Viewfinder: Vidcasting

We recently completed a survey of our readership on our Web site, and I want to thank those of you who completed this sampling. Your feedback is invaluable, and gives us a greater understanding of who you are and how we can better serve you. I am quite fascinated at the level of entrepreneurial interest. Over 13% of you are full-time video producers, and 56% of you generate income from producing video. Of those that are not making money from producing video, 65% want to.

I am sure our entrepreneurs have investigated the obvious opportunities in video production. Wedding videography seems to be a saturated field, but other special interest videos have an allure that attracts many a profit seeker. We see instructional videos in most rental houses on sports, tourism and even new fads like Texas Hold-'em poker. However, there are many smaller niche video potentials which seem prime for entrepreneurs. To date, the business model for niche videos has been to produce the program and make copies available, but that is all about to change because of vidcasting.

Researchers at the Diffusion Group predicted recently that the U.S. podcast audience will climb from 840,000 last year to 56 million by 2010. By then, ¾ of all people who own portable digital music players will listen to podcasts, up from less than 15% last year. The same growth may happen to vidc…