 Afrikaans  Albanian  Amharic  Arabic  Armenian  Azerbaijani  Basque  Belarusian  Bengali  Bosnian  Bulgarian  Catalan  Cebuano  Chichewa  Chinese (Simplified)  Chinese (Traditional)  Corsican  Croatian  Czech  Danish  Dutch  English  Esperanto  Estonian  Filipino  Finnish  French  Frisian  Galician  Georgian  German  Greek  Gujarati  Haitian Creole  Hausa  Hawaiian  Hebrew  Hindi  Hmong  Hungarian  Icelandic  Igbo  Indonesian  Irish  Italian  Japanese  Javanese  Kannada  Kazakh  Khmer  Korean  Kurdish (Kurmanji)  Kyrgyz  Lao  Latin  Latvian  Lithuanian  Luxembourgish  Macedonian  Malagasy  Malay  Malayalam  Maltese  Maori  Marathi  Mongolian  Myanmar (Burmese)  Nepali  Norwegian  Pashto  Persian  Polish  Portuguese  Punjabi  Romanian  Russian  Samoan  Scottish Gaelic  Serbian  Sesotho  Shona  Sindhi  Sinhala  Slovak  Slovenian  Somali  Spanish  Sundanese  Swahili  Swedish  Tajik  Tamil  Telugu  Thai  Turkish  Ukrainian  Urdu  Uzbek  Vietnamese  Welsh  Xhosa  Yiddish  Yoruba  Zulu
Why There Are Free Podcasts
Podcasting, unlike other media forms, almost never has
charges for services, and the vast majority of feed
producers distribute free podcasts. This puts at odds
with, say, online radio stations, news sites that offer
media to subscribers, or the online music industry
general. Even though podcasting has very direct
correlations with industries like news and music that
have strong business models, podcasting differs.
Podcasting does not really have a business model, and
hardly anyone is podcasting in order to profit from it.
There are some businesses and news sites that podcast,
but they do it as a way to supplement their companies
and to gain technological geek credibility, not to make
money. This is an odd thing, but explainable in light of
what podcasting is.
The free podcast problem is not difficult, and
podcasting differs in several key ways from other media
areas. First, podcasting involves the physical transfer of
a file from the host to the users computer. An online
radio station does not do this; all that they provide to
their listeners is a streaming sound file that cannot be
saved without difficulty and work. If someone did
manage to do so, the station would have strong grounds
for suing them since they were never given the rights to
keep and store the files. By podcasting the complete file
to the users computer, express permission is granted the
user to copy and use as they wish. Second, the podcasts
are, for the most part, made by individuals who have
low costs involved in creating and distributing the files,
as opposed to a news broadcast or song by a music
company. These individuals have little reason to charge
for their work since there is little cost to them to do so.
Because the files are distributed in a way allows their
copying and does not control the media, and since
podcasting is a very low cost media outlet, feed
producers have little reason or ability to charge for their
work.
(Word count 336)
PPPPP
|
