Newsweek, in their article on podcasting, calls it "Tivo for your iPod," which is perhaps a new milestone in the annals of "convenient oversimplification." The operative thing about podcasting isn't timeshifting or the ability to capture all future broadcasts of a show (a la Tivo's season pass), it's the democratization of the media sources. Tivo didn't enable thousands of new media outlets within the few few months of its existence. Tivo hasn't added channels to my cable system, last time I checked. Sigh. Still, it's good to see podcasting get all the over-excited coverage it justly deserves.
1. Podcasting is totally about "...the ability to capture all future broadcasts of a show (a la Tivo’s season pass)...". I subscribe and then my aggregator automatically loads the media into my iPod whenever it discovers the latest file.
I agree though that the Tivo analogy is pretty misleading...for now. But I suspect that in due course regular radio will start making popular shows available as mp3 files right after they have aired live...so allowing me to time shift my favorite shows. Then the Tivo analogy will start to make sense.
Actually this will be cool. I can think of a number of great radio shows in other countries that I can listen to via live streaming mp3, but I would love it if they were available as downloadable mp3's...that would be super cool.
Posted at 4:46AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Charles