Feature: How to create your own podcast

Find out why podcasting has made such an impact and how to distribute your own podcasts

The term 'podcast' was coined in February 2004 when journalist Ben Hammersley, writing for the Guardian, proposed several suggestions for a new word meaning 'listening to audioblogs'.

The neologism, which has now entered the Oxford English Dictionary, was derived from the two terms 'Ipod' and 'broadcast', in spite of the fact that, strictly speaking, podcasting does not require an Ipod (or any other portable player) and no traditional broadcasting is involved.

It was just that Ipods were gaining in popularity when podcasting began and no other name has succeeded in catching on.

While the mechanics of how podcasting works are highly technical, the essence lies in enabling viewers to watch and listen to whatever they want, whenever they want, hence its popularity.

While it's certainly true that podcasts were originally audioblogs, they now cover a much wider area, including video content. Radio shows are frequent. Numerous religious groups provide talks ('godcasts').

News organisations and commercial companies supply informational podcasts. Political parties and individual politicians in the US put out broadcasts; George Bush's weekly radio address is available as a download, while Tony Blair and David Cameron have been interviewed on podcasts.

Apple has added a podcast directory to its Itunes online music store and, as the ultimate accolade, even the staid BBC now podcasts a growing selection of its programmes.

There's money in podcasting, too. London's LBC radio station was the first to replace its free-to-air podcasts with a financially viable subscription service. And the Ricky Gervais Show, officially the world's most downloaded podcast, now charges a fee.

From podcast to pod-cash
There is no doubt that far more people are now listening to podcasts than before. Even more are likely to be doing so in the future. One prediction, from Forrester Research, predicts that, by 2010, more than 12.3 million households worldwide will be subscribing to podcasts.

Another forecast is even more sanguine: Bridge Ratings confidently expects between 45 and 75 million individual podcast listeners by 2010. Compare this with the radio ratings company's estimate of the number of listeners in 2004 and 2005: 820,000 and 4.8 million respectively.

Another relevant statistic estimates that some 20 per cent of people who have downloaded a podcast do so on a weekly basis. Elsewhere, Bridge Ratings also predicts a total US podcasting audience of 10 million by the end of 2006.

Additionally, researcher Emarketer foresees that US advertising spending on podcasts will rise from $80m in 2006 to $300m by 2010. The growing appetite of consumers for 'instant' technologies (on-demand films, news and sport on TV) makes these predictions entirely probable.

So podcasting is booming, but what exactly is it? Definitions (such as those on Webopedia) sometimes stress its similarity to RSS ('Rich Site Summary') but are vague when it comes to the nuts and bolts of exactly how it works.

There are several stages to successful podcasting. At its simplest, users create a standard blog and then add audio and graphics elements.

Now, though, many podcasters will be using their PC or other digital recorder to create a 'program' of some kind. This could be just about anything, from a discussion with friends, a personal compilation of music tracks, a radio show or even a recording of a public event.

PCW, for example, provides a Product of the Week podcast which is an audio review of a selected product, and several of our sister magazines produce news and discussion-based podcasts - Computeractive looks at the week's consumer news in its Active News podcast for instance.

Many podcasts are simply standalone audio files on a website that you can download and listen to like any other audio file, but for a regular podcast to be successful it also should be easy to obtain and listen to.

It's at this stage that RSS comes into the equation. RSS is a technology that enables websites to allow other sites to publish some of their content (this is called 'syndication').

They do this by creating an XML web document called a 'feed' and publishing its URL. Any user with an RSS reader application installed, such as Feed Demon, can load this URL into their reader and automatically receive updates to the feed.

Browsers such as Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox now have built-in RSS readers. There are dedicated podcast 'readers' as well, such as Juice that include preconfigured content listings to get you started.

RSS technology is now used for any activity that involves periodic updates of publications and is therefore tailor-made for podcasting, where users set up a series of subscriptions that are checked regularly.

Once podcasts have been created and edited, they have to be uploaded to some kind of hosting service.

Applications
What are the uses for podcasting and why do it? Its employment in commercial radio is an obvious answer, though the extent may be surprising.

Searching the BBC's site for 'podcast' produces some 87 pages of results. While many of these relate to news items rather than details of programs, a quick look at the BBC's list of available podcasts reveals a rapidly burgeoning number of available podcasts organised by network.

A more specific example: Stewart Keenan is a UK Dance DJ who heads a weekly radio show in Australia. Keenan creates podcasts for his show hosted by UK company Podcast Generation.

Journalism, for example, the Guardian, has embraced the new phenomenon, and reveals an escalating number of podcasts, with an emphasis on the topical.

Other uses to which podcasting has been put aren't so predictable. Conservative MP and Shadow Minister for Small Business Mark Prisk produces a monthly podcast tailored towards Ipod-using constituents who commute into London from his constituency.

Here, Podcast Generation doesn't just host the files: it also takes care of the production and editing.

But is there any money in podcasting? There certainly is for advertisers. Originally, the majority of podcasts were free of advertising but their growing popularity has changed this, probably for good.

In fact, although podcasting is arguably still in its infancy, two main commercial models have emerged. In the more traditional model, it's advertising tacked onto the back of them that pays for 'free' podcasts.

This currently remains the most common distribution method. However, subscription-based podcasts (where listeners pay a small one-off fee or subscription) are rapidly gaining ground.

Ricky Gervais Show
Probably the best example is the Ricky Gervais Show. At first, every weekly half-hour show was podcastable at no charge.

So successful was the first series (it averaged 261,670 downloads a week during its first month) that its producers applied for recognition by the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's most downloaded podcast.

After some four million downloads, the show was removed from the Guardian's website and transferred to a fee-based delivery method and it now currently resides on www.audible.c o.uk.

In spite of a second-series charge of 95p per episode (or slightly less when users buy a subscription to the entire series), the series went straight to the top of the UK Itunes chart and remained there for several weeks.

It outsold all online music albums and was similarly successful in Ireland, the US, Canada, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands.

London's LBC 97.3 radio station initially provided free 'best of' podcasts. It still does this but now also supplies a premium subscription basis.

A fee starting from £2 per month entitles listeners to full-length broadcasts of programmes via the dedicated LBC Podcast Player. The more sites that adopt subscription-based delivery methods, the better the news for podcasters looking to make money out of their broadcasts.

Protecting podcasts
One major check on the development of advertising revenues from podcasting has been the question of copyright. The difficulty is that podcasts don't just involve public performances of music; they also entail the reproduction and transmission of sound recordings. This means that tracks could be extracted from them.

Although fees for public performances are handled by performance rights associations, rights in recordings are handled by artists or their labels. Both collecting societies and the major record labels have been slow in coming up with common licensing schemes for podcasts.

One feature that will probably change this is the advent of Digital Rights Management (DRM). At the risk of alienating consumers, one side effect of DRM is that it can in theory provide advertisers with detailed audience figures, including which commercials are heard and which skipped.

One likely corollary of this is a system whereby sponsors only pay whenever an advert is played, a compelling proposition for advertisers and something that can only foster further podcasting growth.

Creating your own podcasts
Even if your PC has an internal microphone, it probably won't provide acceptable podcast quality. You'll need to buy an external mic and plug it into your PC. Now you'll require recording software.

Windows' Sound Recorder will do at a pinch but free programs such as Podproducer or Audacity are much more flexible. Once you've created (and edited) your podcast, you'll need an mp3 encoder. Use the free Lame encoder and install it with Audacity.

Export your podcast as an mp3 file, so it's compatible with as many portable devices as possible. You should make this file as small as possible to reduce bandwidth usage; Audacity will let you set your podcast's recording and bit rate.

Go for 32Kbits/sec mono for talk-only podcasts and at least 64Kbits/sec stereo for podcasts containing music. Podcastproducer will also automatically create an XML RSS file for you to upload to your website.

This approach to creating a podcast has the advantage of being largely free (apart from any music licensing costs) and is fine for a personal podcast. However, for commercial users it's also possible to pay someone else to do the work.

Podcast Generation will automate the recording, mixing and uploading of podcasts or any combination of these.

A typical fee structure involves cost-free hosting (with no bandwidth charges) for the first three months; this allows the company to gauge anticipated traffic volumes.

After this, a day spent recording, mixing and producing the podcast generally costs around £280 plus expenses. This includes the creation of the necessary RSS feed and submission for inclusion in Itunes. The company sells downloadable music clips at £5 each for use in DIY podcasts.

Distributing your podcasts
When your podcast is ready for distribution, you can upload it to a free or paid-for web hosting service. Free services are useful when you're just starting to distribute your podcast - a good example is Yahoo Geocities Free.

If you adopt this approach, you'll also have to create an RSS feed that will tell podcast 'receivers' such as Itunes or Juice how to locate and download your podcast.

You can find instructions on just what to put in the file on http://podcasts.yahoo.com/publish/3 or use special RSS feed creation software (eg Feedforall).

Upload the feed alongside your podcast. As your podcast (hopefully) becomes more popular, however, you should consider using a paid host - this will provide faster access times, increased bandwidth and greater reliability.

A good example is Jellycast. Users can choose from seven price plans - the most inexpensive comes in at a flat one-off fee of £10 and allows you to upload unlimited podcasts with a 25Gbytes/month bandwidth limit.

Higher charges deliver enhanced bandwidth.After distribution, your podcast is available for downloading to listeners' PCs and portable media players. They'll find it via RSS newsfeed programs such as Juice (which is free) or Feed Demon (available for a small fee).

Making money
So far, so good but how do you make money out of your podcast? The answer is to take it to a subscription-based service such as Audible. Unless you're already a well-known personality, though, you can only do this after your podcast has established a following.

Audible claims to be the Internet's largest destination for podcasted audio books, radio programmes, comedy, drama and language learning programmes. Audible now distributes the Ricky Gervais podcast.

Podcasting pitfalls
Podcasting does have its share of obstacles. Success itself can be a problem. Mugglecast, a weekly podcast of Harry Potter-related news, attracts 300,000 monthly downloads.

Mugglecast became so successful so quickly, it rapidly required enormous bandwidth costing around $60,000 a year.

As a result, it had to take in advertising and sponsorship. Production issues cause more problems. Any mismatch between the size of your podcast and the bandwidth you have at your disposal will provide unsatisfactory results.

If your podcast has a high music/video component, consider investing in a paid bandwidth scheme.Two further issues are of concern, one actual and the other potential. First, podcasts have been 'hijacked' when unscrupulous sites divert RSS feeds to themselves.

This means that the number of downloads decreases. Attempts to persuade the dishonest sites to correct this result in a demand for money. You can find suggestions for combating this on various websites.

Second, some forecasters predict that podcasts will soon be carrying viruses and spyware, exploiting a vulnerability in RSS feeds (especially in Internet Explorer 7, currently still in beta). There's no reason to panic yet you can find out more information.

PCW gets vocal
PCW and Computeractive offer regular podcasts.

You can subscribe to the PCW Product of the week podcasts in your favouirite podcast receiver using the URL http://feeds.feedburner.com/pcwpotw.

We've also just finished building of a brand new suite of studios dedicated to creating online audio and video content, so you can expect a lot more from the PCW team in the near future.

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