ZCast

» see zcast.co as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

ZCast let you start a podcast from a phone while people listened to it happening. You opened the app, you began talking, and anyone who followed you could join the stream live or pick up the recording afterward. In 2016 the rest of podcasting still assumed an editing session before anyone heard a word of it, so the pitch was that the whole production chain collapsed into the handset you already owned.

The company behind it had already been something else. Zula launched in 2013 as a mobile collaboration tool, co-founded by Jeff Pulver, and raised money from Microsoft Ventures and the investor Gigi Levy among others. It did not find a market, but its audio stack worked well, and in February 2016 the team rebuilt around that one component and shipped it as ZCast. The launch happened on the TechCrunch stage and pulled in tens of thousands of users.

It ended in the last days of January 2019. ZCast came off the App Store and the users were told by email. The company effectively closed with it. No fixed date was ever published. The date above comes from the company's own account of the week it happened rather than from a shutdown notice, and the two are at most a few days apart.

~ the record ~

~ from zula to zcast ~

The pivot is the respectable kind, where a team admits the product failed and keeps only the piece that worked. Zula had built low latency group audio to make work calls bearable, and the thing people actually enjoyed was being on the call. Turning that into broadcasting meant changing who the audience was rather than rewriting the engine, which is why a company with a dead collaboration app could ship a live podcasting app inside a few months.

~ live from a phone ~

What ZCast got right is now so standard it is hard to see. You could bring a guest into a live show by phone, and the recording was published the moment the show ended, with no editing step in between. Twitter Spaces and Clubhouse would later make a format out of exactly this, and they did it with the social graph that ZCast never had.

What it could not solve was why a listener would turn up while a show was live. Podcasts are a medium people consume on their own schedule, in a car or on a walk, and a live broadcast asks for the one thing the format had trained everyone out of. Hosts liked the immediacy. Audiences mostly arrived late and listened to the recording, which made the live part an expensive feature rather than the reason to use the app.

~ one week early ~

On 6 February 2019 Spotify announced it was buying Anchor and Gimlet Media, and the podcast industry rearranged itself around the news. ZCast had switched off roughly a week before that announcement. The company's own post-mortem, written by its chief marketing officer Hillel Fuld on 14 February, puts it plainly: Spotify acquired Anchor one week after they had pulled the ZCast plug.

The market did not reject the idea that podcasting belonged on a phone. It bought a version of that idea seven days later, from a company that had taken the same bet with the live part removed. Anchor had made recording and distribution free and asynchronous, and Spotify paid for that rather than for live audio.

~ what spotify bought instead ~

Anchor's pitch was that anyone could make a podcast from a phone and have it appear in every directory without understanding what an RSS feed was. ZCast's was the same sentence with a different ending: an audience in the room while it happened. One of those removed a chore and the other added an obligation, and the three years between them were long enough for a small Israeli team to find out which one the market would pay for.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »