April 23rd, 2012
Will Podcasting Ever Be Huge?
Podcasting has been on the cusp of greatness since the invention of the smart phone and maybe even before.
While the audience is large and growing I wouldn’t say it’s something that is mainstream. Will it ever become huge and a key part of the zeitgeist or if there is something flawed about the platform and format itself?
While I am sure that e-reading will eventually eclipse printed books and digital movies and television will (or maybe have) eclipse DVDs and VHS, I am not sure the same argument can be made for podcasts and radio.
In that respect I would liken it to RSS, which was ultimately eclipsed by Twitters usability and filtering. Obviously in many ways Twitter is very different from RSS, though the intention is the same – help me consume content from my favorite sites in an easy way.
Perhaps the format and experience needs to be tweaked in the slightest of ways to create the watershed moment where we realize that we have been doing it wrong all along, or perhaps audio will never be able to achieve the same groundswell of support offered to videos, photo and text. I can’t say I buy this – people sit at their desks all day and listen to music (whether on the radio or otherwise) – and you don’t need the same kind of full-concentration with audio, making it almost more appealing.
The a-ha moment is coming.
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Special thanks to Joe West for help on this post.