By Fran Molloy
Cameron Reilly is a passionate technology advocate – and heads a growing new-media empire, The Podcast Network, (TPN) from his Brisbane base.
Although TPN isn´t well known in his native Australia, Reilly boasts that it is now one of the largest new media companies in the world.
And he´s attracted some heavyweight attention; EContent Magazine listed TPN as one of world´s most influential digital content companies and, closer to home, TPN scored a guernsey in B&T Magazine´s Biggest Players of Australia´s Digital Age.
The former Microsoft e-business specialist started his own software company in 2004 when a colleague told him about podcasting, then just emerging from the US.
"I listened to one or two early podcasts and I got really excited," he says. "It was the most exciting thing I´d heard for a long time."
Though the technology is fairly low-tech, Reilly says that the real innovation is that, suddenly, anyone with a PC and a microphone and perhaps a video camera can produce their own radio or TV show and get instant global reach.
"In the 20th century, you had to be rich white guy to own a radio or a TV station and the access to those services were limited. The real innovation is around the barriers being taken off the distribution platform."
The tech-savvy Reilly soon established a server and the very basic equipment needed to create his own podcasts. "There were no Australian podcasts at the time and I decided somebody needed to be first; and I started doing a show with another person, called G´day World."
Podcasting is the future of radio, according to its many passionate advocates. And most major radio broadcasters are putting at least one foot in the podcasting stream, with many radio shows providing free audio downloads of various highlights from their websites.
Podcasts are audio files that can be played through a computer or downloaded to an MP3 player or iPod; and they give not just physical portability but also the freedom of time-shifting – listening to an audio broadcast when it suits you.
"Within a month, there were thousands of people listening to our podcast show," Reilly says. "There were a whole bunch of shows that I wanted to listen to that didn´t exist back then – shows about movies and politics and history and music."
Reilly contacted friends who were bloggers living in various parts of the world and offered to host their files and handle all the technology backend requirements – if his blogger friends would just produce a podcast on the same subject that they were writing about.
"By February 2005, we had launched TPN with about six shows. I didn´t set it up as a business at the time; but very quickly I got a feel for it and got excited about the idea of building a global independent media company."
Fast forward to 2008, and Reilly´s media empire has expanded at a rate that Rupert Murdoch would be happy with. TPN now has around 80 shows in production and a global audience of 800,000 people.
But podcasting is still in its very early days, he says. "If you walk down the street in Sydney or Melbourne or Brisbane and stopped people to ask if they listened to podcasts, perhaps one percent would listen on a regular basis and maybe one in ten would even know what it was."
Ideally, an advertising-based business model will emerge; but Reilly says that, as with much new media, the advertising industry is struggling to recognise its potential. Reilly defines himself as a social activist. "I understood that to have any significant impact in the political arena you had to have a media company; I´m very interested in politics and the future of the human race, those sorts of things and I saw an opportunity here to build a media company from scratch."
He hopes to use TPN to challenge the way that people think about issues where the mainstream media poses a conservative neocapitalist line.
"My overriding motivation has always been to build a global media company in order to shape the way that people think about certain issues," he says.
Global domination? Now that´s thinking big!
