Evolution Of A Podcast Essay

The technological advancement passes by in a blur of changing gadgets and online trends that are almost too tiring to catch up with. It is almost sad to imagine what the ‘in’ thing was just ten years ago is now the ‘dying’ thing and radio broadcast happens to be one of them in this era because someone woke up one day and decided to start making podcast and suddenly, podcast was the next ‘in’ thing. So what exactly are podcasts? Podcasts are media files that can be distributed via the Internet and played on computers and handheld devices, such as iPods or other digital audio players (Jham, B.C., Duraes, G.V., Strassler, H.E. and Sensi, L.G., (2008) : 278). Meanwhile, in his research of the trends of podcasts, Richard Berry defined podcasting as ‘media content delivered automatically to a subscriber via the Internet’ (Berry, R., (2006) : 144). In other words, podcasts are digital audio files which we can subscribe to just like how we subscribe to magazines and newspaper, except the fact that,

You don’t need to be a DJ and you don’t need a radio studio to start creating podcast contents. Besides, producing it is inexpensive and thus, the audience can listen to it at little to no cost. Anyone can be a podcaster as long as you know what you are doing and who your audience are. Podcasts can be played on demand, there is no limit to its retrieval because it is easily available on the Internet for download, after which the listeners can store in the gadgets to be listened to later and they are simple and user-friendly to use in this world where information overload often happens. But not all is rosy with podcasts. For media companies to invest in podcasting is a potential risk as ‘it requires companies to rethink old assumptions… If old consumers were predictable and stationary, then new consumers are migratory, showing a declining loyalty to networks or even media’ (Jenkins, (2004)