Gcast

» see gcast.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Gcast was a podcast host for people who did not want to touch audio software. It launched in 2005 out of GarageBand.com Inc., the company already running the peer-review music site of the same name, and its entire premise was that recording should cost nothing and require nothing. No microphone to buy and no editor to learn. You made an account, you got a PIN, and the rest of the product was a phone number.

Everything downstream of the recording was handled for you. Gcast stored the file, generated the RSS feed, pushed it to subscribers, and handed you a block of HTML that put a player on your blog. There was a playlist manager for stitching your voice together with music, and the editing available inside it was about as basic as the recording. That was the deal, and for a certain kind of user in 2006 it was exactly the right deal.

It arrived in the middle of a land rush. Apple had added podcasts to iTunes in June 2005, Odeo was raising money on the same idea, Yahoo shipped a podcast directory, and everyone was trying to work out whether the audience was worth anything. Gcast's answer was to give the tools away and let GarageBand.com's music library be the thing that made it sticky.

~ the record ~

~ how it worked ~

You called the 800 number, entered your PIN at the prompt, and then you talked. You could listen back and re-record, or park the take in your account and decide about it later. Reviewers at the time noted the obvious cost of working this way, which is that a telephone line sounds like a telephone line, complete with a click at the end of every recording. Nobody using Gcast cared. The point was that an episode could exist twenty seconds after the thought did.

The 800 number is also why this product had no reach here. North American toll-free numbers do not dial from Turkey, so the feature Gcast was built around was the one feature a user in Ankara could not use. Podcasting itself landed late and thin in Turkish, and the tooling that did show up locally came from RSS-aware bloggers rather than from a phone-first service aimed at American amateurs.

~ the sister site ~

Gcast and GarageBand.com shared an account system, and the seam between them was visible. Clicking through from one to the other threw up a JavaScript alert warning that you were about to leave Gcast for the sister website, promising your password would still work and asking for patience while the integration improved. That alert sat in the page source for years without the promised improvement ever landing.

~ the banner ~

The ending was posted in a red box across the top of the home page. Gcast was no longer accepting new signups, and would not accept new uploads as of 1 February 2010, though existing podcasts would stay available. The banner was still there in June and July while the archive kept working, exactly as promised. GarageBand.com shut down around the middle of that year, and gcast.com served its last successful page on 24 July 2010. From late August the domain returned server errors.

One footnote from the archive: gcast.com had a previous life. In 1998 it belonged to a company selling IP multicast software, with a corporate history page and a partners list, and none of it has anything to do with podcasting. The name was recycled by people who needed a short domain seven years later.

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