If all goes well, I'm going to launch a weekly podcast with National Post colleague Kevin Restivo tomorrow. It's something that I've wanted to do for awhile but...well, you know....life gets busy and the next thing you know, another week has passed. If anyone has any suggestions on what makes for a good podcast in terms of format, content, etc., please send them along. Given my plans, it is somewhat disconcerting to read Forrester analyst Charlene Li's post that only 1% of North American households regularly download and listen to podcasts. If the audience is that small, why bother? Okay, that's totally dismissive - and tongue in cheek - but she does raise some valid points. Among them are that consumers aren't aware of original, new content. That said, Forrester expects the number of households downloading podcasts will climb to 12.3 million by 2010 from 700,000 in 2006 as podcasting "gets easier and the content gets better". Andy Beal's take - Podcasting. R.I.P.? - on podcasts is the content isn't high enough quality, which has prompted him to give them up completely.

Update: Not surprisingly, Li's 1% "solution" is being savaged within the blogosphere. For some lively conversation, check out PodTech, which wonders what planet Li's living on; Scott Karp, who cautious people to be more patient, and Mathew Ingram, who suggests people look down the road rather than the here and now.

According to a new eMarketer report, the number of VoIP subscribers in the U.S. will jump to 32.6 million by 2010 - accounting for 40% of all high-speed households - from 5.2 million in 2005. In theory, this should be good news for Vonage's IPO prospects, which seemed to have evaporated as investors become increasingly skeptical about the company's ability to reduce its losses while it works to grow its subscriber base or even maintain it. In Canada, VoIP should be the spotlight later today when the CRTC - the country's telecom regulatory - makes a much-anticipated decision on how deregulation of the C$10-billion local telephone market will be handled. Many analysts expect a hybrid approach where urban markets with plenty of competition will be deregulated while rural markets with little competition will continue to be regulated. What's going to be interesting is how the competition is defined in urban markets. Will it be the number of competitors in a specific market or will an incumbent carrier have to lose a pre-defined amount of market share? I suspect it will be a combination of the two.

Amid the frenzy of coverage surrounding Apple's Boot Camp announcement yesterday, YouTube's $8-million private equity round involving Sequoia Capital didn't get mucha attention. It's a noteworthy development, however, given YouTube's fast-growing popularity and hot it is frequently mentioned whenever anyone talks about the future of television. It could be that YouTube fails to cash in from TV 2.0 but it is a perfect illustration of the demand for "pull" programming in which consumers get what they want, when they want it. For Sequoia, the attraction has to be YouTube's traffic, which tops 100 million page views and six million unique users a day. "YouTube has an opportunity to expand its business while allowing its users to continue to share in the entertainment experience they have created," said Roelof Both, a Sequoia Capital Partners. Translation: This Web site is red-hot and with some of our venture capital, it could become even more popular, generate some revenue and be snapped up for big-time money by someone (Rupert Murdoch) scrambling for a foothold in TV 2.0"
  One obstacle YouTube and Sequoia need to address before they starting pouring through the M&A offers is how YouTube's going to make money. Like many Web 2.0 companies, it's long on coolness and short of revenue generation tools, which puts it firmly into the "build it and hopefully the money will come" camp. YouTube CEO Chad Hurley told PBS' Mark Glaser the business model is built on a relevant advertising model but the company is "moving cautiously to ensure we don't disrupt the goodness of the community". It looks like YouTube faces the same dilemma as Rocketboom: people love the content because it's not TV so inserting advertising is tricky because you don't want to alienate your audience. This has prompted Rocketboom to put advertising after each three-minute clip. It's probably not the ideal solution but Rocketboom is hoping it will resonate with consumers because each ad will be created in-house with the Rocketboom look and feel.
  For more on YouTube and the video market: TechCrunch has a post on the growing variety of online services, Don Dodge provides a legal overview on why YouTube is different from Napster, while Mathew Ingram covers off a variety of YouTube angles.