Reports from the Asylum

Today’s Report from the Asylum is brought to you by Podcastus Moriturus, and well it should be: the topic is the latest outbreak of this syndrome, Leo Laporte’s claim in his keynote for the Online News Association that podcasting is dead and a combination of 24-hour live streaming and TV set-top box delivery is the way forward.

The main points of this report are as follows:

• While it’s absolutely true that finding and subscribing to podcasts is more complicated than it should be, you can listen to or watch most podcasts without even owning a portable media player, never mind knowing how to transfer files to them.
• Leo Laporte nets more than $1 million per year from the TWiT podcast network. His subscriber numbers might have plateaued, but that’s different from saying the medium is dead.
• Live streaming is just what some of us embraced podcasting to get away from. It’s not just the timeshifting factor, either: production values invariably improve if you don’t go out live.
• TV set-top box delivery is only valuable for video podcasters.

This report is included in For Immediate Release episode 490.

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It’s been months since Michelle Rafter interviewed me for The Geek Weekly, so I had entirely forgotten about it by the time today’s article, ‘The Business Benefits to Podcasting,’ appeared.

It’s possible that the timing of this particular article has something to do with Leo Laporte’s speech at the Online News Association conference on October 2^nd. (You know, the one where he said podcasting is dead because it’s too hard for listeners—that’s known as ‘linkbaiting’—but simultaneously revealed that he grosses $1.5 million annual from his This Week in Tech podcast network.)

Funny, that sounds pretty healthy to me. Healthy enough, in fact, to provoke people into the very get-rich-quick delusions I warn people about in my interview with Michelle.