I’ve been listening to netcasts a lot.  I’m getting picky on what gets into my list of netcasts, as I’m starting to figure out fairly quickly that 30 netcasts eat a fair amount of hard drive space.  That’s not to say that I wouldn’t like to have all 30 netcasts saved.  Herein lies the point of this post.

In the attempt to sound more professional, a few casts have a standard bumper that is played at the beginning and end of every netcast.  For example, take TWiT.  They have a one minute lead-in, and a (roughly) one minute lead-out.  For TWiT and a recent 91-minute show, that amounts to about 2.2% of their netcast size.  The download of that cast was 42.9MB, meaning the bumpers consist of 0.85MB of space that I simply don’t listen to, which also implies there’s nearly 1MB of data transferred which they paid for that is never consumed.

In the case of TWiT, I suppose it’s not a deal breaker; it’s only 2-3%.  In the case of some of the smaller casts I listen to however, it boggles my mind.  Take The Finer Points, a netcast by a Certified Flight Instructor talking about air safety.  He publishes netcasts in the range of 5-10 minutes with a 1 minute bumper on each end.  For a 5 minute show, that’s 40% of his show.  Holy moly.  Even at a longer (for him) 15 minute show, we’re talking a 13% waste.

This all struck home for me when I was listening to a netcast hosted on a .MAC account who busted his bandwidth limitation for the month.  His show also has a bumper, but he’s chosen to use a 5 minute space to highlight a random band.  Great idea if this were a music cast, but it also was about general aviation.

If I produce a netcast one day, I will prefer to use bandwidth efficiently and get a wider audience.  But that’s just me…