I was stuck in horrible traffic on the way to work today, and pondering ways to fill the time.

It struck me that there’s probably a business opportunity for a provider of enabling technology for listening to podcasts (and other pre-recorded voice content) via standard voice calls.

Here are the “ABCs”:http://www.marketingplaybook.com:

A. There is growing interest in podcasting, and an increasing quality and diversity of podcast content available without charge. Cellphone carriers are always eager to increase their billable minutes.

B. But there’s no good and affordable way to listening to podcasts on plain old cellphones¹.

C. So why not create a service that allows users to listen to podcasts and other prerecorded audio content via a standard call on any cellphone, without the complexities of mobile data or software installation.

The cellphone carriers could do the heavy lifting for promotion and billing. The technology provider would do the technical heavy lifting of providing large numbers of voice streams, leveraging advances in VOIP technology to do so efficiently and affordably.

¹ Phone applications such as “Melodeo’s”:http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/venture/237187_vc19.html or “pod2mob”:http://www.pod2mob.com/main require you to install software of your phone and incur expensive per minute charges. I even saw one application which delivered podcasts as a series of ringtones.