Hostway Corporation announced the release of its new business-class podcasting tool. This product offers its customers a new cutting-edge technology to market their businesses by broadcasting their own audio recording, video and text documents via their Web sites.

Built on RSS, podcasting shares the same technical background as the blog tool and these two technologies also have a similar development story.

Podcasting has traditionally been used primarily on a personal level, however businesses are beginning to see opportunities with podcasting, primarily in the areas of marketing and advertising.

"Over the past few years consumers have demanded more information and entertainment that is specific to their personal needs and lifestyles," said John Lee, VP of global marketing and general manager for Hostway.

"This personal realm has begun to spread to the business world as we've seen with blogs and therefore Hostway created this podcasting tool to ensure our customers businesses are fully equipped with all the current marketing tools."

Hostway's podcasting tool offers three levels of disk space up to 1500MB and plans that start as low as $2.95/month. This feature gives users the ability to:

-- Record an audio message on a personal computer

-- Create a new feed on a Podcasting homepage and create new podcasts within the feed

-- Monitor site traffic and available disk space to upload new podcasts

-- Support m4a, mp3, mov, m4v, pdf, jpg, gif, bmp, png file types

Using a program such as iTunes(R), interested listeners can subscribe to feeds and automatically download the podcasts as they become available and transfer them to an MP3 player or iPod(R) at their discretion.

End users can also use an application that checks the podcasting sites that they belong to for new or updated feeds. If one is found, the program automatically downloads the new podcast to the end user's computer. In this sense, podcasts are similar to an audio version of TiVo(R).

To learn more about how Hostway's Podcasting tool can help your business differentiate itself from the saturated marketing environment, please visit http://www.hostway.com/podcasting/.