A Video is Not a Video Podcast

After watching the season premiere of Lost I read references to a video podcast with the producers. "Great!" I thought, "I can download a video podcast and watch it on the way to work!"

ABC did have an audio podcast with the previous season, a rather enjoyable and somewhat insightful program. So I headed over to ABC's Lost site and scanned it for the video podcast. Ah! There it is. I click the link and... get the ABC video player. What?

That's right: the video podcast is a video. It is not a podcast because, insofar as I can see, it does not include a file I can subscribe to which updates itself regularly.

This is misleading and, in my opinion, damaging particularly given ABC has done audio podcasts before. I suspect that someone thought it would be a good idea to capitalize on the audio podcast with a video one, and no one figured out a good way to distribute the video correctly via a podcast subscription. Thus, they kept the label and made it standalone.

It'd be like someone telling you they were going to give you a subscription to The New York Times and when you said, "Sure!", they handed you a copy and said, "Okay - meet me here again tomorrow at this time and I'll give you tomorrow's edition."

Stupid, stupid, stupid.