PodCasting

There is a lot of discussion going on in the blog world these days about Podcasting. This is creating audio content for the iPod and making it available for others to listen to. Some say that it's the new radio. I am not sure about that, but I think its interesting and worth following.

There are two companies that should be paying notice to this trend and building out services to support it.

The first is Apple. I have not seen anything on iTunes that looks like podcasted content. They've got this shared playlist thing, but that's really just a way to sell more music. They don't support a marketplace for content created explicitly for the iPod and they should.

The second company that should be all over this is Audible. My partner Brad was part of the VC group that financed Audible and its a great sucess story. The stock has tripled in the past 12 months and the company carries a market cap in excess of $400mm. But today, Audible is mostly about books on tape for the iPod. And that's only a $30mm/year business. Clearly the market is expecting a lot more from Audible. And Audible should give them it in the form of a marketplace for all things audio.

I'll be watching both companies closely to see if either of them makes the right moves.

Comments

[Brian Swanson]

I don't think the major players in podcasting are going to be those currently delivering content for iPods and equivalent devices.

I think we'll find new aggregator's pop-up that focus on this market. We are already seeing a large portion of the internet radio shows offer there shows as downloadable files for this purpose.

There aren't currently many RSS Readers that even support downloading these "podcast" files from an RSS feed directly, and there aren't ANY that I know of that will automatically put it on your audio player automatically. This is another piece of the puzzle that needs to be completed for podcasting to really take off.

I want to subscribe to different radio shows, and every day plug-in my audio device (in my case an iPAQ with a 1GB SD Card) and have a program that automatically downloads the content and places it on the device like a simple “sync” process. THAT is when podcasting will take off.

[Brian Swanson]

Being that I'm a programmer, I should have kept that idea to myself! Could be worth something!

[Jacob Pang]

Going a step further, I reckon what could be even more interesting is incoporating such features into the next generation of phones, rss feeds, audio feeds and the whole works all sync daily to your handphone.

We know eventually the handphone will get there in terms of storage and it is only a matter of time really.

[scott partee]

BIG corrections in order. Well, semi-big at least.

First, "podcasting" is not creating and delivering content for "iPod." It's a concept that goes a little bit like your first commentor's take on what he'd "like to see":

"I want to subscribe to different radio shows, and every day plug-in my audio device (in my case an iPAQ with a 1GB SD Card) and have a program that automatically downloads the content and places it on the device like a simple “sync” process. THAT is when podcasting will take off."

Podcasting is really just the idea that a feed (RSS, Atom, whatever) has the ability to deliver not just text, but ANY audio format you choose (including torrent files, that would then be downloadid "in the background").

Just as you "read" blogs today, you'd listen to them tomorrow.

And as far as Brian's "nice to have," this is EXACTLY what iPodder, Adam Curry's little thang that has now caught on and had many variants, such as iPodderX for OSX, and other programs already do.

As far as the content goes, people ARE creating it. However, I've had to listen to far too many amateur hour radio shows, including Adam Curry sniffing into the mic' "I've got to blow my nose!" ANd most of the content is about making podcasts -- not fun.

Content aside, the idea that iTunes and Audible could deliver this interesting. They already deliver content for the iPod. Wouldn't a "podcast" just be a file of a radio show or somebody's broadcast? How is that different than a book on tape or a song exactly? There's no "casting" in that. But make it an RSS feed, and this is, what I like to call, the record label of the future.

[David]

Audible was a great initial idea, but once you use it for any length of time, you quickly reveal it's shortcomings. Audible.com needs a serious upgrade.