Will Apple "own" Podcasts?

Michael Gartenberg | May 27, 2005, 10:18 AM

There's been a lot of buzz over the fact that the 4.9 release of iTunes will support Podcasts directly. That's a good thing. RSS remains unusable to a lot of folks because they never figure out what that little orange icon does. Apple showed had RSS subscriptions can work really elegantly in Safari. I expect them to do the same with podcasts support. Too much of the Podcast stuff today is still to hard to use. I could never get iPodder to work for me at all. Doppler works pretty well but you still need to know what you're doing. I suspect iTunes will do what none of the other stuff has done and that is take the technology to the masses. It's a good deal for Apple since we know that most consumers only have about a thousand songs in their music collections, this feature gives folks a reason to buy those 20 and 30 GB iPods. Of course, since the whole podcasting buzzword was a nice commercial for Apple, it makes sense for them to get on board. It's likely that given Microsoft's slow support for things like this, iTunes will become the defacto podcasting client for a lot of folks and that means Apple's directory will be the one you want to be included in.

But at the end of the day, it's hard to imagine that this matters financially. Few bloggers make money directly from their weblogs (although they may make money because of their weblogs). Even fewer podcasters will see any financial success from their efforts. It's hard to speak solo for a long period of time and hold someone's attention. Ask anyone that speaks professionally for a living. I've tried a lot of podcasts and personally only found two that were interesting enough to listen to all the way through. And one of those only publishes sporadically. So what's the opportunity? Well, we're seeing it. ABC and NBC announced they'll be doing podcasts, that is they will be offering their audio content via this new technology medium. Others are doing the same. The technology will create some amazing opportunities for some folks as distribution medium but most of the amateur content won't make it over the long haul. While it's likely we'll see a few folks that would never have made the leap into the broadcasting rise as a result of their podcasts, most of the stuff out there just isn't worth listening to. In 1992 Bruce Springsteen sang about "57 channels and nothing on". He might well have been talking about podcasts.