Another month, another study that seems to pour cold water on the still-fiery podcast phenomenon. In March a consulting firm called the Diffusion Group determined that most downloaded podcasts never made it onto MP3 players. Now Forrester, a market-research company, has found in a study that only 1 percent of North American households listen to podcasts with any regularity.
"Companies that are interested in using podcasts for their audio should focus not only on downloads but also on streaming audio as a means to get their content and ads to consumers," the report on the study advises. (Charlene Li’s Blog) But should colleges be worried about the technology’s evident lack of widespread appeal? Probably not: Students, after all, are probably far more likely to listen to podcasts than the average Web user. And given students’ apparent preference for owning digital copies of movies and songs instead of streaming the material, downloadability may mean more on a campus than it does in the typical American household.
