When I originally wrote more than a year ago about Mobcasting at the Wireless World Forum I simply had “podcasting to the mobile phone” in mind.

Some weeks later, the term was coined by Andy Carvin from the Digital Divide Network in his When Mobile Podcasting Leads to Mobcasting, stating “to describe groups of people using mobile phones to create podcasts on a common subject, particularly in the contexts of civic engagement or political action.”

A slightly different interpretation of the same term showing that a standard terminology has not been found yet for this new mobile channel – feel free to leave a comment if you have any suggestions which term should be applied best.

Anyway, the Mobcasting Experiment was demonstrated later as part of a collaborative blog called Katrina Aftermath, which allowed members of the public to post multimedia content regarding Hurricane Katrina.

Reading yesterdays’ Reuters News on latest commercial mobcasting initiatives, it looks like the mobile industry is going to use the term mobcasting to the meaning of “mobile podcast”, not to get confused with mobile activism or the meaning we can find currently at Wikipedia.

Here below some examples of company pressrelases I picked up related to mobcasting to show the current confusion (think Virgin and mobile activism?)

Mobile Podcasting from Motorola and Yahoo! demonstrated at 3GSM World Congress.

Virgin Brings Podcasts to Mobile Phones, calling these casts “mobcasts”.

“Mobcasts will significantly extend the appeal of podcasts by making them accessible to far more radio listeners…”

And what about Melodeo’s Mobilcast?

Yesterdays’ Reuters article mentions:

“A year ago podcasting was just a fad with a cool name. In recent weeks, the format has taken several steps toward becoming big business, but the major record labels are not eager to partner with the growing format. The audio blog phenomenon that began as free, grassroots rantings is being commercialized through advertising and subscription fees.”

Anyway, what I found interesting was the Pod2Mob anouncement of starting selling ads in their podcasts.

“The trend has expanded into the mobile space. On March 27, Mobile podcasting service Pod2Mobile introduced an automated advertising program that inserts 20-second audio ads at the beginning of participating podcasts.”

I cannot test the service yet over here in Europe but to me mobcasting or mobile podcasting is the way I consume music and news on my mobile.

I download my favourite podcasts automatically in iTunes or other audiofeeds and beam them to my external memory card so I can listen to them whenever, wherever on my mobile. Now creating some tool for automatic mobile podcast subscription makes sense, I’d consider paying a subscription for that – though creating audiofeeds for mobile isn’t very complex, inserting ads as Pod2Mob proposes might as well be a way to go, as long as the inserted ads are well proportioned and don’t become annoying.

But for mobcasting to break through, we need, apart from a capacity of phone memory storage, above all a reasonable dataplan* since podcasts come in at an average 30-60 Mb per radio show, you don’t need a calculator to see that 10-15 shows get easily to the 1Gb limit, often proposed.

In US, mobcasting can take off rapidly probably due to their fixed rate data plans but here in Europe, I think I still have to do it the oldfashioned way, as described above, meaning the operators won’t earn a dime on me, a pity knowing there are some real interesting new mobile revenue channels created I’m willing to pay for.

To me mobile podcasts are what I’m listening to on my mobile, especially since my iPod broke this winter – just out of garantuee and I don’t think I’m going to buy another one knowing all this technology becomes now definately available on my mobile phone…

* referring to Open Letter To Vodafone

UPDATE: when writing this post I was not aware about the fuzz among podcasters about Pod2Mob inserting ads without the consent of the podcasters. You can read all about at Adam Curry’s podshow:

“As discussed in today’s Daily Source Code, a new company called pod2mob is inserting advertising in their mobile streams of podcasts, all podcasts, without the owner’s consent. I’m hoping lawyers won’t have to be called in, but all podcast producers should be defending their copyrights against this commercial usage of their property.”

An interesting conversation of some 76 comments to date followed Curry’s anouncement (!)

A couple of hours ago, Moconews reported in an update with Hal Bringman from Pod2Mob:

“… at the moment podcasters don’t receive any revenue from the ads and aren’t involved in placing the ads in the podcasts. We are very much open to working with podcasters to create every kind of opportunity for them.” … “We’ll be announcing a program for this down the road, we’ve been engaging podcasters about how it could work.”

Rafat Ali from Moconews correctly closes his update with the note that “it’s a far cry from being compared to Google AdSense which was a boon not only for advertisers but for small content publishers who suddenly had a way to get some cash to support their sites.”

Some more birth complications for user-driven content going commercial…

Tags: mobcasting mobcast mobile podcasting mobile podcast audiocast audiofeed mobilcast podcast podcasting pod2mob advertising