Podcasts Don't Cast Into the Pod

[Suhit Gupta]

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060327-6466.html

"A study done by Bridge Data suggests what many of us already suspected: Podcasting is popular, but it has little to do with the "pods," that is, the iPods and other portable players for which "Podcasting" was supposedly born. The study concluded that 80 percent of podcasts are either listened to and/or watched on a PC, or simply deleted. For some, this begs the question: what is a podcast? TDG Research is apparently puzzled by this quandary: isn't a podcast, by definition, supposed to be played on a portable device? I have another question: is this really a dilemma? "Push" content is nothing new, and podcasts are fine examples of push content. Regardless of where a podcast is played, the mechanism for delivery has become the essence of podcasting. Automatic updating/delivery, usually fueled by either RSS or some helper application such as iTunes, is what drives it."

Completely unsurprising. In fact, I would have been shocked if podcasts were primarily played or listed to on an iPod. Ok, so be honest, how many of you haven't tried to watch or listen to a podcast simply because you don't have an iPod? Either way, what I was more surprised to hear is that the projection is only about 9 million people will listen to podcasts this year. This is a much smaller audience than I would have figured, espcially given how many Podcasters are exist.

[Suhit Gupta]

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060327-6466.html

"A study done by Bridge Data suggests what many of us already suspected: Podcasting is popular, but it has little to do with the "pods," that is, the iPods and other portable players for which "Podcasting" was supposedly born. The study concluded that 80 percent of podcasts are either listened to and/or watched on a PC, or simply deleted. For some, this begs the question: what is a podcast? TDG Research is apparently puzzled by this quandary: isn't a podcast, by definition, supposed to be played on a portable device? I have another question: is this really a dilemma? "Push" content is nothing new, and podcasts are fine examples of push content. Regardless of where a podcast is played, the mechanism for delivery has become the essence of podcasting. Automatic updating/delivery, usually fueled by either RSS or some helper application such as iTunes, is what drives it."

Completely unsurprising. In fact, I would have been shocked if podcasts were primarily played or listed to on an iPod. Ok, so be honest, how many of you haven't tried to watch or listen to a podcast simply because you don't have an iPod? Either way, what I was more surprised to hear is that the projection is only about 9 million people will listen to podcasts this year. This is a much smaller audience than I would have figured, espcially given how many Podcasters are exist.

[Jason Dunn]

Yeah, this doesn't surprise me at all - I haven't listened to many "casts", maybe 40 or less, but they've all been on my PC and none on my MP3 player.

[Paul Martin]

Dont' have an ipod so I've never listened that way. I've listened to maybe 20-30 total, most of those ThoughtsCasts. I dump them to my CF card and listen to them on my Pocket PC on the way home, using PocketMusic. As I was driving in this morning, in fact, I was trying to listen to an older one, one of Ed's last Thoughtcasts. I forgot to set it up before I got into the car. It's times like that that the seeming simplicity of pulling up a file on the ipod is definately alluring.