Business Media

In the first of our educational series for B2B publishers and marketers, Jeff Karnes, who heads up marketing and products at VoloMedia, argues that we quickly need to forget the myth that podcasting is just about audio.

Podcasting myths: it’s just audio

Whilst podcasting started as audio with shows such as Adam Curry‘s “Daily Source Code” ramblings and a whole host of amateurs publishing podcast stories of their lives, those were the days when an iPod meant audio only.

Podcasting has come a long way since then. Not only is it more video, it is also more professional and includes some of the best online content available. They range from shows specifically made-for-podcast, to repurposed broadcast TV, and radio content.

The future’s video

Video podcasting has been growing much faster than audio although audio is still highly popular. Over 10 billion podcasts were downloaded in 2008, and a lot of that growth was fuelled by professional content and by the advent of video in iTunes.

Wikipedia’s definition of podcasting illustrates that in addition to serving as a wrapper for video and audio files, it is a very powerful distribution mechanism for content, and a great way for consumers to enjoy and subscribe to programming.

Wider reach

RSS (or Really Simple Syndication) is the most widely used of the syndication protocols for podcasting and offers many benefits.

For publishers, it’s a superior way to define and package their media (RSS includes a metadata framework) while creating an automatic syndication strategy to allow content to follow the users, whether they are getting updates on a website or subscribing through iTunes (or other aggregators such as TVersity) and then playing on a  portable device.

For users, the benefits include subscription (i.e. receiving automated updates to your favourite shows), taking content to-go, viewing on-demand, viewing off-line – basically giving full control over the consumption experience as the content is downloaded. Think TiVo for the web.

Examples

But, let’s come back to the audio-only myth. A great way to quickly dispel this notion is to simply visit the iTunes Podcasting library. And not too long ago, the iTunes podcasting team added video and audio as top level categories.

Titles such as MSNBC, Comedy Central, VH1, The Onion, Oprah, HBO, Revision3, G4, Disney, Slate and NextNewNetworks make content avaible for free. And in the audio section there are even more titles from publishers such as LearnOutLoud, HowStuffWorks, CBS, Personal Life Media and QuickAndDirty. The list goes on.

Dispel the myth

It’s time to dispel the historical myth and embrace the full meaning for podcasting, which includes video. The podcasting resurgence is upon us, and this time, we’ll make sure to give it its proper due!

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