Life after Podango – there are options
Published by on December 28th, 2008 3 Comments »
This week, podcast hosting and publishing service Podango anounced they are about to shut down.
In a notice to all Podango users just two days ago, president Douglas G. Smith announced likely closure to take place Wednesday December 31st and that all users should take immediate measures to back-up media files uploaded there.
Today saw the Blubrry.com podcast network announce a free month of media hosting on their pay-to-host service to all Podango users affected by the closure, and a “tool” to help the transition – which is currently being created (anyone know i that’s actually available right now? – let’s hope it gets there in time). Taking up this Blubrry offer does not obligate ex Podango users to continue with Blubrry after the initial free month.
A free alternative
Another option that seems to have not been mentioned elsewhere – this one entirely free – is mevio.com who already have a simple system to automatically transfer all media available on another RSS feed and suck it into their servers (once you have verified you are the owner of a feed, of course!). Mevio.com hosting is entirely free of charge with no limits to storage or bandwidth.
Another blow for podcasting?
The loss of a hosting service is certainly not positive news, but begs the question as to the need for dedicated services with the cost of web hosting and bandwidth continuing to drop, a question also raised over at Podcasting News.
Where specialist hosting does become a factor is with very successful and high bandwidth shows. If audiences begin to stretch into the tens of thousands of media requests per episode, the small-time producer will be hard pushed to find a compliant shared web hosting service comfortable with the server and bandwidth load.
I cannot comment about Blubrry hosting as I have not had any personal experience, but mevio.com handles the demands of heavyweight video shows such as GeekBriefTV without breaking a sweat.
Let’s hope all Podango users find a new home so that their audiences have uninterrupted transmission.
If you are new around here and in the interests of disclosure, I would like to point out that I work for mevio.com and also chose to use mevio to handle my media storage and distribution.
3 Responses to “Life after Podango – there are options”
Umm, some form of disclosure might have been appropriate for any first time visitors
Will be interesting to see what 2009 brings.
BTW – Monday is the 29th.
- Neil.
Good point on the disclosure, thanks.
The migration tool is available at Blubrry.com now, but users need to email me to let me know that they’ve submitted their feed to blubrry.com and that they are ready for us to move the media over. E-mail: cio [at] rawvoice {dot} com.