First-to-market: rolling out Guam's first vidcasts

I announced how my station would be supporting video podcasts as part of a new broadband channel service I'm developing. I finally bought the paid version of ImTOO MPEG Converter, which works a lot more efficiently in terms of converting WMVs to MP4s than Quicktime7 Pro for Windows. I'd fully recommend that tool for my fellow Windows hackers looking to get into vidcasting.

This works better for my operations because our videos are inherently captured digitally as WMVs for storage in our Webcast Archives, so it's merely a matter of taking those files and converting them to MP4s. While I'm still working on hacking out iTunes-friendly enhanced podcasts using my Windows tools to do things like chapterizing, time-synched imaging & hyperlinking, but we'll see, given the fact that there are limited automated tools to do so.

• Download my audio promo introducing our new vidcasts
  
• Sample newscast

The coolest thing is that I just extended my company's existing RSS feed for news, which a ton of people already have plugged into their RSS aggregators (reader apps as well as dedicated podcatchers). We just added the additional s within the feed and referenced the video. Surprisingly, a lot of people are creating dedicated feeds for text, audio and video, rather than create hybrid feeds. (I admit, I initially did this, too.) Thank goodness for feed services like Feedburner that can differentiate between blog posts and podcast elements, and aggregators like Google Reader that can play embedded media.

This is a fun project for me, mainly because I wanted to be the first to do so in my hometown. This makes sense, seeing as how we previously were the first broadcast news station in the region to produce a series of podcasts and a royalty-free, RSS-based music subscription service.