Podcastplayer.org news

I’ve been looking around the web and the blogs for ideas on podcast hosting. It seems there are several basic approaches:

• Free generic service. There are still a few hosting services funded by advertising, and a few more with a different agenda (for example the internet archive). The advantage is that it’s free. Disadvantages include “small print” on advertising-supported sites forbidding direct download of non-html content (they can’t insert their ads into your mp3s), and potential licence, philosophy, or ownership restrictions in the case of other sites.

• Free specialist service. This kind of service is typefied by rizzn. The big advantages are that it’s free, and they (hopefully) understand podcasting. The big disadvantage is that it’s not clear what the business model is or what the technical specs are, so there can be worries about the scalability or longevity. This is a great choice if you are not sure about podcasting, and want to “dip a toe in the water". Bear in mind, though, that things may change - especially if your podcast (or someone else’s which uses the same service) gets really popular and starts eating bandwidth. Free services have a habit of disappearing or becoming non-free, so be sure to back up your content.
• Paid specialist service. Currently the service that’s been getting the most press is Libsyn. They offer a service based on how much you upload each month, and bandwidth is “free". Advantages include simplicity, particularly if your podcast suffers wildly varying popularity. Disadvantages include a new and untried business model, and difficulty comparing price/value with other paid services.
• Paid generic service.
  This is how most people serve their podcasts. Generic web hosting has become almost a “commodity market". Luckily, podcasting doesn’t require any out-of-the-ordinary software, as a bare minimum you just plop some mp3s and a RSS description file on a HTTP server and you’re set. It can become a little more complex if you want to host your own blog to contain notes, links, and general chat to accompany your podcast, but there are a lot of good, free, software and services to help you with this. To get the best deal on hosting you need to consider several things:
  • Bandwidth - this may be the most important thing for podcasts. Podcasts are big, and if you get a lot of listeners you can use a lot of bandwidth. Let’s imagine you produce 30MB of podcast content a week (e.g. 1 hour-long discussion, five shorter 6MB chunks, or whatever). That’s roughly 150MB per month. If you have 10 listeners, that’s 1500 MB (1.5 GB) per month. If you have 100 listeners, that’s 15 GB per month. If you have 1000 listeners, that’s 150 GB per month. Be very vary of so-called “unlimited” bandwidth. This often means only that each customer is free to use the whole “pipe” with no limits, but can just as easily result in some other greedy customer gobbling it all up, and starving your site. If you are considering such an “unlimited” service, look hard at the real figures for the amount of available bandwidth, and the number of customers using it. If you can’t get real figures, move on.
  • Storage space - you need somewhere to put all that material. 30 MB per week for a year is 1500 MB (1.5GB), two years is 3 GB, and so on.
  • Software “platform” - if you plan to run your own blog, dynamic web site, forums, polls etc… Most blog software seems to need two things: the PHP programming language, and the MySQL database software. Both these are free, and I’d advise against paying for hosting that doesn’t include them. If you prefer software that needs other “platform” software, such as Python (used for Zope and Plone, for example), or Java (used for Pebble and Friki, for example), check that these are installed before parting with your cash.
  • pre-installed (or easy-install) blog software - if you don’t like the idea of downloading, tinkering, installing and configuring databases and blog software it would be a good idea to choose a provider that has either pre-installed some popular blogging or site-management software, or provides a simplified ("one-click") interface for installing optional software such as this. My personal favorite blog software at the moment is WordPress (I use it for this blog), but there are plenty of others.
  • reliability and support - these are typically hard to quantify, but vital. Check with anyone you know who uses the service to see what they think. If you get a lot of moans, move on.

  I’ve looked around, and there are thousands of hosting companies, so you really need to make up your own mind. I know that I am happy with the companies I currently use : - DreamHost, Lunar Pages, and 1 and 1. I’m particularly impressed with the easy “one click” way that DreamHost installs WordPress. When I installed it at 1 and 1 it was fairly fiddly.

  In the spirit of discosure, please note that I am genuinely a happy customer of the above services, and will (supposedly) recieve some sort of “kickback” if you choose to buy a service from one of them. However, don’t just take my word for it, check for yourself.

  I’ve also seen a lot of ads for Start Logic who seem to be offering some good deals at the moment, but I have no experience of using them myself.

• Dedicated server.
  A few years ago this was the only way if you wanted to host and deliver large media content. Imagine racks full of big, expensive servers connected to big, expensive network links. These days it can be a viable choice, as long as [a] you know what you are doing with remote system maintenance and upgrades - keeping hackers and viruses out is not a trivial job; [b] are willing to risk paying “enterprise” prices; and [c] might deliver content that conflicts with the content policy of shared server providers. In the great majority of cases, though, a shared service will be much cheaper for a simple (in processing terms) task like serving podcasts.
• Host it yourself.
  Usually you get some web space free with your dialup or broadband account, or as part of your college enrollment, or whatever. Similarly, you can usually run a web server on your home PC and serve pages, feeds and podcasts out over a broadband connection. It can be tempting to put up a few podcasts in this “free” space and bandwidth, but please think very hard before you do this. Although it is often not very clear what the limits are, all these “free” hosting approaches have limits, and breaching them can often lead to “capping” (refusing connections once a certain amount of traffic is reached) or even complete cessation of your internet connection. Also dangerous is the potential of locking you in to a particular provider. If your site, feed, or podcast URL is tied to a specific connectivity provider, it prevents you from switching to a better deal. Placing your content on a portable domain name that you own gives you much more flexibility in the long term, and can help keep your material available for longer.

So there’s an overview of some of the choices in podcast hosting. I hope it is useful. If you have any suggestions or corrections to the above, please let me know.

Matt Hartley has written a thoughtful response to my article from a few days ago. It’s certainly cleared up some points, and I can now appreciate the idea of striving to give podcast content the widest possible audience:

By no means am I saying this should be the only method of distribution for the world’s Podcasting content. On the contrary, I feel that the more distribution avenues Podcasting ‘content’ has, the better off the creators of this content will be.

Where we differ, I suppose, is in the importance placed on “satellite radio”

I believe that we need to stop following trends with such a narrow view. See, by bringing the content to the growing world of satellite radio, we are working to encapsulate it in such a way that we will be able to distribute our message to brand new ears.

I’m not a north American resident, so (as far as I can tell) I can’t get XM or Sirius. Maybe I’m just not looking hard enough, but I can’t actually find details of the satellite “footprint” on the XM site. This means I start with a different perspective - for me there is no “growing world of satellite radio". Actually, I have a dish on my roof that pulls in 20 or 30 free channels, but I never listen to them - mainly because I never know what might be on. Every time I tried it was just the same old pop/sport/drivel that I found on ordinary radio.

I can understand that there’s a lot of fuss in the USA about satellite radio. After all, XM and Sirius have spent a lot of advertising dollars stirring up interest in every way they can to try and recoup their huge licence expenses. But let’s look at details.

From the XM site, a portable XM receiver costs about $350, and an in-car model around $130. Add to this a $12.95/month subscription and you have about $285 (for the first year). A significant barrier to entry compared to a regular FM radio for a one-off $10 at walmart. Satellite radio is an expensive luxury. I would be intrigued to find out if there is a significant proportion of XM/Sirius users who don’t already have an internet PC or mobile phone. My guess is that satellite radio comes considerably further down the wish list, so it can’t really be touted as a way of reaching Matt’s 70% of the world’s population who are unable to get media via RSS.

On the other hand, I can see a potentially huge possibility for podcasting to provide the source of a lot of zero-cost, or at least low-cost, programming for cash-strapped local radio. Would you listen to the likes of Dawn and Drew if they were on your local radio dial?

The main problems with all of this, though, rest in the nature of radio. As I mentioned before, radio is broadcast. Radio programming has evolved, based on study of ratings and demographics, to provide the most acceptible material to the largest identifiable group of listeners. Anything that deviates from that “sweet spot” will risk losing listener numbers. There is little room for alternatives and experimentation.

Internet delivery is point-to-point. Listeners get to choose individual shows, listen to them when, where, and in the order they like, and skip the ones they don’t like. The control is much more fine-grained. If choosing and listening to a radio station is like electing a president, choosing and listening to podcasts is like being the president.

As for buying into satellite radio, I’d (personally) rather spend the cost of the satellite reciever and year or two’s subscription on an in-car iPod equivalent that syncs from my podcast-fetcher over WiFi while it’s in the driveway. What I want, when I want it, and no subscription fees.

Maybe I’m just weird, though.