BOXpopuli is finding customers for its automated podcasting appliance.
Podcasting firm Webcast in a Box plans a name change to BOXpopuli, said company co-founder, Chris Dawson. The new name reflects the company’s new emphasis on podcasting and its success in creating an automated podcasting market niche with its podcasting appliance introduced in July 2005.
The Linux-based appliance records audio in a club, classroom or other venue and uploads the encoded files, with optional “intro” and “outro” segments and ID3 tags added, to a server as a podcast. It’s a 1U rackmount device and has a 200GB hard drive and no manual recording controls.
BOXpopuli systems are already in use at customers that include several colleges and universities, a church, and Free Geek computer recycling and training center in Portland, Ore., says Dawson, an engineer who has worked at RealNetworks and at Apple’s desktop applications subsidiary Claris. He is the author of a Perl module for managing podcasts.
A media company, Tables Turned, has posted a BOXpopuli-based podcast on its site with material from the PDX Pop Now! music festival held in July.
Dawson said that BOXpopuli’s automated approach has advantages over Apple Computer’s “iTunes U” service, which requires manual recording and editing. On his blog, Dawson wrote, “most Chemistry professors are not using PowerBooks and they are not going to want to remember to start GarageBand and troubleshoot sound issues every time they show up to class. Production is a huge cost, and no one is talking about it.”
There are three ways to set up the BOXpopuli appliance to record. Using the web interface, a user can schedule a one-time or recurring post. Or, a user can insert a specially configured USB key, and the appliance will read the file, record and post the appropriate podcast. Education customers could use this to automate class podcasts by giving each instructor a USB key for a course, Dawson said, and the church customer is already using this method to produce sermon podcasts.
BOXpopuli will be making the appliance software available on a bootable live CD for demonstrations, Dawson says. In addition, the company hosts a content delivery network for customers’ podcast audio, he adds.
