RSS feedIt’s been a week since I wrote about how podcasting will have its biggest effect on community radio, and about 3-4 weeks since podcasting began, at least in its current form. What we in Australia call community radio by the way, in the U.S. they call public radio.
Public/community radio is mainly funded by sponsors and government grants, this is true in Australia and the U.S., so to embrace podcasting, where is the money going to come from for the bandwidth and storage of program content?
Let’s actually drop the facade and instead of calling it podcasting, call it what it is, on-demand radio, which has been around for at least decade. The podcasting part is just the technology to get it out of a feed and onto an iPod or similar device.
Interestingly enough, the blogosphere seems divided at the moment between whether it’s a fad, or a revolution, although with a majority tending to side with revolution. Here’s one against, which pretty much sums up my opinion as well. Online Journalism Review has some good coverage of some of the issues, but at the end again descends into hypeland by quoting Russell Beattie slightly out of context. The ghist of it being:
[..] there are going to be 650 million phones shipped this year alone. How big will podcasting be when all those phones can be “podcast players?” Think you’re at the beginning of a trend now? Just wait.
Well like I said in my previous post, radio does this already. Everyone has a radio receiver, heck even my mobile phone does. How often do I or you listen to it?
The big problem is going to be content, and this is where the current community radio broadcasters will hopefully jump in, as that’s their biggest asset, varied programming. Unless of course they’re one of the stations who have already shifted from specialist to block programming. Wise move guys. 😉
Maybe Dave Pollard’s ideas will help, maybe more content sources will help, but in a world of information overload, when we’re bombarded left right and centre with information, including hundreds or thousands of RSS feeds, how many of us will bother listening to the radio for this type of content? I’m guessing roughly the same as do now. Except of course the podcasters, who don’t seem to have heard of or listened to community or public radio.
As an aside, in the next few months we’ll be trialling limited podcasting from our radio station. This in conjunction with our company’s work on Sauce Reader, should give us some valuable insight into where we’ll be in a few years’ time.