Forrester has just released a report on podcasting. The report is available only to paying clients, however, Charlene Li provides some insights on her blog.

She reports that the

survey showed that only 1% of online households in North America regularly download and listen to podcasts. And when you include all of the people who are just interested or have used podcasts, they strongly favor listening to existing content like Internet radio or broadcast radio, not necessarily new content. (And for newspapers thinking about podcasting, putting print stories into audio format just ranked ahead of original content from bloggers) I think this has something to do with 1) original content just isn’t as well known; and 2) existing content benefits from users that simply want to time shift it.

Forrester is projecting that about 700,000 households in the US will use podcasting this year and that by 2010 that the number will grow to 12.3 million households.  These numbers are being hotly contested by many in the podcasting community as way too low. Some good analysis on that at Geek News Central and at Podtech

She advocates that companies should repurpose existing content into a podcast format. Things like earnings calls, training and executive presentations.