Over at the BusinessWeek Blogspotting blog, Heather Green recounts a conversation with an advertising exec who wondered if BW would reconsider its coverage of podcasting in the wake of Apple’s introduction of a video iPod. This advertising exec fails to understand that new media don’t kill old media. And in this case, the old medium (if you can consider podcasting old at 14 months) doesn’t even need to adapt since the vast majority of content delivered in podcasts wouldn’t lend itself to video.

Look at most people using their iPods. Most of the time, they’re not sitting still. They’re on the move, walking down the street, driving their cars, working out, doing their jobs. Audio’s great virtue is the ability to listen to it while you’re doing something else. This isn’t a concept new to the digital era; Sony didn’t choose to call their groundbreaking portable cassette player the “Sitman,” after all. Video, like text, on the other hand, doesthat you sit and concentrate on the medium to the exclusion of all other input. (At least, I hope to God I don’t see people watching their video iPods while cruising along at 65 miles per hour, even though I do see my fair share of idiots with newspapers draped over their steering wheels.)

While podcasting’s star is still rising, the video iPod does open the door to an explosion of vidcasts. Detaching vidcasts from the computer heightens their desirability: The idea of loading Rocketboom onto an iPod to watch on the plane or the bus is very appealing. I expect to see more and more vidcasts as a complement to—not a replacement of—podcasts.

Heather agrees, by the way:

...podcasting has energized what we used to think of as radio and helped broaden the appeal of listening. Watching of course will be popular, but it’s different.

UPDATE: Reuters has a piece today about the move by podcasters into the video realm, spurred on by the launch of the video iPod.