle weather?

Alex Castro - Pluggd
You don't have to do anything unnatural. That a good question we've actually started to come up after processing a lot of the stuff, we've started to notice when things work better and things work less. We certainly don't have to do anything unnatural like pause and then say -- I think anything that would cause content, folks and users to really change their behavior is quiet not good. The things we've noticed there are two things that drive the accuracy of our system, one is the quality of recording. So, we are using decent microphone; decent microphones make a big difference. Doing things over a bad phone connection drops down accuracy, so that's one, one obvious one that we've noticed. The second one is the system will sometimes have a harder time if there are multiple people; two people usually is fine, but when you get to three or four people, this sometimes happens on to it actually, we have noticed when he has John Dvorak and like one other guy and they're all talking on top on each other, the system has a hard time picking that up.

It's not as bad as we thought it would be, earlier on we were really worried about that because we thought that's a lot of us are just very free form. It turns out though that because we are not trying to do perfect speech recognition, we are just trying to find the key words, the fact that a system will miss a bunch of words but it gets a bunch of like maybe Macintosh, Tiger, Leopard, even if it's from -- one of those words from each of the different people and the fact that these things are all related, the end result to the consumer actually ends up being pretty good, much better than we thought. But it's still not as good as if they were like may be not talking over each others much.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
Okay, so that's two things -- interesting.

Alex Castro - Pluggd
Yeah. Those are two things that have been obvious now, but having to pause and say now we are going talk about Seattle weather actually doesn't much of a difference in how well the system works.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
Okay.

Alex Castro - Pluggd
Well, with video I can certainly do editing tricks to -- if you are looking at video content I am not sure you are not going to look at video stream at all probably with your system you probably are just going to look at the audio that's underneath, we don't do any looking at the video yet.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
Okay.

Alex Castro - Pluggd
It's an obvious thing to think about and at some point - at some point if there is something that consumers are trying to do, and that would be useful, then maybe we consider it. Right now, we thought about it and we were like, it was one of those moments we were like, "That would be even more cool that this feature recognition semantic analysis." Then they like, tell each other and they are like, "Oh, wait a minute, hold on, geeking out, slow down. Don't know if we need to do that just yet, but we've thought about it." Well, working with video takes a lot of processor time, so I know Google and Microsoft both try to do video search based on the video stream and it's pretty difficult to do anything with that.

I mean, RIA is doing pictures, so they are trying to match up faces and they have an algorithm to match up faces and other photos. And you could sort of extrapolate that some day, somebody is going to be able to do that with video and sort of identify that I am looking at you, and then if I have another video on another video show and you are on it, it'll also say, hey, that's the same face, I saw you, and maybe add some metadata or something like that. I think we are not quite not there yet, both in terms of the value and ads to consumers yet. Right now, they can't get anywhere in audio and video. So, we are just like, well, I don't know how can you go there yet.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
Yeah.

Alex Castro - Pluggd
And you are right, in that the processing power is...

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
Yeah. In Microsoft's research project, it took four hours of processor time for 1-hour of video. So, we are not even close (Voice Overlap).

Alex Castro - Pluggd
That brings all kinds of issues. The funny thing though is, we've seen just huge improvements, just with the latest chips, the dual cores. And Intel just announced an 80 core chip right? Eighty processors (Voice Overlap) we've actually talked to them, they are like, you got great poster child for a lot of the enhancements in these chips, so we have actually had some conversations with them on how, making sure our software that we are using is really tuned well for their stuff. The interesting thing though is, initially the state of the art was about real time if you are trying to extract a lot of data. You could be better than real time if you are just doing a query in response, but for the sort of thing we are trying to do, we need more of the data; like, there is company called Nexidia and they do query in response, but you can't do the semantic analysis because you are only querying out one keyboard and getting one response.

So, the best you could do is real time, for the type of speech recognition we were doing, but now with the dual cores, we are getting almost -- not quite 2x real time, but almost 2x real time. So, the speech recognition and this processing stuff, I think over the next five years, we are going to see huge improvements across the board because it's all processor power. In essence, feature recognition, the actual math has already changed in 20 years. I started working on speech recognition for the first time when I was at my freshman year in college for Bell ads (ph). And we all use these honking, crazy machines, and we had specialized subsystems with 5DSP chips and now you just go buy a machine. We actually, when we started running our speech recognition stuff, we just out on the fly and I go, we need an extra machine. The on the fly, I bought something like about $659, stuck it under a Dev's desk and it's cranking through the audience, so it's amazing.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
Isn't More's law a great thing?

Alex Castro - Pluggd
It's a phenomenal thing.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
I am interviewing Steve Wozniak tonight, and I am going to bring that up. I remember when he had a Dye Sublimation Printer on his desk in '89 and it cost $40,000, and today a $50 printer does a better job.

Alex Castro - Pluggd
It's amazing.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
It's just an amazing industry yeah. Wild.

Alex Castro - Pluggd
You are at the forefront of the whole rafted things that are coming. You certainly can sense that more and more things are happening in the podcasting space, so I just got back from the Podcasting Expo last week, which was real interesting, a lot of people doing a lot of interesting content. We all are interested in how you consume this, how you find thing, because audio and video is much tougher to consume than text is; I can read 1000 blogs in a night just by scanning through the headlines.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
Yeah. Totally.

Alex Castro - Pluggd
A newspaper is a good example. You read a newspaper in 10 minutes and you can scan through hundreds of articles right, because your human eye is very good at scanning two types...

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
Totally different (Inaudible) process.

Alex Castro - Pluggd
Yeah.The thing though about that is, it's totally true, and lot of folks say, podcasting is bad and because of this bad thing and I go, it's not bad, it's just different. And here is my argument; television is a $75 billon a year advertising market. On average, the average American spends approximately seven to eight hours consuming television.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
Yeah.

Alex Castro - Pluggd
I can't quite figure out how that math works, but according to the New York Times that's true, and the average American spends between two and two hours and forty five minutes consuming video. So, my kind of feeling is -- and both of those numbers are way higher than print. And while I think its totally true, there is this kind of fact in the world that human beings also consume a lot of audio and video content - its just different.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
Yeah. We can't have a conversation in text; there's something about meeting somebody face-to-face, and with a video camera you can certainly get some of that conversation, like what we're doing right here. I can capture some of that with a video camera. I could try to write a blogger based on our conversation that we loosed up. And I also lose the way you what you look like, and what your -- your office is and... Look at personality you have and that kind of stuff, and also I might forget something that seems stupid or random, but it's -- maybe somebody on the outside world say that "He cut my attention with that stupid and random thing."

Alex Castro - Pluggd
Well, I mean, look at television and say, "Okay, well, why do I watch ESPN Sports on it? Well, I like the highlights, and I think its entertaining to watch the anchors, and the people on the show and how they interact, and the fact that they say, (Inaudible) or (Inaudible) -- that's part of the entertainment value of get that from the sports section. And if try like, comparing like, a blog by Comedy Central to the podcast Comedy Central; one of them is going to be a lot more funny than the other. But I do think like there's -- it's funnier like, I think a lot of people in the venture community, because I spent a lot of time talking to a venture capitalist -- are pretty skeptical on podcast -- I think they don't - first I don't think many of them really understand what's going on, but their notion of what is a podcast is very skewed towards, "Its this new thing that you download and put on your iPod" - and that's actually not what it is in my mind.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
What do you think is happening?

Alex Castro - Pluggd
I think its -- man its just radio and television moving online and the bonus is, there is no DDR-RAM, and you can move it around to your TV or your mobile phone, and yeah, your iPod in some cases.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
See I see it definitely -- to me its not really on TV although its very similar; there's a set overlap there - but a guy was listening to me on -- I forget whose podcast it was. It was one of the marketing podcasts, probably Shell hosts this program - and he said, "I heard you, I was listening to you while I was walking around the Scottish Highlands on Shell's program." And he wrote me an e-mail. And I think it's the usage model that's different because that guy never was able to be reached by media before. If you're walking around the Scottish Highlands or walking around Yosemite in the back country or something like that.

Alex Castro - Pluggd
No, I think you are right; and when I say radio and television, the parts that are similar -- are the medium, its audio or its video, and that it tends to be a little bit more structured and topical. Those are the parts that I think are similar. The difference between radio and TV is that, its time shifted and it's completely mobile, right? It could be your PC -- most people still do it on their PC -- could be devices, and I honestly believe, there's going to be a point in time where there's just going to be a lot of people on planet earth who come home, and they go inside of the living room, they turn on their TV and they might say, "Hey, I am going to go watch...

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
Say, Frank or Rocky.

Alex Castro - Pluggd
Yeah, exactly, and that's just like a channel on their TV, and that would be a higher quality version of the video, and if they are saying, "Ah, man I'm going to be on this hour flight or I'm going to take out a trip to see the in-laws in Spokane, Washington", so I am going to go get that onto my iPod and it will be somehow magically transported (ph) appropriately. And then the watch like that on their video iPod, and some who might just be at their job and board and say, "Nobody is watching, let me go watch a little." I listen to a lot of stuff at work because I can listen while I'm working in spreadsheets and stuff. The other thing that's different about this new world is the cost - cost of production. I mean, I have a very expensive -- expensive, I am using quotes in expensive...

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
He's doing this.

Alex Castro - Pluggd
Expensive gear - I have $4000 camera with a $700 tripod, right? But, the fact that I can down-distribute this content without talking a TV station into broadcasting and - or even a cable access channel. It's a huge change, and certainly now you can use even cheaper cameras.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
Yeah, it's amazing.

Alex Castro - Pluggd
I put video upon blip.tv with my $200 still camera that has video capabilities on it, and I never had that ability before the last four or five years to do that kind of distribution around the world.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
That's a big difference.

Alex Castro - Pluggd
What that lets me do is, do a lot of more niche content. How many people in the world are really going to care about what we're talking about right now?

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
Not as many as I'd like.

Alex Castro - Pluggd
Yeah, you're right. But, maybe 300, maybe 3000, maybe, 30000, a Diggnation gets 250,000 downloads, they say -- I don't believe any of these numbers right now, but...

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
Yeah, I believe my Alexa rankings. So, I mean I don't want to leave them, specially what they can flick with my servlets but I still look at it everyday. So, its kind of just talking of (Inaudible).

Alex Castro - Pluggd
But, there's some small group -- but I would never have been able to talk a TV executive into -- even our Diggnation style audience, which is 250,000 people. They would have laughed at me, they are like, "Why, you're going to have a show with a couple of guys drinking beer on a sofa and talking about this weird website that just came out? Are you smoking good dope and please hand some over." Its true, but here is the thing; I actually think the economics are going to work, because the argument I make is, we started off with three networks, and that was very expensive - broadcast is very expensive. Then we moved to cable; cable was expensive in terms of total capital cost; the capital cost per channel was a lot smaller than broadcast.And then you had hundreds and hundreds of these cable channels, and they are all niche, like 'Flip This House' on I think AME or the Lifestyle Channel and all that - the seven variants of The History Channel, all of which I am like pretty much addicted to.

Most of those channels actually make money; it's a profitable business, and all this is taking -- the aggregate cost now is the Internet, which is as big or bigger than using cable networks, but the actual cost of production is continuing - there's probably like some inverse of More's Law or something in there, where the aggregate cost maybe is staying the same or getting bigger, but the cost per channel or per segment of content is continuing to go down, and I think that's what's driving a lot of this. And to me, you can call it podcasting and you can 'pooh-pooh' the name or 'pooh-pooh' the movement or whatever this thing is, but I just feel like it's a no-brainer, that this is going to just become bigger and bigger, and eventually become part of every person's life.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
On that, it's a good place to end. So, thank you for spending forty minutes with me.

Alex Castro - Pluggd
Thanks.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
And we'll get a demo of your podcast.

Alex Castro - Pluggd
Thanks (Voice Overlap) back up to Seattle (Voice Overlap).

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
The rain came out today, it was...

Alex Castro - Pluggd
Can't get that on camera, because people will then realize that it doesn't rain as much as we say.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
The rain is back today; which actually causes this next soft light and I didn't have to pay a lighting (Inaudible) to get this nice light on your face.

Alex Castro - Pluggd
Oh good.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
Thank you very much.

Alex Castro - Pluggd
Thanks Robert.