I was reading a WIRED piece last week on how Spotify is breaking podcasts, and was intrigued. The authors cite a series of articles by Matt Stoller, who argues that podcasting today is đopen like the web was in the early 2000s: anyone can start a podcast and be relatively successful. The podcasting business and ad revenue is not yet controlled by a handful of giants that are culling all profitsđ°. Creators still own the freedom to their content and the market size is low. Compare podcasts ($1B) with terrestrial radio (~$14B) in the US.
How does this relate to education you might ask?
A couple of things. âïžOne - that learning content has already made its way into audio with podcast-based courses: Alpe, Avid.fm, Disco, Knowable. One of YC companies, Quest is building a platform where experts share advice in short audio clips. Acaudio is breaking down research outputs for the general public, also in a podcast format.
âïžTwo - that any solutions that will drive (or remove blockers to) the increase in the market value of audio will inadvertantly propel those that will adapt it for learning. I can think of two such blockers:
The cost and effort to monetize audio content.
The cost and effort of producing good quality audio materials.
While there are two different models for monetizing audio content, the ad-based revenues are by far the most common. The challenge with ads and podcasts seemed to be technical: the creator read out the promotional content, that got incorporated in the final cut of the episode, itâs pretty static, and an overhead to replace when itâs out of date. Thatâs now been properly addressed by Spotify with streaming ad insertions. Same as a video on YouTube, your podcast stream gets interrupted with a targetted ad.
Now, I am sure everyone finds this super annoying đ„Ž. But imagine for a moment that you are working through an audio course, and instead of the ads, the app is using this technology to insert audiograms from content youâve already listened to đ. Or, questions to help with recall đ§ . Combine that with Audioburstâs technology to extract and index the best bits of content from audio materials, and you got yourself a new edtech! If you are doing this already, give me a shout.
The cost and effort involved in the production of good quality audio materials is pretty similar to video. That is why Spotify acquired Anchor and Megaphone: to provide the tools that facilitate production for creators. Avid.fm also developed some tooling for audio-course creators. Podcastle closed a $7M round last week to scale their tools for editing and distributing podcasts. Descript raised $30M at the beginning of this year for their editing audio and video tools.
đThe really cool thing that Podcastle and Descript can do is take your voice and generate the audio version of a script youâve outlined, or insert sentences you forgot to include without the need to record and recut your episode. This technology, aka text-to-speech, has come a pretty long way now since the 1970s.
Youâve heard synthetic voices on your screen reader and the Googleâs TTS plugin, and they sound quite terrible. Recent developments in deep learning are making it possible to replicate nuances of the human voice, like the moment youâd be taking a breath, or an emotion that might come through a certain combination of words. Aflorithmic raised $1.3M back in February for voice-as-a-serviceđ! Similar startups are sampling actorsâ voices and even dubbing entire movies, with many ethical repercussions (đŁwould you sell your voice?!)
These breakthroughs in text-to-speech indicate that audio versions of digital materials will become the norm in the next 5 years. I will not be surprised to see this happening for educational content in less than 3. You can already do that with Lore, an app that brings all your course content - papers, reference materials, books - and converts it into audio, so you can learn-on-the-go, with all the bells and whistles of learning analytics included.
In other news:
đ» GitLab went public, and jumped 35% in the first day, at a market cap of $15B; letâs hope itâs positive.
After a ton of acquisitions this year, Byjuâs raising more funding, $300M this time.
Udemy filed for an IPO, and revealed an increase of 24% in revenues and 44% in gross profit over the last year. Pandemic might also have something to do with it.
Lynx Educate, a European edtech connecting businesses with leading education institutions to provide adult learning opportunities, raised just over $1M in seed funding.
đ„đLitVideobooks raised $5M in seed funding to continue converting best selling non-fiction books into videos. How awesome!
Have a fantastic week yâall, and share this newsletter with someone whoâll đ it!