Is podcasting dead? In a word… maybe. But then it really depends on what you mean by podcast and what you mean by dead. Like many things in the world it’s all about how you look at it.

This is a complicated issue so let’s start at the beginning. What is a podcast? I think there’s a very common misunderstanding that a podcast is an audio or video show that you download to your computer or other device to play. It’s not. You see there are two ways you can use the word podcast, it’s either a noun or a verb. For example, Movies You Should See is a podcast. An episode of Movies You Should See is a podcast, and we podcast a show called Movies You Should See. Before we start declaring it as dead I think we need to be really clear what we’re talking about. It’s my own opinion that the correct use of the word is the verb. I podcast, you podcast, he/she podcasts etc.

Movies You Should See is a show. It’s a production. You could even go as far as to say that it’s a piece of art, good or bad. Is Movies You Should See dead? Of course not. Really there’s no difference between MYSS and anything you hear on the radio, barring any differences in the quality or type of content. The way in which you listen to it is irrelevant, as long as you can hear it.

So when we’re talking about podcasting being dead we have to be absolutely clear that we’re talking about subscribing to an RSS feed, downloading an mp3 or AAC file and putting it on your iPod or other media playing device. It’s the delivery method, not the content.

Now let’s talk about what we mean by dead. Define dead for me in technology terms because I’m having a very hard time doing it. Does it mean very few people doing it? Does it mean absolutely nobody doing it? This could go on forever, it’s a very non-specific term to use. We might as well be saying something as childish as “podcasting is sooo 2005″. Make your fingers into a W shape and say WHATEVER like a mindless valley girl.

If this debate is going to go anywhere then we have to define dead. I’m going to define dead as no new listeners. When nobody new is discovering our shows then the delivery method is dead. That isn’t happening yet so I’m going to have to say that podcasting isn’t dead. It’s fair to say that newspaper are in decline, yet writing seems to be continuing. Cinemas are in decline but people keep on making movies.

That doesn’t mean that it’s not going to die. It probably will one day, like most things do. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing and it doesn’t necessarily mean the end of show production.

It is important to remember that we aren’t in the audio/video production business. We’re in the audience creation business. If you get a lot of people together you’ve got an audience. Get enough people together and you can get into the advertising space creation business and that’s a good business to be in. If your audience is big enough and you can create enough advertising space then you’ve got a business model, it’s as simple as that.

It just so happens that our method of creating an audience and some advertising space is to create audio based entertainment. Some people do it by writing blogs, some by allowing you to reconnect with old school friends and some people do it by providing a way for you to search for things on the internet. Some people even do it by making Kiefer Sutherland pretend that he’s chasing terrorists for a whole day without needing to take a piss. However we all do it, we’re all in the same industry.

Why do you think we’ve been adding shows to the Simply Syndicated network that we don’t make ourselves? More shows means more listeners, which means a bigger audience and more advertising space. Advertisers aren’t too worried what audience see their ads as long as they then go and spend money.

To sum things up so far, we know that we don’t make podcasts, we make audio shows. We deliver them using the podcasting method, and dead means nobody new coming to it.

Now let’s talk about the delivery method of podcasting. It is tricky to get into if you aren’t particularly techy person. My Dad is the man who got me into technology in the first place. I still remember being not much more than a toddler going with him to buy our first computer. It can’t be more than a couple of months ago that I had to explain to him that you don’t have to pay to download podcasts. As I write this I’m listening to Leo Laporte say something that we in the business have been thinking for a long time. Podcasting is too hard. TV is good because you switch it on and it starts playing. You don’t have to go through the steps that you’ve got to go through to download something that is podcasted.

With that problem in mind podcasting might not be quite dead yet, but it’s on life support. The key is to make our shows much easier to listen to.

Over the last five years I’ve heard all manner of ideas for doing that. They range from selling the content to radio, to calling a phone number and having a show played to you. The latter was a really really dumb idea but somebody actually tried it. They aren’t doing that any more.

We’re nearing a perfect storm of technologies that will make all of it possible. First of all there’s the ubiquity of the internet. Wherever you are, you can expect to pick up some sort of radio. I’m not sure how true that is in the US and Canada, but certainly in a smaller place like the UK you’d be hard pressed to find a place with no radio. Now we’ve got the internet on our phones, our laptops and goodness knows where else. I was reading just the other day how some car companies are starting to build cars with built in Wi-Fi hotspots. When that happens we can be anywhere and everywhere.

Next there’s the way you can download our content. We started by delivering via podcast, and that’s mainly what we still do now. Over the last couple of years we’ve started broadcasting some shows live, over the next couple of years we’ll be broadcasting all of our shows over a live stream. That makes it pretty much like radio. There are applications for your phone that can latch onto those streams and play them just like everything else.

Recently I started to hear from a listener of Simply Syndicated who had absolutely no idea what a podcast was. Think about that for a second, a listener of Simply Syndicated who doesn’t know what a podcast is. She just visits the website, hits the play button and she’s listening.

I still think it remains to be seen how effective a phone application is in all of this. Visiting the Apple App Store, downloading the Simply Syndicated app (on the way soon) and listening via the app is surely as complicated as subscribing to the podcast in the first place. As things are at the moment, I see things like iPhone apps becoming just something that you’re expected to have, rather than something that can be used.

Whatever happens you just need to remember that we don’t make podcasts. We make shows, be it audio or video, and we deliver them in a podcast format. The delivery method may change but the content won’t. As long as we keep making content that people want to hear then we’ll continue to be around making it. That said we can’t scrape together £200 for a new printer so who knows.