Because of this narrow range of programming, commercials galore, and the miserable music stations, the door was wide open for an alternative to broadcast radio. Enter podcasting, with a worldwide audience of Internet users and a narrowcast model that works only in massive distributed markets. Thus a podcast such as the one I take part in, “This Week in Tech,” can achieve an estimated 500,000-700,000 downloads and listeners. Having done local radio about computers myself, I can assure you that no such numbers are possible except through podcasting. Most specialty, narrowcasting radio is relegated to the weekends or college stations, where nobody cares about ratings.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2020285,00.asp

Enjoy!]]>

It seems as yes, they’re going after company names and products that are sharing the “pod” name, not referring to podcasts or podcast production services or the creation of podcasts.

First, Kudos to Apple for getting on this. I’m not sure how I feel yet about the whole thing – but CBS has already switched to netcasts.

I’m torn – podcast is a great term for many reasons, but for others, including growth of the format, making any competing product not able to use the word “podcast” or “pod” in the name limits the possibilities. Quite frankly, I still get plenty of folks who think podcasts need an iPod to be played – which I would theorize is Apples’ intent.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out. There are a lot of folks who are quite offended by the whole thing – I know they need to protect their trademark as well; and have to admit I would be compelled to if I were in their position. Tough call.

Maybe the middle road for us is creating netcasts in podcast-compatible format. Who knows.]]>

So, MacCast, one of the more popular podcasts got knocked out by GoDaddy for using too many processor cycles.

This highlights the point about shared server space – it’s not a good idea for popular items, and a horrible one for podcasting or multimedia hosting.

In his “MacCast is not gone, just knocked down” post, he was complaining about a very expensive $100/month. That is relatively nothing and is a mere minimum of the cost of doing business properly with this kind of material to avoid downtime issues if you’re popular. I’m surprised they’re letting him get off that cheap.

This will continue to plague amateur podcasters until their perceived price links up to the actual in regards to bandwidth, storage space, and processing power.

And in corporate environments, a note to the wise on the bandwidth side – if your company is sharing a 100mb connection to your server and your network, the last thing you want to do is host media on your server. If media is coming out at 1mb per sec, just fifty simultaneous users and your network is at half speed – a real problem if you’re serving up applications. In fact, just 10 could make for a sticky wicket. And the cost of avoiding these problems is so little, that it’s silly not to keep them separate.

p.s.- I like maccast. And GoDaddy did not act professionally by not warning him; they should of sent him a note saying “hey, this is happening, we need to do this.” But, the lesson should be learned for podcast/netcasters that this costs money, and the barriers to entry even at $50 or $100 a month are ridiculously low compared to the past.

I remember the days not so long ago where you couldn’t get going for less than a few hundred thousand dollars.]]>

Apparently, they’re trying to forbid the use of the word podcast by non-Apple entities.

That’s right. The term they helped create and the industry around it, they’re suing them. The question is, is it about “Pod” or “iPod” in the company name, or referring to the work companies such as ours create as a “Podcast?”

If it’s the latter, it could be among the stupidest things in my opinion they could do. Cause frankly, podcast isn’t a great term for it anyway and most people we run into are confused by it.

Leo Laporte is pushing a change, from Podcast to Netcast, and some are suggesting breaking it down to Audcast and Vidcast to be even more specific. Not bad in my opinion, as so many people I know don’t realize that you don’t need an iPod for a podcast.

I’m theorizing it’s one of a few things; either a) they want to reclaim the word “podcast” and re-license it for a fee; b) they’re that stupid or c) they’re doing a bad job of defining what they’re going after, because everyone is reporting from this article on the Wired Blog that Apple is stopping the word podcast, which I sense it could be an issue that “podcast” is in the company name.

Let’s see how it turns out. Here are some other links for some more info.

iConnectdots
ZDNet Article on Trademark Office Documents]]>