Challenges

"The critical stuff is understanding that audio as transmitted over the Internet is not really what the Internet was made to do," said Joel, adding that he often observes the 'MacGyver Syndrome' where "duct tape and bubble gum and stuff" is used to make things work.

Companies can avoid these bandwidth issues by taking advantage of the fact that podcasts can be viewed by downloading, said Joel.

"So it's just the initial download to get it done. That naturally makes it much friendlier to an IT department than the idea of streaming," he said.

He suggests opening up additional bandwidth when a new podcast is available in anticipation of viewers downloading the file that day, instead of dealing with the chaos of too many people streaming the file at once.

Although podcast creation is inexpensive and commodity hardware is readily available, such an initiative may sometimes be best outsourced to a marketing firm who can apply experience garnered from the success of other companies' podcasts.

Ontario Craft Brewers chose the outsourcing approach, said Jones, because it didn't have the internal resources, as the company is only a small group of staff overseeing a large number of breweries.

However, said Joel, if a company feels confident enough to manage the project internally, then a pilot program is often useful for determining what works, and what doesn't. "It makes the learning curve a lot less painful."

Fad or future?

Despite its bandwidth issues, video podcasting is one of the fastest growing forms of multimedia, observed Joel - although he thinks audio is equally powerful a media as video. And, it's a trend that's not surprising to him considering how Internet communications has morphed over time: first it was text blogs, then images, then audio podcasts, and now video. "It's the same sort of evolution that we saw with the Web."