Apple podcast plan criticized
p2pnet.net News:- Steve Jobs is getting a huge amount of mileage out of his latest marketing gimmick – melding podcasting with iPod.
But now, "Apple is being blasted for including what appears to be a proprietary XML document type definition (DTD) for RSS 2.0 in iTunes 4.9 that enables access to Podcasts, and was developed without input and guidance from the RSS community," says Macworld.
"Blasted" is possubly a little strong, but certainly, although the mainstream media and the Apple faithful are impressed, as usual, Dave Winer, creator of the original RSS standard, and Tristan Louis, editor of TNL.net, aren’t quite so enthusiastic.
Apple’s category element duplicates the existing RSS 2.0 category element, although it’s more verbose, says Dave Winer on his Really Simple Syndication blog, going on:
“I love the part where they say it’s okay to duplicate information, in other words we’re funky and we know it. I suggest ignoring the itunes:category element, their software seems to work fine without it (Morning Coffee Notes is listed, apparently, we don’t have any of their extensions, nor do I expect to add them any time soon).
“Same with author. RSS 2.0 has an item-level author element. They don’t say why they reinvented this, giving theirs (again) the same name as the core element, indicating that they probably knew it was there. (The RSS 2.0 element is a mail address, but a person’s name is easily included in a mail address.)
“It would have been really smart to review this stuff with the community before releasing their software.”
Winer also thinks it’s, “kind of a bad idea to use a trademark in the name of a namespace. I think Apple may regret doing this. Also their competitors, already objecting to the use of ‘pod’ in the name of the category, may further object to supporting information with a trademark of a competitor as its name."
On TNL.net Louis, one of the first RSS supporters, fears that, “with large players now dancing in the syndication space" things are, "going to get worse before they get better.”
But he isn’t merely worrying and in fact suggests the ‘large players’ – in this instance, Yahoo and Apple – should together develop, “established data sets that are compatible”.
“The use of namespaces for each vendor use is a great idea but shouldn’t one first think about what they are trying to accomplish and look at prior art before trying to reinvent the wheel?” – asks Louis, going on with eight iotems both companies should work on, namely:
1. A common namespace: it would be nice if they both agreed to a common namespace. I’d reccommend something that does not include a version number (a mistake made in the Apple spec) but it might be nice to have it set as a DTD, which could ease validation.
2. Add media:group to the final specification, it looks like a very valuable one, especially for content that is encoded in more than one way (this will probably be something Apple does not want)
3. Retain media:category and have it replace itunes:category. Here, the Yahoo version seems to provide for more flexibility
4. Replace itunes:explicit and media:adult with media:explicit. What is defined as an adult varies from country to country whereas explicit is well, more explicit.
5. media:text should replace the itunes:subtitle and itunes:summary but it should also get something added to differentiate the two (maybe a content attribute?)
6. itunes:author could be taken care of with media:credit. Maybe this one could be required. The role of owner should be added to it and an extra attribute could be added for email which would cover the whole itunes:owner section
7. itunes:images and media:thumbnail could be merged
8. itunes:block is a good idea and could be created as a new media:block element which would also have a distributor attribute. This distributor attribute would allow to block different distributors moving forward so a creator could decide to distribute certain content only to certain channels.
"Together, maybe we can get Apple and Yahoo! to work together on cleaning this stuff up (and anyone else who wants to play in that space, including Microsoft and Google)," adds Louis. "Otherwise, we will see increasing fragmentation of the markets, which will result in less content for each of the specification proponents."
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See:-
Macworld – Apple slammed for proprietary Podcast plan, July 4, 2005
Really Simple Syndication blog – Apple’s itunes namespace, June 28, 2005
TNL.net – RSS and Media: Can’t we all just get along?, June 28, 2005
July 4th, 2005 at 4:00 pm
Stop Wining!
Signing up your podcast to work with Itunes takes about 5 minutes. I assume repeating that for each competitor will take about the same.
If some sort of conflict is created, how big a deal is it to host several copies: one for each service? Not a perfect situation, perhaps, but hardly a strategic road block.
To suggest Apple can use this to corner the market seems far fetched.
July 4th, 2005 at 6:18 pm
Apple did this because the market is already broken into proprietary products – Real and Microsoft – that use their own players.
Even if you used generic tags, you still have to specify the player that uses it.
By having an iTunes tag, Apple insures that the PodCast will play on an iPod – which is what the consumer wants.
The iTunes tag does insure some flexibility, however. iTunes does support many non-proprietary formats – .mp4, .mp3, AIFF, etc. besides the proprietary .mpp (protected MP4). That cannot be said about Real or Microsoft.
Apple certainly has nothing to fear if Real and Microsoft develop their own tags or Yahoo and others develop their own tags. After all, their media formats won’t play on an iPod anyway.
Content providers in any case will have to support all three formats and use specific tags for each.
Forcing Apple to use a generic tag does nothing to improve things. All it does is foster problems with iPod users since if the content provider does not support iTunes and iPods, then some Podcasts won’t play on the iPod or iTunes.
July 5th, 2005 at 1:34 am
Sheesh.
Someones got a burning desire to complain, lately. I doubt these fears will amount to much, maybe another opportunity for Jon to cry-cry about iTunes somehow.
You know, they use DRM. Spooky, evil, etc etc blah blah blah