The Technology of Podcasting

These days a lot of people are coming in contact with the term "Podcasting", but very few of them know its real meaning and how it works. There are many people who even do not know that what actually a podcast is. The origin of the word 'podcast' is from the fusion of the two words, that is, broadcast and the ipod. This is because at first, these broadcasts were specially made for the ipod only. But later on keeping in mind the growing publicity of these podcasts, they were made for non ipod users also. So now a person does not need an ipod to listen to a podcast. He can just download and listen to a podcast in his computer or any other music player. Podcasting is actually the process of spreading and publicizing the media files like audio or video on the internet.

The multimedia files can include audio in the form of mp3 files or videos like movies, music videos or advertisements to promote a particular object by a company. These days marketing and Podcasting is becoming a very suitable strategy for most of the companies because it is a very effective way to make people aware of their product and moreover this method is also cheaper than any other advertising strategy. The podcast is spread over the RSS feed or an atom syndication over the internet and users can download the file through these sources and listen to it either in the computer in itself or an mp3 player or ipod. The podcasts are similar to the episodes of a T.V or a radio which are released after a fixed period of time.

Through this excellent technology, people can share their thoughts and views in audio format and the users who subscribe to the podcast can listen to these views and give a suitable feedback through replies and emails in the forum of the podcast. Podcasts can also be streamed online and a person can directly listen to it without downloading it. This saves both time and bandwidth of the person as the audio is in low quality format. The streamed audio is at around 96 kilobits per second whereas the downloadable version is at either 128 or 192 kilobits per second depending upon the uploader. To record a podcast, one just needs a good quality microphone and a well configured computer for editing and finalizing the podcast. Then it can be uploaded so that users can listen to it and give their feedbacks.