Do You Care How Your Show Is Delivered? Options

[Big E]

IMHO, RSS feeds are still a royal PITA to collect and download. Anyone here looked at other means of delivery such as BitTorrent?

Curious.....

[tvindy]

How would BitTorrent make the process easier? Even if I downloaded everything via BitTorrent, I'd still have to open up iTunes to add my newly downloaded episodes onto my playlist before hooking up my iPod. Also, BitTorrent can be incredibly slow for anything that doesn't have a large number of simultaneous downloaders. With a feed aggregator I can download all my daily listens in a matter of a few minutes. Also, I don't know of any podcasts that offer their content via BitTorrent.

[Big E]

How would BitTorrent make the process easier? Even if I downloaded everything via BitTorrent, I'd still have to open up iTunes to add my newly downloaded episodes onto my playlist before hooking up my iPod. Also, BitTorrent can be incredibly slow for anything that doesn't have a large number of simultaneous downloaders. With a feed aggregator I can download all my daily listens in a matter of a few minutes. Also, I don't know of any podcasts that offer their content via BitTorrent.

I wasn't really thinking of it in terms of 'either or' but rather, feed AND torrent. Offering it both ways. It would seem there is a whole set of listeners out there that could care less about feeds, but are into the torrents.

[Slusy]

Aren't most people who are savvy enough to use Torrents also fairly comfortable with RSS? The only advantage I could see is bandwidth savings, but with services like Libsyn that offer unlimited bandwidth, that's not really an issue.

Besides, most podcasts don't have a large enough audience to really support a Torrent. The downloads would be painfully slow.

[Steve/EndGamePR]

I honestly don't care how they listen, so long as they listen. The only preference I have is that they do it in such a way that I can track it. BitTorrent seems like a bit (ha .. pun) too much trouble for receiving a podcast. Also, I doubt I could track it accurately.

[techtalkforfamil...]

TWiT uses torrents--some users did so, but I don't know how many people actually use it. Yeah, BitTorrent's painfully slow and unreliable.

[robotslove]

I don't see how RSS is a pain, if you find the podcast's website, you find the RSS and if they're smart enough to program in an iTunes url, CLICK and most casual listeners are good to go.

With torrent you would have to have a large user base who is using bit torrent and they would have to manually check and download each torrent tracking file as each show comes out and then hope there are enough people to download from. That's an additional 4 steps at least. You might save bandwidth, but there are plenty of hosts who offer unlimited bandwidth. My host offers 3TB of bandwidth a month and for all intent and purpose thats basically unlimited for the file sizes I'm working with.

The whole idea behind RSS, is just that, a specification to simplify the syndication process. The world of podcasting is dominated by a large percentage of amateurs and, while I'm not bad mouthing any of them, don't have a lot of background knowledge in web design, html, xml, and content delivery. You have people managing an xml feed on their site, but that isn't updated with a second feed for the same show they got on feedburner, etc etc. A lot of the blogging and feed tools are confusing and bloated. It's so much easier just to hand code your feeds or to buy a shareware program that displays them in a logical way to edit.

[darylNcognito]

Another big issue against a bitTorent, there are a lot of providers that are throttling P2P sites. A 10 minute vidcast could take a day to download. What part of RSS is a PITA?

[WyethDigital]

BigE, TVindy and Robotslove, RSS will work with Torrents, and there are a few podcatchers out there that can handle them. Just Google.

For those interested in podcasters that offer Torrent as an option, I know of at least two: Rocketboom used to, and I think TWiT does.

You can see more about how this works, or how to set up a RSS/Torrent feed in this (old) tutorial.

Here's a Dave Winer post about Torrent implementation in RSS.

And here's a list of Torrent/RSS feeds (not sure how current it is).

Hope that clears up some of the confusion about the Who and How, even if it doesn't really address the Why very well (unless you have massive downloads and want to distribute the burden).

Eric

[robotslove]

...
Hope that clears up some of the confusion about the Who and How, even if it doesn't really address the Why very well (unless you have massive downloads and want to distribute the burden).

Eric

Yeah, as far as the why I see very few reasons for the RSS/Torrent hybrid in audio podcasting. It's simply because the majority of audio podcasts seem to max out around 100mb which is a fairly quick download and not many shows are so popular that they're unable to scale with the demand.

Where it would come in handy is video podcasts that come in at 100mb+ where the strain can be taken off the server and speed up the download by using a torrent model.

[tuckertales]

I dont see the need in using bittorrent for podcasts. Unless your podcast end up being a 500mb audio file and your using a really bad hosting provider I dont see the need.

The thing with twit is that their show caters to techies, tech people dont mind setting up bittorrent. I dont see many common folk watching a wine vidcast or such going through the trouble.

[WyethDigital]

I dont see the need in using bittorrent for podcasts. Unless your podcast end up being a 500mb audio file and your using a really bad hosting provider I dont see the need.

The thing with twit is that their show caters to techies, tech people dont mind setting up bittorrent. I dont see many common folk watching a wine vidcast or such going through the trouble.

There are clients that don't require any more set up to grab a torrent feed as an RSS feed. For video, Democracy is one of those. To me the real hassle is setting it up from the podcaster's end.

Eric