One of the key factors in turning podcasting into a real business is effective execution of best practices in content creation, marketing, distribution, monetization and user experience. Many publishers are not following best practices in these areas. The result often looks more like someone's hobby than a real business endeavor.

Developing content, building audience and getting advertisers to buy in will take serious effort. Publishers who understand the huge opportunity for subscribable media and its capacity to shape the media industry's winners and losers will step up and make the investment required.

Putting these elements into a framework allows for systematic evaluation of operating practices across publishers and for the identification of best practices for new media publishing.

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In Digital Podcast 49, we interview Richard Cottrell, Chief Executive Officer of Accenture's newly formed Digital Media Services business about automating the digital supply chain. Richard describes Accenture's planned offerings and how acquisitions like Digiplug and Origin Digital play a role in building out the services.

Our interest in the story was triggered by the announcement of the Origin Digital acquisition. We interviewed Origin Digital’s CEO Darcy Lorincz last year at Digital Hollywood and learned a bit about their efforts to automate the value chain.

Richard describes the new offering in Digital Podcast 49.

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Edison Media Research has released a new study the podcast consumer. The study has lots of interesting information that I think reinforces the importance of traditional media companies starting to think of subscribable media as an important new line of business.

Key findings from the study include:

Podcasting continues to grow quickly: Audio podcast listeners grew from 13% of Americans to 18% and video podcast consumption grew from 11% to 15%.

Podcasts enable more media consumption: The people consuming podcasts spent approximately 90 minutes longer per week listening to online audio than other online audio consumers.

Podcast consumers are an attractive advertising demo: Podcast consumers are more likely to have a college degree and earn in excess of $75,000. They are also more frequent online shoppers and spend more money online than other Americans. These consumers are also adverse to interruption based advertising and use pop up blockers, SPAM filters and other tools to block out commercials.

Podcast consumers are internet social: 25% of them have MySpace pages and spend lots more time on the internet than non listeners.

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Podcasting 1.0 has been the age of iTunes and iPods. The original software clients that were built in late 2004 and early 2005 were designed to automatically download media files and put them into your iTunes music folder. By labeling the files as podcasts, they automatically went into a folder on iTunes for podcasts and from there the files were automatically synchronized with your iPod.

The problem is that the installed base of between 100 and 200 million iPod devices is actually quite limited, particularly when you take into account the number of iPods people own and how many actually get used.

To realize the true potential of podcasting, we need to go beyond the iPod and expand the market for subscribable media to billions devices worldwide with potential audience sizes as big or bigger then television.

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