Interview With Omny Studio CEO Sharon Taylor

Sharon Taylor is the CEO of Omny Studio, a podcast hosting solution that was designed with radio broadcasters in mind. I asked her some questions...

1. What is Omny Studio?

Omny Studio is a complete audio management solution for podcasters and radio networks. Going a step beyond standard, simpler podcast hosting, Omny Studio's enterprise level tool-suite has been built specifically for professional audio publishers and content creators, enabling them to capture, host, publish, edit, monetize and measure their audio like never before.

We have a very unique feature set, a part of which is a live recording function that allows radio stations to capture recordings, build an annotated archive of everything that went to air, publish to every consumer platform, connect podcasts and other clips to mobile apps and websites as well as monetize digital content.

2) Tell us about the history of the company.

Omny was formed in 2012 by three founders who saw a future where listeners interacted with audio on their own terms. They could see that consumers had more of an appetite for "on-demand" and audio was no exception. The product they built to address this was Omny Radio, which pulled in spoken word content, music and personal updates to build a personal 'radio station' for listeners.

Unfortunately, and I don't think this has changed considerably yet in the industry, we faced content scarcity and curation issues so we decided to help at the other end of the funnel instead - by helping producers, predominantly from radio networks, repurpose their on-air content into an online medium. So, Omny Studio was born and we've been working to move the audio on-demand industry (of which podcasting is a core focus) ahead ever since.

3) When Omny Studio built its suite of tools for podcasting, it had radio broadcasters in mind. Tell us about that.

You're right, with the initial aim of finding a way to get more content into the Omny Radio app, our initial design and build was developed with radio in mind. We worked closely with Australia's largest radio network and other individual stations around the world to ensure the workflow and feature set met the needs of broadcasters. And in doing so we managed to build an audio CMS that allowed them to go from on-air to online, literally in seconds, while saving them hundreds of hours a year in people hours.

We released the product at Radio Days in 2015 to great interest. Broadcasters were scrambling to prepare for the wave of on-demand listeners and wanted to prepare their stations. Fast forward a couple of years and Omny Studio is now a 'battle-tested' audio management CMS which enables broadcasters to repurpose their content while providing a powerful archiving tool as a by-product.

4) The vast majority of podcast listening happens on Apple devices, but Apple is not forthcoming with its data, which has made it difficult for podcasters to determine the amount of "Time Spent Listening" to each episode. Omny recently made headlines when it claimed that it could determine this elusive metric. Tell us about that.

We've always prided ourselves on our analytics and have been reporting consumption data back to our clients for a long while now. We track retention, start points, drop-offs and skips down to the second and report that back to users in our system. For a long while that was all we could do because, as everyone will tell you, historically you can only report that level of insight back if you control the player. We wanted to change that and luckily our CTO is brilliant enough to have found a way, which goes beyond the traditional byte range request method where listening is (somewhat inaccurately) estimated from download quartiles.

For the percentage of listens that come from the Apple Podcasts app for content we host, we're now able to report consumption data back for around 30% of those plays, showing all the same granular level listener interaction data within 10 seconds of accuracy. At the moment it's only available for streamed plays (or 'progressive downloads' if you want to get technical - and it seems like a lot of people in our industry want to!), but with streamed plays accounting for around 76% of podcasting interactions according to Edison's most recent Infinite Dial report, it's definitely not an insignificant amount of data to sample from.

Our clients are loving the additional insights and with the product now out of Beta, it's available for all clients of Omny Studio.

5) For radio stations who are looking to embrace podcasting, what are the monetization models they should consider?

As a technology platform we are extremely flexible when it comes to advertising strategies, as ultimately we believe that the radio stations themselves are best positioned to determine their own monetization strategy. What I do urge radio to do though, is to at least start monetizing. Sometimes I see broadcasters hesitant to start advertising on their podcasts, either because the perception is it's too difficult to start or complex to do. It's not, I promise.

We've recently partnered with Triton Digital to make this even easier for clients, where we leverage Triton's podcast advertising server, TAP Podcast, to dynamically stitch pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll audio ads directly into podcast episodes or audio files, targeting multiple podcasts at once or multiple campaigns within one podcast. Ads can be targeted based on a number of parameters, including geo-location, aggregator, tags, or specific episodes.

6) Many radio stations repurpose on-air shows as podcasts. What are some of the factors to consider when repurposing? What are they keys to doing this well? What are some pitfalls to avoid?

I think radio needs to remember that podcast listening is very different to traditional radio. Structurally, there are core differences that need to be considered. A broadcast is a continually moving piece of content and listeners can tune in and out at any point without issue. Podcast listeners on the other hand have gone out of their way to catch up on the show and you should curate that experience for them and reward them for their effort. Adding exclusive content or even just a short "podcast-only" introduction is a great way to engage and reward the super-fans of the show, build up your podcast listenership and ensure that the growing number of people from younger generations who only consume content with their phone have a reason to listen to your podcast over the competition.

I personally don't believe that repurposing an entire 2+ hour show is the best way to engage with your podcast audience. Remember that a podcast audience is choosing to engage with you when they listen - they've made an active decision to listen to what you have to say. I question whether making them skip and search around a multi-hour podcast is the best experience for them to hear what you have to say.

The power of Omny Studio is that it lets broadcasters tackle this in multiple ways. They can repurpose the whole show if they'd like, minus ad breaks and music. They can clip out the best performing parts to make a 'best of' playlist, or they can extract specific interviews or segments for bite-sized consumption on social media to build up subscriber numbers, ultimately allowing them to be everywhere their audience is in a new audio-on-demand environment.

7) You're in Australia. To what extent have Australian radio stations embraced podcasting? Do you see differences in where radio stations from different countries are approaching podcasting?

Australian radio has jumped on board the podcasting train in a big way. Each of the commercial networks here currently podcast in some way or another, though their strategies vary, and smaller stations are also starting to dabble. The differences are content and organization based, and not so much geographical I think.

Repurposing the best performing shows remains the most common podcasting method across the globe, but I do think Australian radio is particularly good at sharing high performing clips and individual pieces of content across social media to build their audience and podcast subscribers.

We're going to see even more growth in podcasting this year, due in large part to more broadcasters across the globe entering the space. The US is particularly exciting to watch and it's incredible to work with some really innovative networks to help them work out their strategy and then deploy it with them.