Podcast News

TiVo for Audio: Listening to the sound of content aggregation for the mobile audio market

There are a number of people very excited about podcasting, whose name derives from Apple’s iPod but describes a service that could be used on any MP3 device. It’s based on XML-based technology called RSS, (Really Simple Syndication), which creates auto-generated feeds of data files from various content publishers. The “enclosure” features supported in RSS 2.0 allow this syndication to include audio content. That means users would simply subscribe to a feed, then wait for the podcasting service to aggregate the kind of content the user wants and push it to their listening device.

Content aggregation is not new in and of itself, but it could have a huge impact in audio, partly due to the sheer size of the addressable market. Think of all the people who own MP3 players today. Now they have access to a service that allows them to significant expand their use of an existing device, and one that’s (so far) free as well. Most importantly, we’re talking about content aggregation on mobile technology, which is much more appealing than a similar service offered to someone with the leisure to sit at their desk, browsing for what they want on a PC. More at IT Business…