IT Professionals

Fancasting – It's Fantastic!

Posted by on Sep 28, 2006 | One Comment

I just love it when I get emails like this:

Thought you might cover our recent social media deal with Fox. We took our podcasting tool (a VoIP switch combined with a Ruby on Rails podcast hosting application) and created a custom version for television programs. We call the customized version of PodServe – Fancast. Anyway, this week we launched the first application for the Nip/Tuck. Here are the details:

Here,
and here!

Here is the commercial running on FX Network for Fancast.

We presented our platform back in July at Under the Radar and won ‘best in show’ and recently INC picked podserve as “best for podcasting!”

Here is the frontend of the Nip/Tuck installation.

Anyway, we would love it if you would cover it in your blog some time.

Alexander Muse
Managing Partner
Spur Inc

So in simplest terms, these podcasts allow the fans of NipTuck to communicate with the show’s cast and other members. To be honest, it’s simply brilliant. Podcasting: Who would have ever thought?

  • http://www.biggu.com Alexander Muse

    Thanks for the post. I guess it wasn’t really the sort of coverage we were looking for, but any news is good news I guess. The story wasn’t the technology, but the use case…

    Almost a year ago we built a tool to allow for social or public podcasts – i.e. podcast feeds where more than one entity or person could contribute content. Audio or video content could be added by anyone to a ‘public’ podcast. Audio or video content could be added only by invited guests to ‘social’ podcasts. This was a fairly unique concept – normally podcasts were setup to provide a channel for a single person or entity. Rarely did they create a conversation between two or more unrelated parties that we could ‘listen in’ on. We took the system one step further and connected a PBX to the podcast system allowing the system to make outgoing calls or accept incoming calls and then insert those calls into a podcast.

    At the end of the day, our deal with FX and the Nip/Tuck program allowed the ‘fans’ of the program to interact using the show’s podcast – i.e. not through their own channel, but through the channel created and promoted by the program. We call this implementation a “Fancast”.

    Other implementations we are working on include:

    # Teamcast – for sports teams
    # Weathercast – for news stations
    # Dreamcast – a marketing effort around greatly extending the wake up call concept
    # Contestcast – another marketing effort around allowing users to connect directly to win contests and prize give-aways
    # Salescast – connecting regional and local sales teams
    # Datecast – helping people meet each other offline

    Here are the details: http://www.biggu.com/fancastexamples