Thursday, October 27, 2005

The IPOD Will Die By 2007?


Marc Freedman, a Consulting Analyst to The Diffusion Group, is predicting an early demise for the IPOD.

He calls it “the creation, and victim, of its own success” and that it will die by 2007.

Freedman says that only in the last two months, AOL, Yahoo, and Apple have integrated podcasting into their Web sites and software. It’s only a matter of time, he postulates, until podcasting is integrated into all major media players, much like other media technologies. And because of the widespread availability of podcasting services, podcasting will enjoy rapid growth over the next 12 months as these services and products build upon one another. Despite widespread publicity, podcasting remains unfamiliar to most North American consumers.

Podcasting, he says, will become less about MP3 players and more about consuming subscription-based audio programming on desktop PCs, laptops. PDAs, and cell phones. But Freedman says the technology and tenets of podcasting will be permanent. The underlying technologies and the concept of subscription-based digital audio distribution will survive through many generations of consumer platforms and services.

Hats off the Canadian broadcast trade journal publisher Howard Christensen, for spotting the story.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I totally disagree, PODCASTING is a fad, it is cool... it is the kind of thing every morning show should be doing to for disemenating their best stuff daily/weekly, but it is not going to replace the individuals desire for personal choice. As for Subscription based content, while it may sucker some, I predict it will never replace the desire of ownership. It is why the new "Napster" is not even a shadow of what the illegal version was. Consumers don't want to rent music, they want to own it.