Podcasting to fade away?

Dave Caolo from TUAW won­ders if pod­cast­ing will slow down as more peo­ple will look into vod­cast­ing, partly due to the new video­play­ing iPods.

Sure, inter­est is going to rise as DV cams are drop­ping in price and as the dis­tri­b­u­tion model is improved as far as hard­ware and syn­di­ca­tion goes. But to look at video as an improve­ment over radio — the long lost brother with all the visu­als — doesn’t seem right. Radio is an art­form in itself and has sur­vived tele­vi­sion, movies and the inter­net. Prob­a­bly with less lis­ten­ers, but just as I found aggre­ga­tion of blogs absolutely mind­blow­ing, the auto­sync­ing of audio­con­tent altered my every­day life. The point is I can lis­ten to all the good DIY con­tent while doing other things. Bik­ing, rid­ing cars, cook­ing; pod­cast­ing is my friend. When in a bus, on a train, on a plane, video will rock, defi­nately. But these forms will hap­pily coex­ist, I’m telling ya.

Audio con­tent jumps right into an empty atten­tion sweetspot where video has to com­pete with other activ­i­ties tak­ing up full atten­tion. Which is fine. I’d rather watch the Daily Show than read some silly free paper while com­mut­ing. Hav­ing played for two min­utes with a PSP though, makes me pretty con­vinced that Jobs was right when he stated that the screen might be too small. It still is. And the device isn’t online. The PSP is — with a larger screen. More con­ver­gence, please.

In that light, it’s inter­est­ing that the iPod now can record in a decent way.

That being said, I’m look­ing for­ward to more video con­tent, to see the new iPod in action and to wit­ness the result of the cry­baby record indus­try finally real­iz­ing that there are mil­lions of ways to make money on the con­tent they already have; this time it’s movies and music videos. In a cou­ple months’ time, Jobs will show a slide with impres­sive sales of video con­tent. So stop complaining.

Tags: pod­cast­ing, video, vlog