The Downside

Within 5 years, you won’t hear the word podcast. You’ll forget the word podcast. It will go the way of the fax machine because it’s not a technology. It is a black hole of technology, sucking in all that is truly interesting and innovative. It’s the 8-track of the Internet.

First off, I hereby resolve never to use the word podcast again. It doesn’t have anything to do with Apple’s iPod, and there’s no “casting” or broadcasting involved. More on this later.

Remember when you got your first cassette recorder with a microphone and you and your friends sat around recording each other talking? That’s (almost) exactly what a podcast is, except it’s cheaper to make copies of your mindless babble. The “pod” came from the fact that Apple is dominating the portable audio player market, so most people were listening to their audio downloads on their iPods. If we were any more sheep-like, we’d be calling operating systems “Windows Systems.”

Then, the fact that you can download this recorded audio somehow became known as casting, although broadcasting is generally accepted to be the distribution of a signal, like through television or cable, that can be simultaneously received by the watchers or listeners. But podcasts are downloaded on-demand, whenever the listener wants, or as the tech types like to say, asynchronously. It is not sent until the user requests it, and then it is only sent to a single user. Nothing casty about it.

So what we’re talking about is really an audio download, or as I like to call them, loadios (LOW-dee-ohs). These are not to be confused with loadeos (low-DAY-ohs), of course, (video downloads.)

So why are loadios destined to join Betamax and the upcoming PlayStation 3 on the scrapheap? The technology to make loadios obsolete is already here. The whole point of a loadio is that you can download it and play it whenever you want on your portable audio device. But perhaps you’ve noticed that every cell phone and PDA released in the last couple years has a wireless Internet connection. As those connections get fast enough, there will be no reason to download and store loadios because you’ll be able to listen to them on-demand, whenever and wherever you like. No need to have an iPod involved or to save the loadio anywhere - just ask for it, and you’re listening to it. Naturally, you’ll be able to save them if you want to your phone or PDA or ‘net-enabled audio player, but would there be any reason to call a saved audio program a “podcast” at this point? It’s just another saved program, like on your Tivo. This streaming, on-demand paradigm is not far away. It may even make iPods obsolete, but you can be sure Stevie Jobs is adding ‘net capabilities to his Pods as we speak.

Incidentally, what’s so “I” about the iPod? Usually that “I” stands for Internet, but any connection an iPod has to the Internet is purely incidental in that the computer you plug your iPod into may have an Internet connection, although there’s really no need for that unless you want to download music files to your computer where you can THEN transfer it to your non-Internet enabled iPod. I love marketing folks.

Of course, downloadable audio files are useful still. It’s cool that people can record their own little radio show and distribute it to their friends and listeners. But we’ve been able to download audio files on the Internet for 10-15 years now, so it just doesn’t seem that important, new, or revolutionary. The fact that you can put these files on a portable audio player like an iPod is cool, but just not all that new or exciting. And how the word “podcast” came to represent this activity, I have no idea. Perhaps some underground marketing from Apple? I look forward to a time when I don’t have to download files to my portable audio player and when I can pick and choose which programs I want to listen to on-demand.

So yes, I give podcasts *ahem* loadios another 2 years of any sort of relevance, and then another 3 years until they’re completely forgotten. People will listen to streaming audio (streamios) and watch streaming video (streameos) on any device they like, whenever they like. Check back with me in 2011 and we’ll see.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 16th, 2006 at 11:23 am and is filed under Apple, Internet, Technology. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.