Mobilecast is a free iPodder add-on to converts podcasts to the widely supported AMR-NB mobile phone audio format.

Mobilecast and mobilecasting are becoming the vernacular for downloading and listening to podcasts on mobile phones. A related activity is creating/recording podcasts using a mobile phone. The benefits of using a mobile phone for listening to podcasts are becoming clearer as the quality of mobile networks improves, and mobile phones themselves become more useful audio devices by adding storage capacity and stereo capability.

While the benefits of using a mobile phone to download and listen to podcasts are becoming clear, some challenges remain. High speed networks are not completely rolled out, particularly in the U.S. Network speed is critical for downloading the large podcast files. The default podcast format is MP3. MP3 files are too large to easily download over the mobile network, requiring podcasts to be re-encoded into a mobile-friendly format like AMR. Even in SMR a podcast longer than 20 minutes is still unwieldy to download.

Podcasts are designed and optimized for PCs and transferring to portable devices connected to those PCs. Growing awareness of mobilcasting is leading podcasters to think about how to create podcasts specfically for mobile phones. These are shorter and in many cases focused on a single, focused topic or designed to communicate quick information like short movie and restaurant review, or news headlines and summaries.

Currently a few companies are publicly and actively involved in mobilcasting:

Melodeo, which has a product called Mobilcast and coined the term mobilcasting to define the act of creating, downloading, and listening to podcasts on mobile phones. Mobilcast is an application that is installed on a mobile phone and allows a listener to browse a podcast catalog and stream the podcast for immedidate listening, or download it to a phone for listening at a later time.

Mobilecast, which creates a distributes an iPodder add-in tool for transcoding MP3 files to AMR on the phone.

Pod2mob, which has a service that allows a listener to stream podcasts directly to their phones. Pod2mob users manage their podcast favorites on the PC and use the phones WAP browser to access the podcast and initiate the stream.

Juice Wireless is also working on a major initiative to mobilecasting audio and video files to mobile handsets with JuiceCast^* technology. This technology allows any user to create an audio or video files and have that user generate content stream to mobile handset.

External links

• MobilcastNetwork
• Mobilecast
• Pod2mob.com
• VoiceGenesis, which delivers podcasts to mobile phones through its Vemail Voice Email product.
• VoiceIndigo, which has a free service making it easy for users to download over-the-air and listen to podcasts anytime, anywhere, from any artist or publisher. VoiceIndigo for Mobile Phones was first shown at Portable Media and Podcast Expo in Ontario, CA in November 2005.
• Mobile Podcast Solution, a push solution which needs no plug-in download.