YAHAHRiFPP (Yet Another “Hey, Apple Has Released iTunes for Podcasting” Post)

Today is the day: Apple has released iTunes 4.9 with podcasting support. It’s a big deal — not just for the new opportunity it presents for hundreds or thousands of people — but that the company which dominates the mp3/music player space has embraced podcasting.

I’ve already had several conversations with people about their ideas for shows…but they are all concerned about quality. Why? If you download the new iTunes 4.9 and look at the content that Apple has chosen to place front-n-center (Disney, ABC News, National Public Radio, etc.) along with “indie” shows (Dawn-n-Drew, 5 Minutes with Wichita, Gillmor Gang) you can see that Apple has opted to go with mainstream content providers as well as with clearly the top-rated independent shows.

While they *do* provide a “publish your podcast” link, they undoubtedly reserve the right to screen potential candidates for inclusion in the podcast section of the iTunes music store. Will this be a form of censorship? Will Apple only take, say, the top 50 shows? What will happen when there are maybe thousands of shows in a genre? How will people even find shows let alone download or subscribe to them? How will people — whose shows become hits — handle the resulting bandwidth costs? Will there be a bittorrent download option?

To me, Apple jumping in to this raises-the-bar in a good way so that those of us who have the talent, produce quality product and, most importantly, focus in on volume content that people care to listen to, will have an opportunity to build an audience and possibly monetize these efforts over time.

This is VERY exciting.