The Jason Salas Experience

I live in Guam, which sports 5 ISPs, each with broadband Internet service of some sort (either DSL or cable modem). But being all the way out here in the Western Pacific, we don't avail of the fastest of online access. So one of the challenges I face is knowing how to get the most out of bandwidth for my primary audience that accesses my company's stuff, because there isn't a whole lot of it.

I'm right now in the process of encoding much of the video that's going to constitute my company's new news video podcasts (aka, vidcasts/vodcasts). For the first run, I'm extending my existing RSS feed by adding the MP4 elements to the existing audio items. And while I initially was encoding entire casts and specials verbatim (as long as 30 minutes a pop), this makes for huge files - to the tune of 109 MB per. Even for broadband users, this is a pain.

Although it's more work, I suggest encoding stories and segments as individual video files. It makes for more tolerable downloading for your users, giving them the chance to tell their podcatcher application to ignore certain things they'll only wind up deleting anyway. Newscasts are chock full of extraneous information (intros, outros, transitional shots), so get rid of the superfluous stuff to make the best user experience. You can still include client ads and promotional mentions.

One of the things we came to learn as a community when audio podcasting first came on the scene was how to optimize our MP3s to avoid costly data transfer problems with our hosts. But MP4s with video are significantly larger than audio, so we need to segment our offerings a bit more.

But keep in mind this is all dependent on the flow of your show. What works for an affiliate in a minor market may not work for one in a larger operating space, a network, or a DIY'er. This approach largely contrasts how we've been accustomed to producing streaming media. Companies like WorldNow empower news agencies to have users select a range of clips for ordered playback, which is great.

With video podcasting not being locked into the "on-demand, but still synchronized" nature of streaming, the consumer is boss. So let them rule.