God-centered resources from the ministry of John Piper

Podcasting has become very common. Yet many people are still unfamiliar with what it is and how it can benefit them. For those people, I’m offering this short primer.

What is podcasting?
Podcasting is a way of distributing audio and video automatically to your computer. It is like a newspaper subscription, but instead of receiving a paper delivered to your door every morning, you receive audio or video programs delivered right to your computer as they are made available.

Why might podcasting be helpful to you?
You might find podcasting helpful because of the incredible convenience it offers. For example, instead of coming to the site to manually download the new sermon each week, your podcast reader will automatically download it for you. If you use iTunes, then when you sync your iPod the sermon will automatically be put onto your iPod for portable use.

How do you start receiving podcasts?
To start receiving podcasts, you first need to make sure that you have a podcast reader. You can download one from the internet. Two popular options are iTunes (Windows or Mac, free) and FireANT (Windows or Mac, free). iTunes is by far the easiest.

Once you have a podcast reader, just go to our full list of podcasts to sign up. If you use iTunes, simply click on the “subscribe in iTunes” link. If you use another podcast reader, you will see a link that says “feed link,” which you then put into your podcast reader.

What podcasts do you offer?
On the page with our full list of podcasts, you will see that we offer six podcasts: sermon audio, sermon audio excerpts, sermon video, sermon video excerpts, our daily online radio program, and our don’t waste your life video podcast.

How do people use podcasts?
Once you have subscribed to some podcasts, the fun starts. You can use them in many different ways. Here is what I do. First, I regularly sync my iPod to the iTunes program on my computer. Second, since you can’t tell right from your iPod what you’ve listened to and what you haven’t, I keep a “To Listen To” context on my task list. This makes it easy to review my options when it is time to determine what’s next. Third, I listen to my podcasts and other audio on my commute, when I jog, and on long car trips. (On plane trips the video becomes an option, but I find that I actually prefer to read instead.)

For my commute, I have helpful little iTrip device that turns what I’m playing on my iPod into an FM radio signal. I tune my car radio to the right frequency, and listen to the audio through that. I think that devices like this are becoming quite popular—a couple times a week I pick up someone else’s iPod, and it interferes with mine. Just yesterday, I was stuck listening to some odd 1940’s music from a nearby truck that I just couldn’t get away from.

Between jogging and commuting, I can get in about 1 hour and 20 minutes of listening on some days, simply in the midst of tasks I have to do anyway. It’s really nice to be able to “kill two birds with one stone” like this, and time in the car doesn’t seem like a waste.