Earlier this week, SIRIUS announced that Adam Curry, the "father of podcasting" will produce a special SIRIUS Satellite Radio program which will broadcast the best podcasts in the world!
Doesn't it strike anyone that the traditional media's rush into what they perceive as "Podcasting" is similar to what traditional companies did in the late '90s when they began to buy up anything that ended in ".com" because they thought every destination on the internet ending in ".com" was a valuable commodity?
And then the crappola hit the fan and the DOT COM bubble burst. Time-Warner/AOL. Need I say more about that?
Well, we're in "The Great Podcasting Rush of '05" and everyone wants to get their piece of anything that has a "pod" and a "cast" in it.
But, the problem is this: both Infinity with KYOURADIO.com and SIRIUS with Curry's new show featuring podcasts are just two older mediums emulating a new medium. Broadcasting podcasts is not podcasting. It's broadcasting...or in the case of Satellite Radio, actually narrowcasting - in a sense. No matter: it's not podcasting.
The point of podcasting is to give the listener choices, not the creator of the programming. Listeners decide what podcast(s) they will subscribe to by topic or interest and when they will listen to it.
It seems to me KYOURADIO.com and "Adam Curry's PodShow" on SIRIUS will be the antithesis of podcasting. In both cases, someone will make final decisions and narrow down the programming to a small universe of audio.
Just because you use the catchwords, doesn't necessarily make it something it's not.
The move by SIRIUS to bring Adam Curry aboard strikes me as just another part of Satellite Radio's recent "land grab" of audio. Between XM and SIRIUS' almost daily announcements of more additional programming, I feel like they're throwing everything against the cosmic wall to see what sticks.
In certainly seems Satellite Radio is trying to prove it can outdo terrestrial radio with stacks and stacks of ... more terrestrial programming!
Hello!? WHO CARES!?
Satellite's initial beauty was the promise of wonderful things like "commercial-free" music which in some listeners' minds is already becoming debatable. The initial seduction of Satellite Radio was the offer and promise to counter-program against the mundane black hole of programming that terrestrial radio has spiraled into over the last decade or so.
Yet, it appears Satellite Radio can't spend enough money and resources on grabbing programming that has been available forever on AM and FM like baseball, auto racing, college hoops, and dozens of other subjects we can already hear. I actually received a press release today telling me that SIRIUS had added thoroughbred horse racing to its "deep stable of live sports programming". And now I can hear podcasts on Satellite?
(This the sound of me shrieking out loud although you can't hear it.)
The power of podcasting is in its distribution method which is uniquely individualized. As I said, Podcasting empowers the listeners with choices. But, it also empowers program producers with the incentive to create programming that would never find a place on AM, FM and most likely neither Internet Streaming nor Satellite Radio.
After all: who wants to hear 15 minutes on "Dung Beetle Diversity In Pasture Versus Forest". I don't know - but eventually someone will do a podcast on it and others will subscribe to it because, my friend, that is what podcasting is really all about.
