05 Clubhouse and the future of Audio (aka "someone scratched my car")

The Innovation Engineer Podcast

Today we talk about one of the current hype trends, which has been going strong for some years - Audio! Podcast or audiobook, why is it so popular? Does it even make sense to go backward and remove the video again, after it killed the radio star? Do you even remember Clubhouse? We talk about the real reason why Clubhouse did not have an Android app and why it used the invite system. And what does podcast actually mean and where does the word come from?

Welcome to The Innovation Engineer Podcast, your favorite place for picking brains of your favorite engineers. Today we ask ourselves what happened to Clubhouse and what’s the future of Audio.

Show Notes

• 0:00 Intro
• 1:00 Audio is an old format, where is this current uprising coming from
• 1:50 Why audio is one of my favorite topics
• 2:10 As a parent audio is your go to choice of media
• 3:20 My day feels like 30 hours thanks to podcasts and audiobooks
• 3:58 I did not understand where this hype is coming from
• 4:57 Do you know what the first video was that MTV played?
• 6:47 It does not make sense to remove video and have audio only
• 7:25 Who would listen to a podcast on a TV?
• 8:56 Is it interesting to watch people talk to each other?
• 9:23 The content is the valuable thing
• 10:19 Everyone can do a podcast
• 10:54 My favorite podcast - the one produced the worst
• 12:10 The Stack Overflow Podcast - Recorded phone talks since 2008
• 12:39 The Axel Springer Tech Review Podcast - recorded with Teams
• 13:46 There is one podcast I cannot leave - The Rooster Teeth Podcast
• 15:00 Why is audio so successful? It’s personal.
• 16:54 That one strange app, Clubhouse. Is it dead again?
• 18:29 The Clubhouse waiting list with 10 million people
• 19:00 The hype is kind of over, nobody is talking about it anymore
• 19:46 Clubhouse is live streamed interactive podcast
• 20:30 It’s so bad it feels like a telephone call in the 90’s
• 22:00 Exclusiveness sells well for a while, but it has a bad product-market fit
• 24:40 They are more scalable than video conferences
• 25:32 Clubhouse is not the next big thing
• 26:08 The American audio market is the indicator for other countries
• 27:24 Companion Podcasts for TV shows - you wouldn’t believe those numbers
• 28:25 It’s not peaking, it’s still growing very strong and it’s booming
• 29:19 The Battlestar Galacticast on YouTube
• 31:34 Rick & Morty, szechuan sauce and The Sauce Podcast
• 33:12 Crime in Germany - Someone scratched my car
• 33:55 You can create content for each fandom
• 34:58 The unknown app with 1M requests a minute with 2 backend engineers
• 37:08 The end of the story: Python just sucks for backends
• 38:06 The real reason Clubhouse had an invite system an no android app
• 39:28 A startup should not start with the goal of scaling, but target speed
• 41:08 Where does the word podcast even come from?
• 44:33 What’s this? I just open Spotify and search for it
• 46:25 Radio and mixtapes are dying, sad times for radio
• 47:23 Our children will call it radio, not podcast
• 49:45 Next episode teaser

Stuff we mentioned

• 📺 The Buggles - Video Killed The Radio Star
• Runners World Podcast (German)
• The Stack Overflow Podcast
• Rooster Teeth Podcast
• The Tech Review Podcast & Youtube Video
• Blogpost from Clubhouse about “thundering herd effect”
• Elon Musk Brain Implant
• Rick & Morty, szechuan sauce and The Sauce Podcast
• The Battlestar Galacticast
  
  

What should we talk about next?

• YouTube: The Innovation Engineer
• Leave a review/comment on YouTube; it's like podcasts, but with video.

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