To Host, Or Not Host, My Podcast?
by Bob Bloom
category: "podcast"
It's been an interesting week of looking into doing a podcast.
I did a podcast about developing my LaSalle Software a couple of years ago at https://soundcloud.com/lasallesoftwarenews.
A while in my Joomla days I did a podcast called "The Bob Bloom Show". Episodes are forever listed at https://blogtalkradio.com/southlasalle.
Things are pretty much like they were when I did these shows, except just more so now. There are still RSS feeds, podcast hosting companies, and familiar sounding production software. There are more podcasts about how to do podcasts now-a-days. The industry is just bigger now. It's all very familiar.
There is one thing that has changed, something that has me really excited: what is available on Amazon Web Services, and my increasing ability to utilize the capabilities on Amazon Web Services.
A good chunk of my week was devoted to looking into the huge podcast hosting sites rabbit hole. I found two specific features that (i) are not universally offered amongst podcast hosting sites, and (ii) did not exist the last time I did a podcast.
Feature A: "Recast" (https://help.simplecast.com/en/articles/2732204-recast).
Feature B: automatically create a video from your podcast audio to upload to YouTube (and elsewhere) (https://repurpose.io).
Of course, YouTube has an API. One of the things you can do with this API is upload a video programmatically, without logging into YouTube's dashboard (https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/guides/uploading_a_video). The social media sites have had API's for the longest time. My real question is: how would they create the video from audio?
Why would I even ask myself this? Well, because I have Amazon Web Services on my brain, because I am learning AWS "serverless". I devote a page to AWS S3 in my Software's doc at https://lasallesoftware.ca/docs/v2/gettingstarted_installation_cloudstorage.
Which led me https://podnews.net/article/podcast-hosted-on-amazon-aws.
I did a podcast about developing my LaSalle Software a couple of years ago at https://soundcloud.com/lasallesoftwarenews.
A while in my Joomla days I did a podcast called "The Bob Bloom Show". Episodes are forever listed at https://blogtalkradio.com/southlasalle.
Things are pretty much like they were when I did these shows, except just more so now. There are still RSS feeds, podcast hosting companies, and familiar sounding production software. There are more podcasts about how to do podcasts now-a-days. The industry is just bigger now. It's all very familiar.
There is one thing that has changed, something that has me really excited: what is available on Amazon Web Services, and my increasing ability to utilize the capabilities on Amazon Web Services.
A good chunk of my week was devoted to looking into the huge podcast hosting sites rabbit hole. I found two specific features that (i) are not universally offered amongst podcast hosting sites, and (ii) did not exist the last time I did a podcast.
Feature A: "Recast" (https://help.simplecast.com/en/articles/2732204-recast).
Feature B: automatically create a video from your podcast audio to upload to YouTube (and elsewhere) (https://repurpose.io).
Of course, YouTube has an API. One of the things you can do with this API is upload a video programmatically, without logging into YouTube's dashboard (https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/guides/uploading_a_video). The social media sites have had API's for the longest time. My real question is: how would they create the video from audio?
Why would I even ask myself this? Well, because I have Amazon Web Services on my brain, because I am learning AWS "serverless". I devote a page to AWS S3 in my Software's doc at https://lasallesoftware.ca/docs/v2/gettingstarted_installation_cloudstorage.
Which led me https://podnews.net/article/podcast-hosted-on-amazon-aws.
And this gem: https://medium.com/@NirZicherman/why-you-should-never-pay-for-podcast-hosting-9c39becd7cf7 . How about this quote: "For almost every single podcast Anchor hosts, the cost to us is less than 10 cents per month". Yes, I've read the articles about Anchor -- did I mention I spent a fair chunk of this week deep diving into podcast hosting, among other podcasting topics? What of the "ten cents"?
Well, that is a realistic estimate of storing files on AWS's S3 storage. Go to https://calculator.aws/#/createCalculator. I plugged in: 10Gb standard storage (that's a lot of 50Mb MP3 files), 10,000 "put requests" and 100,000 "get requests" and get 32 cents per month. Knock that down for someone starting out to "1Gb" + "1000 put" + "100,000 get" = 7 cents.
Well, that is a realistic estimate of storing files on AWS's S3 storage. Go to https://calculator.aws/#/createCalculator. I plugged in: 10Gb standard storage (that's a lot of 50Mb MP3 files), 10,000 "put requests" and 100,000 "get requests" and get 32 cents per month. Knock that down for someone starting out to "1Gb" + "1000 put" + "100,000 get" = 7 cents.
Then I found this video from the 2017 AWS Re:Invent on -- incredibly ☺ -- podcasting ☺ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWS5JNYVBFM.
Two buzzwords got me all-a-buzzing: "lambda", and "transcoding". Lambda is the heart of AWS "serverless", which I am learning. Transcoding is now https://aws.amazon.com/mediaconvert.
My Software is now feature complete (https://lasallesoftware.ca/announcing-my-feature-complete-software-release). I still have code I wrote for podcasting (https://github.com/lasallecast, although almost all the repos are private).
Well, that's it for podcast hosting sites, because if (when) I do my own podcast, I will host it myself.
Update: Blubrry Post About Owning Your Feed
Want to reference this link: Own your podcast feed.