Otto Radio

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

~ the obituary ~

Otto Radio started in San Francisco in 2015 with a narrow and fairly good idea: your commute has a known length, so the audio you listen to during it should be assembled to fit. The app pulled news and podcast segments from BBC, CBS News and a dozen other outlets, then stitched them into a briefing sized to the trip rather than to the episode.

It got further than most apps of its size. Samsung NEXT put money in, the founders demoed at CES in January 2017, and in late 2016 Otto Radio completed an integration with Uber that played a personalized briefing timed to the length of a passenger's ride. For a brief window the pitch landed in the right place, since a car with a captive listener and a known arrival time is the single best argument for duration-aware audio anybody has made.

The app never found a business underneath the product. Podcast listening was consolidating hard around Apple and Spotify, and an independent client had no leverage over either the catalog or the advertising. On 26 July 2018 Otto Radio stopped, and the same company, same CEO, surfaced a month later selling audiobooks.

~ the case file ~

~ the audiobook turn ~

Hibooks launched on Product Hunt on 27 August 2018, run by Otto Radio, Inc. with Stanley Yuan still in charge. The model was a membership fee plus steep discounts per title, aimed squarely at people who found Audible expensive. It is a cleaner business than podcast listening, where the content is free and the money sits with whoever sells the ads.

It did not work either. Hibooks is logged as out of business, and hibooks.com today serves a placeholder page from whoever holds the domain. The audiobook company lasted roughly as long as the podcast app had.

~ what the app was for ~

Duration-aware audio keeps being reinvented because the underlying observation is correct. Spotify has tried it, and most car makers with a dashboard have at some point shipped something that promises to fill the drive. What none of them solved is the thing Otto Radio also failed to solve: assembling a good briefing requires rights to the audio, and the people who own the audio would rather you came to their app.

From where I was sitting this was a product for a country of long solo car commutes, which is not the shape of the places I have lived. Ankara traffic is bad enough, but an American drive-time app in English, keyed to American news brands, was built for a listener on a freeway outside a US city. The distance here is measured in miles per day.

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