Why does GB keep the oldest podcasts in the feed alive?

Or, better phrased, why is the Bombcast the only podcast I know of that allows you to download everything they've ever recorded? The only other one that did that was the Hotspot, but they killed that feed months ago and now we're left with a few of the older casts and the new Gameplay podcast. All other podcasts default to caching(?) 50 or 100 podcasts at the most, and let the older ones lapse. I always thought it was a money issue, so that people couldn't eat up bandwidth by downloading, deleting and redownloading old podcasts, but in that case, why did a start-up like GB do it and old industry vets like IGN and Joystiq don't? The non-gaming podcasts also usually let older episodes lapse, and it's frustrating to have to manually download old podcasts. Then again, I probably should find a better use of my time, but that's a whole matter entirely.

tl:dr Why is GB the only podcast to allow you to download their oldest recordings, and others don't? What's your opinion on this?

I dunno but it's awesome.

Shhhh...don't say anything about it! They might hear you and decide to change it, just to troll us.

I wasn't aware that the bombcast was that big of a drain on resources. Do all the bombcasts combined take up that much bandwidth compared to every Quick Look combined or all Endurance Run episodes?

I dunno, but they better never stop, because I still like to listen to them sometimes.

For the betterment of future generations.

Plenty of podcasts out there go back to the start, sometimes there is a feed change a newcomer would need to know about but it's not uncommon. Hopefully they all stick around.

because this "living in the now" mentality is terrible, there is a shit ton of awesome stuff to be heard in the old podcasts

Tested do it too and I've seen other podcasts that do it. What would be the point of a language learning podcast if you couldn't get them all from episode 1? As for Bombcasts, I think it's good that they're there. I've now listened to all of them from late 2008 on because of it. However, I do think that the older ones lose some relevance since they're talking about games that are 3-4 years old and the 'News' section is actually history (although you could argue that about the 2011 ones, having just listened to one where they discuss the 'NGP'). Anyway, I don't think I'll be finishing my trawl through the back catalogue. But if they can afford to keep them there, why not?

They're not huge, as someone said, QL's must take a hell of a lot more space for them to keep.

It's the Bomb yo!

I love it.

Several times I've had to reformat and reinstall my OS, and rather than copy over forty gigs of podcasts I trusted I would be able redownload them only to discover they archive only the last twenty weeks.

There are old podcasts I've listened to a dozen times over.

It's great that they do that. There's some comedic gold on the old episodes. It's always fun to listen to the old Arrow Pointing Down casts and remember how far things have come.

I can't think of any that I listen to that cull old podcasts, but the Giant Bombcast, MBMBAM, and the Mega64 Cast, are the only ones I listen to that have all that many episodes. I'm highly in favor of being able to go back to classic episodes. I probably re-listen to podcasts more than I re-watch television shows or movies, actually.

virtual dirt!

Because some people like to listen to old podcasts. Also because giant bomb is the shit

I did not know that some websites deleted old podcasts after a while. That's fucked, if you asked me. I seriously doubt that they take up that much hard drive space compared to other stuff, and much bandwidth either.

I can't think of any podcasts that don't allow you to download their entire bkaclog.

I get the feeling (also Ryan has stated that he saves everything) that if you were to spend up to 3 hours a week talking about something and then another hour or more editing and uploading it to a database, that you would probably want to hang on to it for awhile. Also, they maintain an ever growing video games database, so it kind of comes with the territory.

80mb(random bombcast) x 311 = 24880mb = 24.29gig

232mb(random ql) x 6433 = 1492456mb = 1457.47gig ( i did not account for the HD, the LOW, or the MOBLE )

Who knows? I'm never going to go back an listen to them, but someone will so that should be enough. Even if they do start cutting off the older stuff from the feed, someone will have that somewhere and probably post them somewhere.

Plenty podcasts provide their entire backlog. As to why many do not? Most likely, because they have limited storage space or bandwidth and need to conserve both, for financial reasons.

It probably has a lot to do with actual usage also. Are there really that many people going back and listening to old IGN and Joystiq podcasts? I doubt it. Most of those podcasts are worthless outside of the time period they were released in, with some exceptions. On the other hand I listen to old episodes of the Bombcast a ton and old episodes of all the classic 1up podcasts like GFW and Retronauts and MBMBaM, which are all timeless (Bombcast and GFW to a lesser extent, but they go on tangents enough to not feel entirely topical) and all of those are available to be downloaded.

It's not that big of a deal. As said above, EVERY podcast to date is only about 25GB - they could be doing podcasts for the next 10 years and it wouldn't be over 100GB probably. Hell, my fap folder is bigger than that!

Welll what kind of database would GB be if they didnt stored their own created stuff? Remember GB is not only about current videogames and shitz .... IT ALWAYS BEEN A VIDEOGAME RELATED DATABASE/WIKI

ESPN's Baseball Today podcast had a great guy named Peter Pascarelli on it, basically a grumpy old man that moaned about everything; hilarious dude. Then they fired him for insulting Bud Selig and made him record an apology and proceeded to delete all of the old podcasts. Now it's terrible by comparison as the co-host was always shit and they brought in standard ESPN douchebags instead; alas.

I can't think of any podcasts that don't allow you to download their entire bkaclog.

I hope they never make the old podcasts unavailable. They saved my sanity when travelling overseas this summer.

Like others have said, it's not a huge drain on resources...

Hell, somebody could download the entire bombcast collection, and It would probably still take up less space then the archive for that 24 hour Halo stream.

@august said:

I dunno but it's awesome.

I love to listen to those old episodes.

i think its awesome since i often listen to the bombcast while playing games, so i often did deep in to the early podcasts.

also the cut some of the podcasts allready some of the arrow pointing down.

but there is one thing i want them to do.

take all the 8-4 play and other podcasts and remove them from the bombcast list and put them in to there respective list where they belong.

also the same with video's like the endurance run. i want sub folders for eatch run so its not as big of a clusterfuck then it is right now.

like

main folder:

subscriber content

sub folder:

TNT, spooking with scoops, Rpg, jar, breaking brad, wmha, BLLL, flight club and so on

and maybe also in the case of BLLL there would be

2012, 2011.

and with ER there would be

Persona, dp brad and ryan, dp vinny and jeff, chrono trigger and so on

okay now im getting off track but still.

Wait, some podcasts don't provide their entire backlog? That's crazy.

Always be old podcasting.

@CH3BURASHKA said:

Or, better phrased, why is the Bombcast the only podcast I know of that allows you to download everything they've ever recorded? The only other one that did that was the Hotspot, but they killed that feed months ago and now we're left with a few of the older casts and the new Gameplay podcast. All other podcasts default to caching(?) 50 or 100 podcasts at the most, and let the older ones lapse. I always thought it was a money issue, so that people couldn't eat up bandwidth by downloading, deleting and redownloading old podcasts, but in that case, why did a start-up like GB do it and old industry vets like IGN and Joystiq don't? The non-gaming podcasts also usually let older episodes lapse, and it's frustrating to have to manually download old podcasts. Then again, I probably should find a better use of my time, but that's a whole matter entirely.

tl:dr Why is GB the only podcast to allow you to download their oldest recordings, and others don't? What's your opinion on this?

No offense but you must not listen to many podcasts I have tons of podcasts in my RSS feed that have every episode they ever did available to me. As for why... because I dunno people like to listen. People like to catch up on old casts. I didn't actively start using the site until like mid 2010 so I went back and caught up on a lot of the early 2009 podcasts and it was great.

Podcasts: 315

Time: 27 days 15 hours

Size: 18GB

I think it's great. I got into podcast around 2008 and just jumped in where they were. Once I got accustomed to and became a fan of certain personalities, I enjoyed digging back through old shows I'd never heard of to find them so I like that GB offers this, even though I personally won't use it for this site since I was listening to the bombcast since it began.

Total "wish list" material but it would be nice if they had a separate stream for "recent podcasts" and one for the archive.

So future generations can study what President Jeff Gerstmann was like in his video game reviewing days.

@Rafaelfc said:

because this "living in the now" mentality is terrible, there is a shit ton of awesome stuff to be heard in the old podcasts

This, a million times over. In fact you could just cut the statement off after "terrible" and apply it to everything

As we're approaching new consoles, who wouldn't love to go back a little and listen to 2005-2006 talks about the 360, PS3 and Wii? Bless 'em for doing it!

Because the old ones can still be funny, and it's fun as someone who's a relative newbie to go archive binging.

Probably because they're awesome and they care about the users. I've searched everywhere for those old Game Theory podcasts and cant find a single one. It's super sad :(

Every year, around GotY time, I actually go back and listen to ALL of the past GotY deliberation Podcasts again to get myself psyched for this years knock down drag out fight. (Though the first two years are still the best.) I have a slightly similar obsession with listening to old E3 podcasts. So yeah. Count me as someone who's grateful they're still there.

As someone who's been working their way through the old episodes to when I started listening in '09, I hope they never do.

If you haven't listened to them all they all still hold up, regardless of how out of date they are.

http://www.giantbomb.com/podcast/?podcast_id=55

That's my favorite ever.

Posterity

who fucking cares, i love old podcasts

I don't understand at all why keeping an archive of all podcasts would be undesirable.