Melodeo Mobilcast launches mobile podcasting with Cingular & M1

Link: Mobile Phone Podcast Blog: Melodeo Mobilcast Officially Launches With Cingular and M1

Besides launching a podcast service to it’s customers, Cingular has also introduced this facility:

[You can] start listening to a podcast on the web at Melodeo.com and you can finish it on the phone later. Very cool.

Features and facilities like that are excellent. I’m encouraged and excited at the possibilities of mobile podcasting. If you offered it to me tomorrow on my device, I’d certainly use it — and I think a lot of other people would.

I listen to a lot of BBC Radio1 and Radio4 podcasts. I rarely listen to anything at broadcast time as I object to planning my existence around some scheduler’s whim. However now and again I’ve caught myself listening to Chris Moyles’ show live: I much prefer the podcast at the end of the week as they’ve stripped out all the dross 😉

The Moyles podcast, along with Scott Mills and the Mark Kermode cinema review is amongst some of the most popular on the iTunes scoreboard. If you offered these audio feeds to consumers on their mobiles tomororw, I reckon they’d be very well received. (Apart from, of course, the 3,4 or 7 quid a meg charges that most of the UK operators are foisting upon folk.)

So I’m pleased Cingular and M1 have seen the light. I don’t think there’s much the UK networks can do with podcasting until they sort out their data charging structure. A 27 minute Scott Mills daily podcast works out at just over 11 megabytes in size. Yours for 30 odd quid. Listen to Scott Mills’ daily podcast for the month on your mobile and that’s a cool 600 quid. Er. No.

So podcasting on mobile ain’t going anywhere in the UK at the moment. Unless, that is, you’re with T-Mobile and their unlimited data deals.

I wonder if T-Mobile couldn’t introduce this facility to their handsets and steal yet another march?