Bumpers

» see bumpers.fm as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Bumpers launched on 20 October 2016 out of New York, a free iOS app with a million dollars of seed money behind it from Spark Capital and Founder Collective, with Evan Williams among the angels. Ian Ownbey and Jacob Thornton had both been engineers at Twitter, and their pitch fit in one sentence: recording a podcast should feel like leaving a voice memo.

The app did the parts nobody wanted to learn. It normalized your levels and canceled the room behind you, then broke the recording into chunks so you could delete the one where you coughed. Music and loops were built in, and if you had no idea what to talk about it would suggest a topic. What came out of the other end was a published episode with an RSS feed already attached, which in 2016 was the hard part of podcasting for anybody who had not worked in radio.

The catch was visible in the first reviews. The Next Web wrote that October that Bumpers uploaded your episodes into its own ecosystem rather than handing you audio files, and that the library of content was still very much in its infancy. Both observations describe the same problem. BuzzFeed News ran a daily news show on Bumpers called Reporting To You. It got to ten episodes and eleven people subscribed to it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ export instructions ~

Ownbey posted the shutdown letter on 6 February 2018. It opens by saying that they need to start the process of shutting down Bumpers and its companion app Captioned, and gives the reason in six words: lack of growth and funding. Bumpers would stay up until 6 March 2018 and then go read-only for at least sixty days. Captioned came off the App Store immediately and went read-only in thirty.

Everything after that is logistics. Any user or series had an RSS feed you could reach by adding .rss to its URL, and any episode could be pulled down by adding .m4a, so the instructions amounted to a way of picking the service's pocket on your way out. Once you had a new host, you logged back in and redirected your iTunes feed so your subscribers followed you rather than being stranded. Simplecast and Libsyn were named as replacements, with Zencastr specifically to replace the Remote feature for interviews. The last line before the signature reads "We are truly sorry we couldn't make it work," signed Ian, Jacob.

~ what the front page still holds ~

bumpers.fm answers today, and what it serves is the app's own state on the day the lights went out. The page carries its data store inline, featured playlists and all, every counter frozen where it stood in the middle of July 2017. The Heat And Light Podcast, two NFL Network writers talking football and life, shows six episodes against 101,114 listens and fifty-seven subscribers. The BuzzFeed News show on the same shelf shows ten episodes against 266 listens. The gap between those two rows is the whole business model.

~ the part that stayed hard ~

An English-language, iOS-only app for making podcasts, launched in New York and closed before its second birthday, had no route to Ankara. Podcasting in Turkish was barely a category in 2016 and arrived later, carried in by the streaming apps, years after this was gone.

What does travel is the engineering decision underneath. Bumpers kept your audio inside its own system because that was the only way to make the awkward parts disappear, which left every show on it dependent on the company staying solvent. The shutdown letter spends four paragraphs teaching its users how RSS works.

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