Tuesday, December 9, 2008

The Drawbacks of Podcasting

Podcasting is the process by which you can share the multimedia files with your friends over the internet. These files can be viewed on the portable media devices or on the personal computers. Podcasting thus combines broadcasting and iPod. You can broadcast your audio and video formats on the internet. Your friends can download these files on their portable MP3 or iPod and view them.

You can auto syndicate the music videos or audios on the internet and these music videos and audios can be played on the iPod. For podcasting you don't need to have an iPod. You can choose your own content and create your own syndicated videos or audio programs.

For this you prepare your own audio files in MP3 or WMA format. You then publish them which can be received as the RSS format by the subscribers. These files can be downloaded by the iPod users, cell phone users. All that you need for podcasting is laptop; a microphone, headsets, portable recorder and software that facilitate podcasting.

It first came into existence in 2000. Since then it is getting popular day by day. Podcasting provide many advantages to the users. By way of podcasts the users can share their views and information with others. They can now use their faces and voice to convey and share all the information they want with others.

But every technology has a darker side. This is true for podcasting as well. The process seems simple and innovative way that supports creativity and sharing of ideas. But as you create your own files you ignore the size. Some podcast files can be very large with most of them exceeding 75MB size. Thus the main problem is the bandwidth. Each time you download the file, it uses the bandwidth.

Now the web host has certain limits for the bandwidth. You can use only a certain limit of the bandwidth. Once your website reaches the limit your site will be shut down for the definite term. Or, the other way round is that you pay for those GB that you use.

The only way out is, find out how serious you are with your podcast. If you are serious enough then reach out the podcasting service that you can afford. Find out the bandwidth you have for the month and the extra charges that the service provider will charge you once you cross the limits.

If you are really serious and want people to listen to your podcast then save some money so that you can pay for those extra gigabytes that you use in a month.

1 comment:

Aneet said...

What about a business proposition which involves podcasts -- creating a podcast radio* that people can carry with them sans the drawback of actual radio: Advertisements?

*podcast radio:
Selecting a bunch of podcasts to create a 'radio station' of sorts which would get updated regularly and you would receive updates through RSS.