PodCasting

There is a lot of discussion going on in the blog world these days about Podcasting. This is creating audio content for the iPod and making it available for others to listen to. Some say that it’s the new radio. I am not sure about that, but I think its interesting and worth following.

There are two companies that should be paying notice to this trend and building out services to support it.

The first is Apple. I have not seen anything on iTunes that looks like podcasted content. They’ve got this shared playlist thing, but that’s really just a way to sell more music. They don’t support a marketplace for content created explicitly for the iPod and they should.

The second company that should be all over this is Audible. My partner Brad was part of the VC group that financed Audible and its a great sucess story. The stock has tripled in the past 12 months and the company carries a market cap in excess of $400mm. But today, Audible is mostly about books on tape for the iPod. And that’s only a $30mm/year business. Clearly the market is expecting a lot more from Audible. And Audible should give them it in the form of a marketplace for all things audio.

I’ll be watching both companies closely to see if either of them makes the right moves.