Following your analogy to streaming, there must be a business in there somewhere. If streaming was/is just another cog, how was broadcast.com able to be built and sold for such a substantial sum? From a consumer’s point of view, your right, a podcast is just another form of entertainment but, for the person who can aggregate in a way to get significant ears to come to one place to listen, there should be a profitable enterprise. Not that this changes your thesis that podcasting is unprofitable to the individual podcaster, but it is unrealistic to assert there is no meaningful money to be made in the podcasting “evolution/revolution.” (Now, if I could just figure out how to do it with no money )

My two cents…

For instance, I enjoy Norm Hitzges radio shows, but I am at work when he is normally on the air, it would be cool for me if I could download his show and listen to it later.

Folks, it ain’t about podcasting versus blogging or podcasting versus streaming. Those arguments are specious exercises over which media is better. Speed ahead ten minutes in the galactic timeline and you’ll be wasting the same time over whether people will watch amateur video-based ‘casting on the next generation of iPods or PSPs or whatever. And they will already be watching.

Repeat after me, the medium doesn’t matter—the message does. It’s all about content and marketing and it has been since media became mass. Mark knows this as well as anyone, because if his Mavs were playing their games in a Dallas schoolyard and no one knew, they’d attract a local audience about the same size as any start-up podcaster.

The ball to keep your eye on is what happens when the cost of entry to producing and distributing your content (however good or bad it may be) is a relatively level playing field with the big media conglomerates. Then the battle becomes word of mouth versus the marketing cash in the pockets of the pros for one…and only one thing that no technology can make more of:

The time the audience has to spend reading, listening or watching. That, friends is what its all about.

Also, beyond the portability aspect, the power is really to create a user experience that requires high quality file web delivery with no latency as a result of watching audio or video preloaded into RAM. This is happening now, ahead of future net speeds.

Podcasters have not yet utilized the full extent of this capability as evidenced by their continuing desire to push overly compressed audio such as mp3s when they could just as well send uncompressed audio (because by the time the listener is present at the computer or player, the file is already downloaded).

Also, AOL Live8 videos came as downloadable .wmv files. I downloaded them though enclosures in my feed reader and watched them locally without latency while being able to keep a copy and send them to my friends.

The most important thing you can do to start thinking outside of the box on this is to start calling Kleenex what it is, “tissue”. “Podcasting” is a corporate-specific term for syndicating media. The implications for the near future, combined with this revolution in personal media recorders and an international audience, is much more profound than your shrugging.

Podcasting is a super “New Radio” distribution technology — alongside satellite, live streams, and archived webcasts.

The magic will come from a listening guide bridging old and new radio. It should integrate content from both “the long tail” and “the tall head” and not be specific to a technology. Like TiVo for radio, also like Amazon for radio. See radiotime.com.