Many if not most understand the timeshifting benefits of podcasts and other downloadable media; you can listen to or watch your favorite programs where you want to, when you want to and on almost any device you can imagine. But perhaps no aspect of downloadable media is more striking than its complete disregard for borders.

Whether you are producing a fifteen minute personal podcast about the local music scene, or managing a major media house’s hourly news video podcast, you probably have an audience in dozens of countries worldwide. Since your show is not tethered to a terrestrial broadcast station or a cable operator’s network, it can be downloaded (almost) anywhere in the world… and probably has been. But that widespread distribution raises some interesting questions:

• Do you know where your audience is?
• Do your feeds actually work with the local aggregators and distributors worldwide?
• Do your advertisers and sponsors really want to reach all of your audience?

Analytics packages can provide some insight into who is listening to or downloading your program, but once you have determined that you have 172 listeners in Spain, what are you going to do about it? Do you want to learn more about them, like their native language? Do you want to provide them with tools to help them transcript, translate or tag your show? How do you care for your audience when parts of that audience are based far way in both space and time. Some of the tools you seek are out there, others are yet to be invented.

Standards have been established to help smooth the distribution of downloadable media around the world; standards for publishing RSS feeds for instance, but many feed publishers attempt some customization to meet their own needs which renders their well intentioned feeds unreadable by other peoples’ applications. The problem becomes more acute as various languages and character sets become part of the metadata.

And what of your advertisers? Do they really want their promotional spot in German played for the Spanish speaking portion of your audience. Can you localize your ads, or swap them out for more appropriate ads. Is your program built with keys to facilitate the swapping of ads in and out? Piece by piece podcast and downloadable media industry players are answering these questions and providing solutions, but there needs to be consistency for the industry to evolve.

There is still a lot of work to be done to establish standards and tools to make downloadable media truly international-ready. The single biggest challenge may be the lack of understanding of downloadable media by the traditional media industry players; content producers, content publishers, and advertisers. The basic concept of locally published and distributed content is being replaced, but the road has not been smooth. The Association of Downloadable Media can help to educate and provide standards that the industry can work with to deliver a consistent and global solution. By smoothing the road for business partners to participate in downloadable media, ADM can bring more content producers, distributors and advertisers into the industry, and as we acknowledge the global nature of our market, standards become more and more important.