Chinese podcasts, videos and HSK tests

[trevelyan]

This is great feedback guys. We will be incorporating a lot of these suggestions. Thanks a lot.

Luobot - can you be a bit more specific with your comment on audio production quality? Either down below or in an email. We do normalization and other post-production work but are serious about providing high quality audio and pointers on particular grievances are very useful for getting them eliminated.

5) Add some silly banter. It really makes the podcast more fun.

... but makes the podcast tedious to listen to more than once.

This is an interesting debate. Oddly enough, some of our early feedback was from people disappointed at the lack of gravitas in other podcasts, and that has probably affected us. But there's no reason multiple podcast formats can't co-exist, and pushing out alternate shows in different formats are fine (why on earth should there be only one format?). We have a modest budget for podcasting which will hopefully grow, and can consider funding (or contributing to) other shows with more banter, or even recording dialogues for others to wrap color commentary around.

I want everyone who podcasts for us to feel comfortable so prefer to let them find their own voices. I will say that I think we're all incredibly privileged to have Brendan O'Kane working with Echo Wei on these lessons though. Both are fantastic teachers with great Chinese. We're digesting feedback on the structure and will make changes moving forward, probably moving to tighten the vocab segment of the podcast something along the lines suggested by leosmith (you're not alone...), likely handling the vocab as part of a line-by-line review to make the materials more accessible and not overexplaining words with a character-by-character breakdown.

Just stepping back to the question of alternate shows. If anyone in Beijing is interested in podcasting (getting access to our studio or helping push forward a show) please contact me by email. We are located in one of the older hutongs off Guijie - it's a far cry from a modern office, but a really lovely part of the city and quite convenient with the new Beixinqiao metro.

7) Make the free content downloadable without having to join. I'll actually use it if you do. None of the 3 excellent sites that I've been posting about require membership for downloading podcasts.

Changed, and not a big deal. The location of the file is already in both the page source as well as the public RSS feed, so there's no reason to block people who want to download it explicitly through the site.

That’s why I was advancing the advertising model. Otherwise, can you think of a good incentive for a commercial organization to want you to use their expensively produced content for free?

If advertising ends up offering a viable alternative to subscription sales, we will consider it. Until then, we will control access to our own content but let anyone create and distribute their own materials.

The most basic question is, what products/services are considered custom versus mass other than the podcast?

Anything that requires non-trivial server processing time or storage, custom lesson production, or face-time from our teachers. Access to materials produced by specific instructors may also require payment, as will offline complements to online lessons, physical products, etc.

I'm confident we can operate the service profitably on the freemium model as envisaged. The business model for UGC isn't fully hashed out yet in part because we're not expecting an explosion in UGC and see it as a by-product of what we are really aiming for: a remote and language agnostic lesson production system. UGC is great for self-motivated, advanced learners with more niche needs.

That being said, I do think UGC plays an important role in leveling the playing field and makes a lot of potential complaints about subscription levels sort of silly. If anyone really considers it unfair that they can't download a particular PDF for free, it isn't that hard to step over to the create page and just make one themselves by transcribing the dialogue. A group could easily share an account and split the burden of lesson creation without paying a dime.

[Luobot]

Luobot - can you be a bit more specific with your comment on audio production quality? ... We do normalization ...

Some of the podcasts I listened to are relatively too loud in parts, too low in other parts. Here’s a tip: In some cases, automatic gain control produces dramatically better results than normalization. I tried it on one of your podcasts and it was a definite improvement. It depends on the recording. Another little thing is that Brendon, in the current intermediate “network” podcast, sounds as if he’s speaking through a tin can. Otherwise, they are all fine podcasts.

[trevelyan]

I'll try automatic gain control, thanks for the tip. We can also try putting Brendan on a Behringer instead of a Shure. Our Shures are actually better microphones overall, but the pickup levels are lower while the Behringers accent a slightly higher range.