12th February 2007

How much bandwidth will that podcast consume?

posted in podcasting |

As I teach various workshops relating to educational podcasting, I frequently field questions relating to bandwidth. Today I discovered this excellent comparative table of podcast lengths and encoding bit-rates which shows the approximate sizes of podcasts of different lengths recorded with different quality levels from Liberated Syndication.

For my own podcasts that are primarly spoken voice episodes but do include some music for the intro, transitions and outro, I always encode at a bitrate of 32 kbps. This table of podcast sizes matches with my own experiences, where a 20 minute 32 kbps podcast takes up about 4.5 MB and a 60 minute podcast is 12-14 MB. When you want to calculate total bandwidth demands for a given podcast, multiply the podcast size times the number of anticipated subscribers / downloads.

Tim Wilson told me about Liberated Syndication this past week at the TCEA conference in Austin. It is the hosting solution he uses for podcasts. Their hosting features include “unmetered bandwidth,” which is a really big deal for popular podcasts. Individual as well as organizational podcasting plans are available, the individual plans start at $5 per month which includes 100 MB of uploaded podcasts per month. If you’re encoding at 32 kbps, that amounts to quite a bit of uploaded podcast content each month!

I haven’t tried Liberated Syndication myself, but I’ve added it to my “Intermediate/Advanced Topics in Podcasting” workshop curriculum.

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 12th, 2007 at 1:54 pm and is filed under podcasting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

There are currently 3 responses to “How much bandwidth will that podcast consume?”

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  1. 1 On February 12th, 2007, Rob Wall said:

    I’ve just switched hosting for the EdTech Posse podcast to Libsyn and so far everything is working smoothly (so far meaning “in the last 6 days since the latest podcast was put online”). I really like the presentation of the podcast stats.

  2. 2 On February 13th, 2007, Geoff said:

    Some of iTunes top podcasts are Libsyn - Grammar Girl, for example. Our church is starting to podcast and after looking around for a solid site that is easy for non-web experts to use, I recommended using Libsyn (if for no other reason than the small fee shows it has a pretty reliable business model for the future).

  3. 3 On February 15th, 2007, Open Resource Centre : Managing podcasting bandwidth issues said:

    [...] Again from Wes Fryer As I teach various workshops relating to educational podcasting, I frequently field questions relating to bandwidth. Today I discovered this excellent comparative table of podcast lengths and encoding bit-rates which shows the approximate sizes of podcasts of different lengths recorded with different quality levels from Liberated Syndication. more How much bandwidth will that podcast consume? Thursday, February 15, 2007 7:26 PM miketemple123 Filed under: ICT information, ICT and Boys writing, Writing with ICT, Podcasting, Web 2.0 [...]