The introduction of podcasting functionality in iTunes has given an immediate boost to its penetration: Apple says that in the two days since the release of iTunes 4.9, there have been more than a million subscriptions added from its iTunes Podcast Directory. While it’s unclear at this point just how many new podcast users this has brought, no doubt it’s had a significant impact already.
But looking over Apple’s directory and the shows on offer, as well as audio content in general generates some interesting ideas. The top 20 podcasts on iTunes are dominated by big name, commercial content providers like Disney, ESPN, the BBC and ABC News. Many of these podcasts are just recorded or repurposed versions of radio broadcasts, almost the antithesis of the DIY ethic many indie podcasters espouse. Like blogs before, podcasts promise to put individuals on the same publishing plane as commercial content providers. (Of course, like blogs, just having the technology doesn’t guarantee all the user-created content on offer is particularly compelling, but that’s another topic altogether.)
But while the ability for anybody to create and publish audio content is, by no means, an unimportant development, the real value of podcasting is in taking the delivery of updated audio content out of the realm of techie and making it a mainstream concept — and that’s where it gets interesting for mobile. What we’re presented with now is a world of available audio content from a number of individual and big-name providers, and the breadth of what’s on offer will only get bigger. We’ve also got, in RSS with enclosures, the delivery mechanism.
I’ve written quite a bit before about the potential value of RSS for delivering content to mobiles, though it all disappeared along with TheFeature. My basic idea is that RSS makes a lot of sense in the mobile space to deliver information to devices. My first idea was movie listings: a user could set up a profile with their 5 favorite theaters, and then the showtimes for those would be updated via RSS every night at 3am, transparently to the user. That way, the current information is always available on the handset, without having to fire up the browser and connect to the network. Other information could be delivered the same way, using RSS to replace SMS sports score alerts and so on.
So what happens when audio content (or even video, down the road) is thrown into the mix? Instead of just having static content regularly updated to a device, now you’ve got multimedia. It also solves one significant hiccup for podcasting: to take content mobile, you’ve got to sync your MP3 player with your computer. Using mobiles over the network takes that out of the equation, making podcasting a little bit more exciting. We’re an awful long way from that reality, of course, given the usual roadblocks in rolling this sort of thing out for mobile (pricing, operators, etc.).
There’s already companies like audible.com that have expanded out from audiobooks to providing audio versions of newspapers and magazines, as well as recordings of radio programs. Audible has already said it will begin distributing some of its content using RSS, which is a massive step in usability up from expecting subscribers to go download something on their own each day. They’ve still got to sync to their computers, though — having the content sent directly to a mobile phone, automatically, would seem to be much more preferable. That way, a user’s always got the latest content in a device that’s always with them, and the only action required to get it is to subscribe. It becomes real radio on demand — the shows you want to hear, anytime, anywhere, since they’re delivered right to your mobile handset.
Bringing podcasting into iTunes and thereby increasing its exposure will be a boon to podcasting — and the availability of popular commercial content in addition to niche, user-created shows will also help ensure its viability. And once podcasting gets big, evolving from a buzzword to a very widely adopted concept, it seems a natural question users will ask is “sure, this is great — but wouldn’t it be better if I didn’t have to sync to my computer?” And that’s one mobile technology can answer.
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