Servicing ‘self-scheduling consumers’

Podcasting has moved rapidly from the underground and pirate radio fringe to the heart of public-service media, with the BBC, NPR, CBC and Australia’s ABC all early adopters of the technology. The public-service broadcasting (PSBing) ethos appears both compatible with, and challenged by, the podcasting phenomenon. Podcasting’s appeal lies in its capacity for time-shifting, portable consumption and global distribution of audio content. Moreover, podcasting piggybacks on existing distribution infrastructure, and is particularly appealing to technologically savvy youth audiences whom public-service broadcasters (PSBers) traditionally have difficulty attracting. Yet podcasting simultaneously creates highly fragmented audiences with doubtful brand loyalty. Equally problematically, the medium’s relationship to commercial media has been close from its inception, as the term ‘podcasting’ itself suggests. It is precisely podcasting’s complex relationship with PSBing ideals — both complementary and potentially conflictual — which makes it such a rich case-study for examining the continued viability of PSBing in the digital media environment.