A article in Fortune on BitTorrent got me to thinking today, when I started podcasting a year ago I thought that I would be able to allocate about 50 gigs a month to the project. As I look back at it, that was a pretty narrow view. Last month I moved over 4 terabytes of podcast traffic. Not bad for a Geek from Hawaii, but as I look down the road two years I start to become very concerned. My concern and realization is two fold, over at PodcasterNews.com we have been talking with national content delivery companies and man bandwidth in the commercial world is very expensive!
Most of us podcasters have become complacent in our bandwidth concerns because of the god send of podcasting, “libsyn.com” their deal is so amazing that I am not sure how they are doing it. But as the long tail of podcasting starts to invade the other 98% of the world that is not listening to podcast we are going to be in big trouble.
In the past year we have been resting on our laurels, when we should have been working like dogs and integrating BitTorrent in all of the podcatcher clients so that the integration was seamless and brainless. When Apple jumped on the podcasting band wagon we should have beat them from head to toe to insure that iTunes had BitTorrent built in transparently. This includes Yahoo and anyone else that jumps on the bandwagon.
As good as the deal is we have with Libsyn at the moment, I think we are in real bandwidth trouble and don’t even realize it. Now that Apple has added Video to the mix you are going to see a massive number of people producing videocast, and you thought the amount of bandwidth you are using was bad now… Just wait…
We need to fix this and like yesterday. Those creating podcatcher applications need to come together and work out a plan to make BitTorrent the podcast file delivery vehicle of choice but it has to be simple. We need to get our act together and put up some centralized BitTorrent trackers for Podcasters. Maybe I am wrong, but today I have experienced my own paradigm shift and will be making some recommendations to our team at RawVoice it pains me to have to pay the type of dollars we are looking at.
How many podcasters would be still podcasting if they had to pay more than .50 cents but less than a $1.00 per Gig if libsyn.com went away tomorrow. [Fortune]
I think you nailed it … we should all do whatever we can to push the clients to support BT. With Y! and Apple, that might be a Sisyphusian task, but the benefits are just too great not to try.
Good post!