Ok, iTunes 4.9 is out. Feedburner had a 50% increase in podcasting subscribers the day it was released and iTunes became the number one podcasting client overnight. Wow. Its got great tools and a huge user base. But what about the bandwidth? Now that podcasting has this huge ray of exposure, bandwidth usage will go through the roof. We’re talking about content providers that only involved themselves in the first place because of the cheap up front costs. Now that their names and faces are embedded into iTunes, how can they keep up with the amount a bandwidth they need to stay online.

The old answer was simple. Bittorrent. Bittorrent came along for the ride with podcasting when it took off. The technologies went hand in hand. Bittorrent was built to let downloaders share in the bandwidth load. Podcasters found bittorrent to be a perfect, simple, cheap solution to their bandwidth problems. The problem here is that iTunes has no support for bittorrent, and don’t expect it any time soon.

Hiccup. The number one attributor to the problem provides no way to solve it. Great. Ok, subscription rates are way up due to iTunes provided exposure…nice…but who’s gonna pay this bandwidth bill?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 29th, 2005 at 6:32 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.