The Invasion of the Pod Snatchers; On the future of podcasting.
I wrote on the podcasting mailing list yesterday in a long thread Re: 'Podcasting - is it radio, audio blogging, both?';
How much of this is going to be like the web was, or blogs are becoming? I.e. the corporates will move in with their big budgets and then suddenly 2004-2005 style personal broadcasting seem so ... quaint?
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One thing that needs to happen is someway for the player devices and software to link the downloaded content file with the original information and meta-data about that content, so that for example, textual information, links to other materials, and so on can be included in the podcasted environment for the user to utilise. Unfortunately none of the podcatchers appear to do anything about this and certainly none of the players support it, but it is a conceiveable development path.
Someone responded to a point about the RSS enclosure and subscriptions mechanisms, and said that the problem is that at the moment the whole thing is just way too geeky for the average Jane or Joe.
I responded;
Yes, I would fully expect that if this is going to become a mass movement, that iTunes and Windows Media Player would have to include fully functional and mostly pre-configured podcatcher clients inside them, from the factory. Or that plugins are easily downloaded or something.
The problem then will be for podcasters, how to prise the audience away from their now preset-from-the-factory channels! The problem of the media conglomerates again.
Then just now I found this post by Ross Rader from a week ago. Key quote;
... I am left without any doubts that Windows Media Player 11 must include a fully integrated OPML directory browser and and RSS parser - i.e. a built in Podcatcher.
Yep, I must have asorbed that part by osmosis or something. Prepare for The Invasion of the Podsnatchers.