I (and everyone who ever donated to Chicago Public Radio) just got an e-mail from Ira Glass of This American Life asking for more donations. He suggests that free podcasts may be in danger due to the $150,000 annual costs in bandwidth. Actually he says that more of his co-workers might be laid off due to the expense of the podcasts. But in either case, if you were to donate to WBEZ, you would offset these costs and spare some jobs.
What I wonder is, are they really using the most cost-efficient methods for distributing the podcasts? If money is the only object, why not ask users to spread the cost of bandwidth by donating some of their own? This is exactly why bittorrent was invented, to spread the load of serving content from a single location to many locations. If WBEZ just ran some trackers, I'm sure they could get enough fans to seed the episodes. I have a feeling that they don't want to do this due to some idea of control over their content, but first, they have none, since I was able to download all 370-odd episodes one day (I did donate $20 after it was done). And second, it's apparently an expensive level of control that they've purchased, and maybe they should be considering whether it's worth the cost. It sounds like they could recoup most of the $150K and save a few of Ira's coworkers.
What I wonder is, are they really using the most cost-efficient methods for distributing the podcasts? If money is the only object, why not ask users to spread the cost of bandwidth by donating some of their own? This is exactly why bittorrent was invented, to spread the load of serving content from a single location to many locations. If WBEZ just ran some trackers, I'm sure they could get enough fans to seed the episodes. I have a feeling that they don't want to do this due to some idea of control over their content, but first, they have none, since I was able to download all 370-odd episodes one day (I did donate $20 after it was done). And second, it's apparently an expensive level of control that they've purchased, and maybe they should be considering whether it's worth the cost. It sounds like they could recoup most of the $150K and save a few of Ira's coworkers.
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