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Locked-Out Journalists Turn To Podcasting
An anonymous reader writes "An Interesting Canadian Press article is up on the Macleans website discussing locked out union journalists podcasting to stay on the air. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation locked out 5,500 unionized employees Aug. 15 over a contract dispute. Most of those walking the picket line are radio, TV and internet journalists and technicians. In the last few days, they've been cranking out podcasts - locked out folks in Fredericton, New Brunswick; Regina, Saskatchewan; Vancouver, British Columbia and other cities have all participated. Some have 'real news', music and interviews. Others are more propaganda-like. A whole batch of them are at www.cbcunplugged.com."
It is not "streaming audio". Streaming requires enormous bandwidth in order to play in real time. A Podcast is downloaded and saved to the subscriber's disk for playback at a later time. It does not matter, therefore, if limited bandwidth means that a twenty minute episode will take fourty minutes to download
Streaming audio also has the same limitation that radio does, and which podcasting provides a solution to: the listener must tune in on the day and time of the broadcast in order to hear it. There are a large number of Public Radio programs which I enjoy but my schedule does not allow me to listen to live. Even more programs that I listen to are not offered by stations in my area. Podcasts allow me to subscribe to the feeds that I want and listen to them whenever and wherever I want, including on my mp3 player when I am away from my computer.Point still valid.
I'm surprised that people on a geek site wave technical ideas away before even bothering to spend any time understand them. It is more than just an audio file on a web site somewhere.
What makes "podcasts" an improvement over just audio files on a web site somewhere is that you can subscribe to them using a podcast aggregator. An aggregator lets the user subscribe to a bunch of different feeds, when a feed has a new file, it automatically downloads the latest files. It then takes those files and puts them in the user's media library, and also can copy them to the user's portable audio device. Then the user can play the "recently added files" on the media player in the way to work while driving or riding.
That whole automated chain of events is what makes podcasting a vastly improved delivery system over manually checking every site, downloading every single file and them manually copying them to their portable audio device. I think it is a great improvement over radio. While most of radio, and most podcasts are garbage, with podcasts, I can pick and chose when and where I can play the recordings.