Podcasting, timeshifting, the iPod experience

This panel at Gnomedex spent some time talking about podcasting. At one point the question of bandwidth came up. Someone mentioned user experience problems for people with 14.4k modems. There’s an important point here, something that no one on the panel brought up, and something that a lot of people—smart people—seem to miss about podcasting. Wait…wait…okay, I’m happy now. Scott Johnson did. Thank you Scott!!!
Here’s what Scott said: podcasting is built on RSS enclosures. RSS enclosures are built on the idea of timeshifting. A well-designed news aggregator, if it runs every hour, won’t immediately download an enclosure the first time it sees it in a feed. A well-designed news aggregator will wait until the middle of the night or some other time when the machine isn’t in use. Alternatively, the aggregator will be scheduled to only run at off hours. The point isn’t for the user to sit staring at it like a pot of water working its way up to a boil. Just the opposite. Connection speed can still be an issue, but it only becomes an issue when the product of file size times connection speed is greater than the length of time available.
Another thing. There have been complaints about the name “podcasting” because it’s too close to the name of a popular MP3 player. Here’s the secret: if you don’t own an iPod, you’re probably not getting the full podcasting experience. Why? I’ve listened to Web audio plenty over the years, but it never really worked because when I’m sitting at the computer I’m usually thinking about a programming problem or reading a news site. Spoken word doesn’t mix well with this. I’ve experimented with capturing the audio and manually transferring it to a CD or my Neuros, but it was just too much work. Plus the Neuros is rather bulky.
The crucial differences with the iPod: it’s small and it’s scriptable. It’s small, which means I can walk around the house with it jangling in my pocket and not really know it’s there. I listen to podcasts while washing the dishes, making my daughter’s lunch, taking out the garbage, driving in the car. The same kinds of activities where I might otherwise have a radio on. Perhaps more importantly, iPod is scriptable, which makes it easy to write software programs that automatically transfer newly downloaded audio. This is critical. Selecting a podcast has to be as easy as turning on the radio and flipping the dial. If I have to click and drag files around it’s too hard.
Do any other audio players meet these two criterion? I haven’t heard of any yet, but they may be out there.