Battle Over - Apple Won
Monday, April 23, 2007
That was the title of a recent Valleywag blog posting about podcasting. I love it when people declare something "over". In this case, they come to this conclusion because of two main things: Odeo's sale and Loomia's transition from the podcast directory space.
If you've been following the stories, then you know why Odeo quit: Twitter. From the Obvious Blog on the subject:
In the last few months, we here at Obvious have been increasingly focused on Twitter. As a result, our original product, Odeo, has not gotten the attention it deserves.And according to Valleywag, Loomia changed directions because:
It does not cost us much to run - in fact, AdSense covers the hosting—but on the web you need to constantly improve, or fade away. We've put too much into Odeo to want to see it fade away. And it still has tons of potential. But we're not improving it fast enough.
We estimated the market share of various competitors, and it was immediately clear that Apple had grabbed more than 50% of the "podcast finding" business overnight....We were all just fighting over a small slice of the pie.In short, one service fell behind while the other gave up - and that's enough to define an industry according to the crack analysts of Valleywag. Don't get me wrong. I recognize that Apple's has the lion's share of the market. And I acknowledge that as a founder of a podcast-related company I want there to be hope. The fact is though, Apple has held on to their share because no one has tackled the market at Apple's level: the retail device.
This is also the reason that podcasting saw very little growth going into 2007 (which by the way is already roughly the size of satellite radio in the U.S.). There are a lot of companies that are concentrating on the content and the advertising, but hardly any seem to be focused on audience acquisition and distribution.
At Podcast Ready we spent most of 2006 quietly working with device manufacturers to make their MP3 players "podcast ready" - meaning that they are capable of receiving podcasts right out of the box without the user having to install software, learn about RSS, or any of the other obstacles that currently impede podcast adoption.
Podcast Ready partners like iRiver, Cowon, and Wolverine expect to ship about 5M "podcast ready enabled" devices in 2007 (and that's just as of today). With an initial activation rate of over 90%, and an eventual adoption rate of over 40%, we expect to bring a considerable number of new podcast audience members into the market this year.
This is a great opportunity for the manufacturers (who add additional functionality to their offerings) and content creators (who can expand their distribution by having their content placed on the devices at the factory). If all goes according to plan it should be a major step in mainstreaming the technology and jump-starting its adoption.
Just because no one has yet to take on the problems of podcast distribution and adoption does not mean that Apple has "won" or that the opportunities have flattened. Podcast Ready aside, imagine the day when podcast functionality is added to the desktops of 90% of the world's computers ala Microsoft Media Player...
I personally love it when folks declare that "the battle is over" and so-and-so have won. It keeps them focused on other things while those behind the scenes continue to execute. If these kinds of declarations were true there'd be no Google...
Labels: loomia, odeo, podcast, podcasting, valleywag
posted by Russell @ 8:06 PM,
1 Comments:
-
At 9:31 PM,
Chris said...
-
There are waaaay too many openings for serving, delivering, and finding podcasts better to say that it is over. There were people who said the United States was knocked out of the war when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor... history has shown differently. Sure, that "battle" was lost - the WAR was just starting.
Subscribe
