Radio and tech guru Kurt Hanson posted this very strong piece about the podcasting phenomenon.
Here’s a particularly interesting quotation:
“When you can program your own radio station, carry it with you anywhere and pause and restart it at will, who needs mainstream, advertising-supported broadcast radio?..”
Well, my question would be…who’s gonna create the content? I’m not being skeptical, only practical. Creating content needs highly recognizable talent and wide distribution to stoke that talent’s popularity and recognizability. In other words, TV fans don’t TiVo en masse the obscure shows on the obscure cable channels, they TiVo Desperate Housewives.
Further, the science behind podcasting right now is anything but push-button. If and when that changes, then we’ll see. Easy to use may mean common. Hard to use definitely means scarce.
But even so, much of radio is environment programming, not appointment programming (unlike TV). For this reason, most radio stations have more to fear from Satellite and Broadband wireless streaming than from a technology focused on appointment listening.
That said, unless radio creates more appointments it won’t last long enough to see the popularity of podcasting peak.