Will Podcasting Kill Satellite Radio?

Closer to home is the news that iPods will work almost seamlessly with 70% of all 2007 cars made in the US. This could cut into satellite radio subscribers but I doubt it. Here's why: You still have to buy the music.

In an article in PodcastingNews that quotes analyst Carl Bayard, from Desjardins Securities in Toronto, Bayard notes that the cost of satellite radio for a year will buy you an iPod Nano. But Bayard didn't account for the thousands of dollars you'd have to spend to get equivalent content onto your iPod. Nor does Bayard factor in the time it would take to transfer all that music.

Satellite radio truly offers something for everyone and unlike podcasting or other social media, it works by turning a dial. Until podcasting is as easy to access as turning on the radio, there's not much chance that podcasting will dethrone any form of radio programming.

In addition to the time and money issue, there is a content difference. There is some programming on both XM and Sirius that you can't get anywhere else. That may be enough to keep subscribers tuned in.

History teaches us that the addition of a new communications medium tends to INCREASE media appetite, not decrease it. Remember when the experts were predicting the demise of radio upon the launch of the CBS television network? Well of course you don't because most of you reading this weren't alive then. But it happened. In fact, since radio's inception as a commercial medium, people have been predicting its failure. Almost 90 years after the first prediction of its failure, radio is still going strong.

Here's another example: cable TV. Remember how it was going to kill network TV? When that prediction was made there were only three major TV networks. Now most people would argue that there are at least four and as many as six, depending on how you define a network. So much for that prediction.

Then there was the music video. MTV was going to kill radio. There's even a song you've no doubt heard that starts with the line "Video killed the radio star."

While we've had MTV for 25 years, radio has survived and even flourished during those times due to what I like to call bounce-back marketing. One medium fuels the other.

And then there's the Web itself. Back in the mid-90s, people were gleefully predicting the demise of all print media due to the Internet. While there may have been some minor impact on certain aspects of the print media like classified advertising, the Internet has not closed down many media outlets as predicted. In fact, it's opened up new ones.

I am as big an advocate of podcasting as you'll ever find. But I don't think it's necessary to portent the doom of other media in order to legitimize podcasting.

Satellite radio may well fail. But it won't have anything to do with podcasting. More likely, the very high costs of delivery and customer acquisition in the satellite radio business will be the killer, not podcasting.

For more on podcasting, visit my site PodcastingTricks.com

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