Killing of the Podcast – NEVER!

A couple of years ago I was fortunate to attend a seminar with the headlining guest speaker being the BT Futurologist. Much of the lecture was based around the future of communications (it was after all an Avaya hosted event), and it was all rather interesting, but one thing that stuck in my mind was the predicted demise of the podcast.

To this day I’ve never been able to figure out why the podcast was targeted as “dying medium”, when it seems that MP3 and other media players are on an ever increasing upwards spiral and radio remains to be alive and kicking (it turns out that video didn’t really kill the radio star – and DVD offered no threat, will Blue-Ray kill the radio star? I doubt it!).

The podcast of course was made publicly popular by the talented and funny Ricky Gervais podcast (evidenced by the long period of time his podcast show remained number one in the podcasting charts, even long after it was released). More recently Russell Brand and his Radio 2 show have dominated the charts and plenty have challenged for the position of number one downloaded podcast.

It’s definitely not a dying medium at this moment and I hope it long continues to generate content – I look forward to downloading my favourite podcasts and listening to them, on what I call “Podcast Tuesday” (the majority of what I download tends to be available over the weekend or Monday evening at the latest). It’s the only way to get me through my day – even though I do appear to be crazy when I’m listening to podcasting comedy gold and laughing away.