<== Site of the Week for 2018-05-12 ==>

Shan Man

I decided to try my hand at podcasting. As I researched the industry I began following instructional videos by Shannon Hernandez (Shan Man) who has a radio show on KUPD and a popular podcast called Be The Experience. His youtube channel has vidoes about creating podcasts.

My Take on Podcasting ... So Far

The price of disk space and bandwidth have fallen to the point where self-hosting a podcast is feasible.

HTML 5 now includes an AUDIO and VIOEO tag that work quite well for short content (under 3 minutes). Here is a ten second snippet presented with the AUDIO Tag:

This test file is only 100k. Podcasts tend to be about a megabyte a minute. A ten minute podcast would be 10 MB and an hour podcast would be 60MB.

To stream large files one needs a more robust back end than discounting web hosts provide.

I agree with pretty much everything that the Shan Man said in the video with the caveat that one should start by determining how much audio one wants to use in web presentations.

If you intend to use audio files that are under 5 minutes and will only have an hour or so of audio; then self hosting is the right direction. If you want longer podcasts and plan on having hours of videos, then you should use a podhosting service.

I decided to go with Podbean.com. They charge $108 a year for an unlimited account. If my podcast becomes popular than I figure that self hosting would cost this much anyway.

Shameless Self Promotion: Here is the link to my podhosting experiment. I am using Podbean.