Nearly there. Even though there’s not much technical work to do, setting up a podcast does take a bit of time. So far, I’ve had to set up this blog, which instead of WordPress or something, I’ve gone with what I know, and used TypePad from my current blogging account, and adopted a simple template which I can add a banner to at a later stage.
Next, I’ve had to have a think about where to house the mp3 files. Lots of hosting gives you big storage, but many restrict big bandwidth downloads of several thousand. You do the numbers. A 30MB podcast mp3 file, downloaded by 100 subscribers, is 3GB. That will nearly bust most monthly hosting agreements. 1000 downloads of 30MB file is 30GB, 10,000 downloads is 300GB which are the numbers for a popular podcast. 100,000 downloads is 3TB!!
And there are 2 issues. One is download bandwidth by MegaByte, the other is download speed for the all the people downloading at the same time. I’ve asked around. Amazon S3 looks interesting and low cost. Using TypePad’s 10 GB and then their recommended link to Coral and host sites such as Libsyn may work. I’m giving blip.tv a go, because they’re used to hosting and delivering much bigger files than my mp3 podcasts, and it’s free!
I’ve slightly messed up the file naming from Blip, because the file takes the name of the user TonyGoodson, and not the showname the3moments. Forgive me for the time being!
I’ve spent quite a bit of time on the file naming convention, which no-one seems to have standardised on. I still don’t know the difference between a “–” (hyphen) and a “ _” (underscore) though I suspect that servers like to work with underscores. Also, there are some who recommend shortening to t3m instead of the3moments and separating the date in year-month-day. It looks like the file names will be
TonyGoodson-the3moments_20090614_guestname_###
where the ### is 3 numbers which blip.tv randomly adds to the file!! That’s what you get for free hosting!!
I spent quite a bit of time understanding the mp3 tag editing, and I’ll have to wait and see what it looks like in iTunes. Talking of iTunes, the iTunes Australia directory for podcast submissions has been displaying “We are currently experiencing technical difficulties. Please try again later.” This has gone on for 3 days now. Thanks a lot Apple, unless it’s something not working at my end. How would I know? In the 3 days I’ve been waiting, I’ve created an iTunes image for the store, something eye-catching and easy to read when it’s down to 72x72 pixels. That took a bit of time to design even though it looks so simple.
What I’m submitting is the Feedburner RSS feed, instead of using the TypePad feed. It’s seems easy to set up and with lots of add-ons to analyse the subscription and download stats.
Thank you Glenn Biclar for your time, advice, and help, with the experience you’ve gained from the website and video podcasts that you’ve set up on nsayn.tv. Together we will conquer the world.
Now for some guests!!
did you ever get the itunes to work, i'm having the same problem
Posted by: ezra | 10 November 2009 at 07:01