Along with JD Lasica, Marc Canter and others I’ve been working on a semi-confidential project known as Ourmedia. The official web site, ourmedia.org, remains password protected for now, but from the older work-in-progress site you can get the general idea: “an open-source initiative devoted to creating, sharing and storing works of personal media.” It’s non-profit and all volunteer. I’ve been working on the audio components.
JD just posted some notes from our discussion today about offering free hosting for podcasts. It’s a new idea, even by Ourmedia standards, and we’d like to get your feedback either here (as a comment) or on the project wiki. Expect to hear more over the next few weeks. Ourmedia is a very exciting endeavor.
How much does it cost a podcaster or anyone else to deliver a one-hour program to a single listener? I’d never bothered to do the math, but it came up in a telephone discussion I had earlier today. You can’t go by “unlimited” hosting plans because they’re not really unlimited. They’re throttled by the capacity of the box and the link to the ‘Net. So I picked a discounted high-volume dedicated-server hosting account: 1,000GB for $100/month. (A 1.3 GHz Celeron Linux server with 512MB RAM and 60GB drive from EV1Servers.)
That’s $0.10 per gigabyte, or about $0.003 for a 30MB file, roughly one hour of 64kbps MP3 audio. Add in some cost of system administration (but not production), and you’re looking at between $0.005 and $0.01 to deliver a one-hour file to each listener. 10,000 listeners? $50-$100.