There is much debate in the podcast community regarding the impact on radio. At the extreme podcasting has been called the end of radio, but the real answer is much more complicated.

Radio has significant advantages of being broadcast and immediate with a legal way to use licensed music and a massively installed base of easy to use distribution(everybody has lots of radios and using them is real easy).

Podcasts have the advantage of listen when you want, no FCC restrictions, massively lower production costs for producing a show, insignicant capital costs to play and a huge number of people who are able bring a massive amount of imagination and innovation to content.

My personal take is:

1. Podcasting, satellite radio and streaming content all have a small piece of the audio listening market, with radio still having a very high share of the market

2. Podcasting, satellite radio and streaming content will continue to grow and take market share from radio - making growth for radio stations difficult at best.

3. Weak radio shows and stations that don’t seize the opportunity to innovate will feel most of the impact. Strong shows and strong stations that embrace the new technologies to their advantage will stay strong.

4. Strong radio shows that leverage these new technologies will benefit from expanding their listener base to non-local and/or time shifted audiences.

5. Innovative and strong radio stations will be able to profit from their ability to drive listeners to podcasts that benefit the radio station in some ways. For example, strong proprietary content or infomercial podcasts produced by sponsors.

6. New radio stars will emerge from podcasting and radio stations that find them will benefit from taking these new stars from podcast to broadcast.

The level of competition is going up and that means there will be changes depending on where the radio station is now and what they choose to do going forward

• the weak/change resistant stations will feel the most negative impact
• the weak/innovative stations may be able to use this changed environment to reposition themselves into strong players - for example, there is weak radio station in San Francisco that is broadcasting podcasts as a way to re-position the station ( for more on this check here http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,67344,00.html )
• the strong/change resistant stations will feel a negative impact, but it will be slow erosion
• the strong and innovative stations will find ways to use these new technologies to maintain and improve their positions