Zune Team Top Priority: Podcasts!

David Caulton from Zunester has been interviewed by Paul Thurrot of Twit.tv.

David starts the interview by talking about the humble beginnings of the Zune project but is rapidly moving to more interesting stuff about the Zune and the mp3 player market in general.

For a brief moment during the interview, we thought David was going to announce Internet connectivity for the Zune…but finally said that we should forget about that for a while because of the implementation complexity.

We did learn that Podcast capability is “very high” on the priority list of new features. Our friend Paul Colligan will be happy to learn that! Too bad this won’t be part of the 1.3 firmware update.

When ask about what were the main features that people use in portable media players, David said the music was still the universal glue, but now 10% to 20% are using the devices to play audiobooks and podcasts.

David confirmed that the Zune won’t be a completely closed ecosystem like the iPod but partners are going to be selected only when they are strategic and fit the Zune experience standards.

When ClicZune interviewed David last November, we talked about the user interactivity but David goes even further. The Zune team really want to develop a community around Zune users. The social experience will be backed by a bunch of online community features like user music recommendations. The Zune should also be fully integrated with the Xbox community. He defines the Zune as not being another mp3 player but as a social experience.

There was a lot of speculation on whether or not the second generation of the Zune would mean the death of the first generation or not. David explained that new features added to the second generation Zune player should be available to the first generation of the Zune also. The platform was developed to be able update the firmware over the Internet.