Podcast Hosting

I was contacted earlier this evening by a prominent Irish podcaster who was interested in my thoughts on podcast hosting.
While I would normally have replied to them directly via email I thought it worthwhile to share some of my (random) thoughts in public.
When a number of the Irish podcasters got together late last year to discuss setting up a podcasting body I signed up also.
Why?
Well it’s the kind of thing I am interested in.
I don’t podcast and I may never do so, but I do like to keep abreast of technologies and especially those that are in my “circle”
I’ve looked at podcast hosting and it could be a growth area in the future if you “do it right”. Like so many other niches in hosting there is a demand out there for it, but it also comes with certain caveats.
Apart from a small group of business podcasters the bulk of podcasts are run by hobbyists, so you cannot apply the same pricing models as you would to say music streams for commercial music groups.
Under current Irish legislation it would be all too easy for a podcast host to run afoul of IRMA if a podcaster were to abuse (knowingly or otherwise) an artist’s copyright. Of course that’s a risk you run with “normal” hosting, but it might be worse with podcasts.
I have been mulling over the idea of podcast hosting, but trying to come up with a workable business model for the Irish market is not an easy feat.
Hosting, like many businesses, is a numbers game. If you have enough subscribers to a service you can oversell happily as only a small percentage of the userbase is going to use their allocation. Combine that with cheap and plentiful bandwidth and it can be viable.
Some people have issues with the concept of overselling, but it’s the cornerstone of so many business models. Airlines oversell, hotels oversell – they just call it by a different name.
It’s only an issue when you oversubscribe
If you oversubscribe a number of things can happen.
First off, as a provider, you could end up with your costs exceeding your income by a factor in excess of what you may consider acceptable. If that happens then continuing to provide the service may no longer be financially viable.
From a technical point of view this may lead to capping, which would, obviously have a tangible effect on your subscribers (unlimited bandwidth is a figment of a marketer’s imagination)
Either of these would lead to unhappy clients. Unhappy clients lead to not only a loss of existing business, but can also hit both your recurring revenue and new business.
For example, many Irish users would have subscribed to a “no limits” service some years ago. Many of us actually used the service to its fulll extent, but then found that the provider had labelled us as “abusers”. The resulting uproar led to the formation of a pressure group for Irish broadband / internet users, but I digress. The point being that any such service if badly served would have a very negative impact on the provider.
Is that the case in the Irish market? Hard to say, but from what I’ve seen the number of active Irish podcasters is quite small compared to that of “traditional” bloggers.
At present we’re treating it all on a very ad-hoc basis.
Tom Raftery, for example, has been podcasting for several months, so we offered him space and bandwidth on one of our servers.
He can podcast to his heart’s content and not have to worry about bandwidth costs.
It’s probably an area that will have to be investigated further and I am, as always, open to suggestions and feedback from podcasters.