Post-iTunes 4.9 release downloading surge yields some negative results for podcasters
Leave it to Apple to once again shake up the world.
Many of my friends in the podcasting community have written me, extolling their happiness about being listed in the iTunes 4.9 podcast directory and as a result, getting a ton of downloads for their digital audio content. In the same breath, many of these champions of time-shifted information lament the fact that since the directory isn't abundantly populated (relatively speaking at the time of this writing), they're getting a lot of traffic from first-time podcast listeners and Mac enthusiasts just discovering the platform, severely taxing what is characteristically metered data transfer through a third-party host provider.
And all this due, in part, to listeners who may not really want to listen to a podcaster's handiwork...they just subscribed because it appeared iTunes and they wanted to check out whatever was associated as being part of The Next Big Thing. Such mass market appeal has really got the potential to exponentially broaden a podcasts's listenership, but it also impedes a content creator's ability to serve those who genuinely want to get at their stuff.
With the amount of data that can be sent across the Internet typically offered on a limited basis (often only several hundred megabytes per month), many podcast producers are finding themselves having run out of said allotted space, facing access to their media stopped for the remainder of a billing period, or applying costly overage charges - or in some cases, disconnected altogether. I projected this inevitably happening, with most ISPs not usually allowing potentially hundreds of gigabytes of data transfer per month for a rapidly-growing audience base to access MP3s that can be quite large (a 40-minute show encoded at 64Kbps results in a download of about 20MB).
Dr. Don, who runs the excellent Cartoon Radio Network podcast, even told me his ISP is considering dropping him outright because of the huge bandwidth load his shows are causing on their network.
Also consider what this could mean for the segment of the podcasting population that produces more than just a single show. At the moment, I record/edit/distribute (4) such digital audio shows for KUAM, with at least (3) more coming in the near future. The ramped-up bandwidth requirement could mean I'd be running out of server capacity four times faster than the next guy. And in my own case, the server housing our podcastable MP3s is the same box serving my company's streaming video/audio archive, which under normal circumstances sustains a pretty intense demand and load anyway. So while this probably won't be the scenario shared by the majority of the world's podcasters, for people like me this presents a new challenge: how to expand effective market reach while maintaining accessibility and quality.
My guess is that Liberated Syndication, a critical provider for the podcast community, is going to get inundated with signups in the coming days because that site allows for unlimited downloads of content, but a fixed amount of server storage space, to balance everything out. (It's a great business model, and given the current and expected future fallout from recent events, what I believe will be the next-generation of AOL-like unlimited Internet access, with other similar providers following suit and coming up with creative competitive plans.)
Further, Adam Curry, in his pivotal keynote address at the end of the recent GNOMEDEX 2005, called upon developers and vendors to bring about the immediate rise in single-click subscription. However the larger point was that Curry, the father of podcasting, also called upon the incorporation of the P2P-based BitTorrent platform into podcast delivery, so as not to too heavily impose transfer responsibilities on any single access node. It's a great idea, and one I really support.
But for the moment, the majority of podcasters, myself included, face a daunting challenge: register with iTunes (and assumedly Microsoft's forthcoming next version of its Windows Media Player and perhaps WinAmp and RealPlayer and other major media applications sometime soon), and expand the consumer base for our podcasts, and risk restricted access and possible termination of service, or continue to operate in the underground, riding the DIY marketing engine, but having a more granular amount of control over how often our content is download.
So again, Apple's been successful at playing the role of global change agent, giving so many of the world's creative talent a forum in which to showcase their ideas and really mature their content - the "suddenly a superstar" effect. It's just a tad frustrating going through the growing pains.