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.