Blog Relations

About a year ago, as an experiment,  I uploaded some audio onto Podango, the podcasting start-up.  Today I received an email saying that sadly, their future is in doubt:

Our ability to continue operations past the end of this year (2008) is in question. We do not want any of you, or any of your shows to be negatively affected by this uncertainty and so we are encouraging you to begin taking all necessary steps to secure your data or begin moving to another hosting provider.

The truth is that podcasting isn’t profitable enough to support more than one or two major service companies. As far as we are concerned, Libsyn is the only game in town. They offer unlimited bandwidth and cost-effective hosting for audio and video based on the amount you upload and store every month – and they make a profit out of it. Through their parent company, Wizzard Media, they arrange sponsorship deals for podcasts. Wizzard is listed on the Nasdaq, and Libsyn seems to be a rare instance of a company that hasn’t lost its user-friendly start-up ethos after selling up to a bigger company.

Unfortunately, not many other podcasting service companies are going to survive the downturn.