Life and Death in This American Life
Many years ago (1999, apparently) I saw Ira Glass on David Letterman. He was fairly nerdy and talking about some sort of public radio show that he did that had become a success. The show: This American Life. It took me a couple years to actually tune in, but it easily became my favorite thing on radio. I remember listening to it on the radio of my Jeep in the parking lot of my first apartment. I was waiting for the show to end.
Over the years it proved difficult to remember to tune in at the right time on Sundays. This was well before podcasting, and so my only options were to listen to archives in Real Audio, or just try to remember to listen. Neither were particularly good options. Perhaps this is a product of our lifestyles and TiVo, but it’s dang hard to remember to turn the radio on at 5pm or so on a Sunday. And Real Audio sucks. Somehow they got their claws into a lot of non-profit type organization right before streaming MP3 became a possibility (WREK streamed Real Audio for a long time), and so an awful lot of good content has only been available on the internet in an awful, worse-than-AM-radio format. I could go on, but I digress.
Fairly early on, TAL was available for download on Audible, which generally sells audio books. Their rates were just too high, though. (”You want me to pay how much to download what I can listen to for free?”) A few years later podcasting made its way into iTunes, and Audible had a rather shaky implementation that allowed you to pay a more reasonable fee ($40/yr) to download the show. I subscribed. (For the uninitiated, a podcast is generally an audio or video program that you can subscribe to such that new episodes will be automatically downloaded to your computer and/or loaded onto your iPod for later listening.)
By the time I got it working I was pretty much appalled by the quality level of Audible’s format. It may be fine for audio books, but for an hour-long show like TAL that actually sounds really good (and has music, etc.), it really degraded the listening experience. It was slightly better than Real Audio, I suppose. I learned to deal with it.
Now a year has passed, and I see iTunes didn’t download a new episode this weekend. I suppose my subscription is up, but I don’t know how I’m supposed to know that. Audible’s site gives no indication of expiration. I was about to pursue renewing, but then I noticed on TAL’s website that they’re streaming MP3 now! It’s 64kbps mono, which is pretty darn good. You can’t subscribe to it, the way you can to a podcast, but at least it’s available in a much nicer format now. In perusing the FAQ, I see that they’re working on a TV show for Showtime. (!) Verrrry interesting.
Well, this turned out a bit longer than I intended. All I really wanted to say was that TAL is great, they have MP3s now, Real and Audible suck (I would happily pay TAL directly for a good quality podcast — anybody listening?), and they look to be doing a TV show soon.
If you haven’t listened to This American Life, I highly recommend it. It’s just great radio. An excellent show, with really interesting and different stories each week. If you’re in the Atlanta area you can hear it on WABE 90.1FM, 6-7pm on Sundays.