Hostway Releases Business-Class Podcasting Tool

Hostway adds a new podcasting tool to its marketing services line.

Chicago, Illinois, June 7 , 2006—Hostway Corporation released a new business-class podcasting tool that gives customers the ability to market their businesses by broadcasting their own audio recording, video and text documents via their Web sites.

Built on Really Simple Syndication (RSS), podcasting shares the same technical background as Hostway’s blog tool. These two technologies also have a similar development story. Podcasting, like blogging, has traditionally been used by individuals for personal purposes, but businesses are beginning to adopt the podcast to support marketing and advertising efforts.

“Over the past few years consumers have demanded more information and entertainment that is specific to their personal needs and lifestyles,” said John Lee, vice president of global marketing and general manager for Hostway. “This personal realm has begun to spread to the business world as we’ve seen with blogs and therefore Hostway created this podcasting tool to ensure our customers businesses are fully equipped with all the current marketing tools.”

Hostway’s podcasting tool offers three levels of disk space, up to 1500 MB, and plans that start as low as $2.95/month. With this new tool, customers can:

• Record an audio message on a personal computer
• Create a new feed on a podcasting home page and create new podcasts within the feed
• Monitor site traffic and available disk space to upload new podcasts
• Support m4a, mp3, mov, m4v, .pdf, .jpg, .gif, .bmp and .png file types

Using a program such as iTunes®, interested listeners can subscribe to feeds and automatically download the podcasts as they become available. These dowloads can be transferred to an MP3 player or iPod®. End users also can subscribe to sites with podcasts and use an application that checks those sites for new or updated feeds. If one is found, the program automatically downloads the new podcast to the end user’s computer. In this sense, podcasts are similar to an audio version of TiVo®.

Learning more about how Hostway’s podcasting tool can help your business differentiate itself from the saturated marketing environment.