The Elusive Fish — Creative Services

A recent survey by The Diffusion Group states that the relevance of portability in podcasting is overstated. Their findings show that only 20% of downloaded podcasts are transferred to a portable device. It’s worth noting that there is another survey by Podtrac which is less dramatic but still show 41% listening on their computer.

The authors of the study seem to find that number surprising and state, “perhaps we should reconsider our understanding of podcasting - what it is, what it does, how it does what it does, and how it may impact the distribution of Internet media. In other words, let’s go back to the drawing board and start from scratch.”

There’s absolutely no need to start from scratch. As many of the commenters to the original post state, for most of us who listen to and create podcasts, portability was never a defining aspect of the podcast. I don’t own a portable device myself but listen to about 10 - 15hrs of podcasting a week on my desktop. The beauty of audio is that you can multitask. As I work on an illustration, or fiddle with stylesheets or sift through my feeds, I can be listening to my programs. A downloaded MP3 vs streaming audio means that if I miss something I can zip back a few minutes and pay closer attention.

My own thought is that the defining aspect of a podcast seems to be the use of RSS to automatically deliver the files, and that opinion seems to be backed by the comments left for the study’s authors not to mention the wikipedia entry on podcasting. But what is driving the growth in podcasting is the underlying ‘my media - my way’ philosophy. Listen when you want. Listen how you want. Whether that’s at 2 am in front of the desktop, 7am on a burned CD over the car stereo during the morning commute or 7pm at the gym with your MP3 player. It’s your choice.

tip of the hat to Donna Papacosta whose tipping her hat to Steve Rubel.

Share This

This entry was posted on Friday, March 24th, 2006 at 11:26 pm and is filed under Audio, Social Media, Web Design and New Media, News and Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.