When it's all said and done, there are basically two things that make a podcast a podcast: it can be subscribed to via an RSS feed and it's time-shifted, which is some braniak's phrase for 'pre-recorded'. The question is: If a show is pre-recorded often enough throughout the day, when does the 'time-shift' cease to become relevant?
NPR has recently started offering <a href="http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast/podcast_directory.php" target="_blank">news podcasts</a> that are updated every hour. Now while I grant that 60-minutes between episodes is afar cry from streaming, it's an even farther cry from say…daily?
One of the benefits of the time-shifted nature of podcasting is that I can listen to content when it's convenient for me. A show comes out daily or weekly, but I chose when in that day or week to listen to it. How does this scale (reverse-scale?) when a content provider starts pumping out shows every 60 minutes? I can only take the first couple of shows with me in the morning before I leave and when I get home I have 10 more shows to get through. More likely, listeners will just load up what's ready before they leave the house and then ignore the rest of that day's shows. Then the question begs to be asked: what's the value of a podcast that puts out so many episodes that you can't listen to them all?
Just curious...
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