Duplicate Podcasts

This is becoming a fairly frequent occurrence for me...

Every so often, a whole slew of episodes of one of my podcasts in iTunes get re-downloaded. For instance, today, the troublesome podcast was Cato Daily Podcast.



Every podcast since March 21, 2007 was re-downloaded. All together, they weighed in at 580.5MB. I don't think this is iTunes fault, but rather some developer / server that decided the RSS guid's should all change. And, by obeying the RSS spec, iTunes says "hey! different guids! must be new podcasts!" and downloads away.

Yesterday (I told you this was happening often!), it was Fox News's Podcasts. Annoyingly - the reason they republished all their recent podcasts is they re-did them, adding 15 seconds of advertisement to the start of them.

The reason this is particularly irksome to me (annoying enough I decided to vent on my blog, anyway), is that my 30GB iPod spends most of it's time with about 29.5GB used. Each day I download maybe 100MB - 200MB of podcasts. I have a smart playlist that shows me podcasts that are two weeks or older, and each morning, I uncheck those old podcasts which keeps me floating along happily around the 29.5GB in-use mark. But when some podcast gives me something like 580.5MB of new podcasts in one day, it really throws a spanner into the works.

I also hate to think of the wasted bandwidth costs these people are paying (I care more about the non profit ones, like Cato.) If you assume 20 cents per GB for bandwidth cost, an utterly unnecessary 580MB being downloaded by, lets say just 1,000 users, is about $120. If it's 10,000 users you've broken $1,000. All because of small stupid guid-glitch.