Slate posted a good series of articles about podcasts (presumably because they are diving in hard into the world of podcasting) that are terrific reads. One point that always catches the ear of my college students is…
Power 106’s broadcast tower can reach 15 million people in Southern California. There are no incremental charges involved—when an additional person tunes in, it doesn’t cost the station a dime. Not so on the Web. Each time you click a streaming radio channel, or download a podcast, it’s as though you’re making a collect call. Somebody’s paying to send all those data packets your way. The more people tune into a streaming broadcast, the more the broadcaster must spend on servers and bandwidth.
via The future of terrestrial radio in the age of podcasts..
I operate an on-line radio station at Alternative Sports Talk Radio and so far the costs to stream haven’t been a problem (would be a good problem to have.)
On the listener end, a year ago I would have stressed about data consumption. However, my current AT&T plan is up to 15GB of data, and as I drive around listening to Alt Sports Talk I don’t really scratch the data limit. Not even close. Not even within a long frisbee throw of 15GB. So I think as consumers we will be OK and be able to walk around listening to online radio without worrying about hitting the cap.