Opinion

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

~ the goodbye ~

Podcasting was not a thing I had around me in 2014. In Turkey that year the audio people actually consumed came off the radio or out of a pirated MP3 folder, and the idea of recording your own show on a phone read as a hobby imported from somewhere else. Opinion was built for a listener and a maker who both lived outside my orbit, which is why I am writing this from the documents rather than from memory.

It launched on 20 November 2014 and the thing reviewers kept pointing at was the waveform. Every audio editor since the eighties has drawn sound left to right, because that is how tape moved and how a desktop screen is shaped. Opinion rotated it. Your recording ran vertically down the phone, which meant you could scrub and rearrange a show with one thumb while standing up.

The economics were simple. The app was free with a ten-minute recording limit and $3.99 unlocked unlimited length, after which hosting your finished episodes cost nothing at all. Over 100,000 people took that deal across three years.

It was made by two people. Tor Rauden Källstigen had previously built Loopcam, an animated-GIF app, and when that team dissolved he started a company called Aodio with one developer to make Opinion.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the waveform turned sideways ~

The vertical waveform deserves its own paragraph because it is the rare mobile design decision that came from the device itself rather than from shrinking a desktop layout. A phone is tall. Audio is one dimension. Pointing that dimension down the long axis of the screen gives you more resolution per second and leaves your thumb where it already is.

Nobody copied it. The podcast recording apps that followed went back to horizontal timelines, because that is what anyone who had opened Pro Tools expected to see. Ferrite, the recording app that serious mobile podcasters settled on, draws its waveform left to right.

~ years of audio on somebody else's disk ~

The shutdown notice went out around 30 September 2017 and it is unusually honest about the cause. "The amount of content on our servers is now measured in years, rather than hours or weeks. And the costs followed suit." One in-app purchase, paid once, against a storage bill that grew every single day somebody kept using the thing they had already paid for.

Users got a month. Episodes stayed online until 1 November 2017 and everyone was told to download their content before that date. The company also put the platform up for sale in the announcement, inviting anyone who wanted to keep the sharing service alive to get in touch, and nobody did.

The app itself was left on the store as a recorder and editor, with publishing handed off to whichever host you chose. That half faded out separately. There is no Opinion in the App Store today and no working domain under the name.

~ the domain now ~

opinionpodcasting.com answers today with 105 kilobytes of search-engine filler under the name "Opinion Pod Casting, A Journey to Knowledge". Someone picked up the expired domain and filled it with generated articles about growing your podcast audience, including one about poster printing in Brooklyn.

The host that shut down because storing real recordings cost too much has been replaced, at the same address, by text nobody recorded and nobody will read.

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