Internet Tools

Priceless Podcasts for Pastors (Ways to do podcasts for free)

Media is one of the great tools that we have at our disposal, and podcasts and other types of feeds are very useful for distributing a wide variety of content to the masses.

Here are some types of “podcasts” and other “feeds” that you can use, for free, and the type of media distributed.

1. Regular podcast - the easiest way to do a plain audio podcast that I have found is with gcast.  I have written about this before, so you can check out the post on it.
2. Video podcasts, feeds, or live sreaming - If you want to make your media that you distribute a little more interesting you can do a video podcast.  You record it (that would be another post), but once you have it in a digital format you can upload it to a number of different sites that allow people to subscribe to be notified when you update it.
   1. YouTube - This is the best for trying to get highlights out.  Or anything else, really, because of its popularity, but the limitation is that it only allows for 10 minutes.
   2. Vimeo - Better quality and longer durations allowed, but basically like YouTube.  Gaining popularity.
   3. Google Video - Unlimited and simple to understand.  Like everything else that Google does.
   4. Ustream.tv - What our church uses.  Supports live video streaming of services and records/hosts them for posterity.  You can embed a player on your website like YouTube and have it play default programming that you set up when there is nothing live.  You may see the embedded version here, and the dedicated Ustream page here.
3. Blogs - never actually seen it done, but you could start a blog for sermon notes and embed the video into it.