Podcast Acceleration

Although I haven’t writ­ten about them, I’ve been qui­etly mon­i­tor­ing the pod­cast space. I am amazed by how quickly they’ve taken hold and today’s announce­ment by Infin­ity Broad­cast­ing that they were launch­ing KYOU Radio, a radio that’s dis­trib­ut­ing pod­casts seems to be the tip­ping point for that new technology.

For my read­ers who are not famil­iar with the con­cept, a pod­cast is essen­tially an audio file that is dis­trib­uted via a syn­di­ca­tion feed like RSS. Mosts pod­casts are encoded in MP3 for­mat and, for the most part, pod­casts have been the equiv­a­lent of audio blogs. The ini­tial con­cept behind them came in a din­ner at Katz’s deli in New York (fall of 2000) when Adam Curry and I urged Dave Winer, who was then the only per­son keep­ing RSS on life sup­port, to pro­vide a way with RSS to dis­trib­ute data other than text. Adam had writ­ten an arti­cle talk­ing about the last yard issue in terms of deliv­er­ing con­tent in the home (real­ize this is before Bit­Tor­rent was pop­u­lar.) From there, Dave added the enclo­sure item to the for­mat and things were quiet for a long time. Last sum­mer, Adam intro­duced iPod­der, a pro­gram that sim­pli­fied the cre­ation of what he called pod­cast, with the idea that they would be dis­trib­uted to the iPod. Since then, the idea has gone from being the domain of a few geeks to becom­ing a main­stream effort.

Today’s announce­ment about the cre­ation of KYOU shows that the idea is now going main­stream and I expect pod­cast­ing to make the cover of many busi­ness mag­a­zines in the months to come, replac­ing blogs as the new new thing. While the sta­tion is small, it’s an inter­est­ing exper­i­ment in using con­sumer gen­er­ated data to cre­ate new pro­gram­ming. In a way, this is the next evo­lu­tion in media, going from tightly pro­grammed shows (Sit­coms, TV dra­mas, etc…) to shows leav­ing room for more indi­vid­ual reac­tions (“real­ity” TV shows) to pro­gram­ming with no var­nish whatsoever.

The one thing that fas­ci­nates me about this progress is the elapsed time between intro­duc­tion and main­stream adop­tion for such tech­nol­ogy. The web browser took half a decade before being adopted by the main­stream; E-commerce went from geek street to main street in a cou­ple of years; but pod­cast­ing has gone from zero to hero in under a year. I was recently sur­prised when I heard pod­casts being casu­ally men­tioned on my local radio sta­tion. With today’s announce­ment, this is the sec­ond time I’m sur­prised by the rapid adop­tion for this new technology.