CASTINGWORDS PODCAST SUBSCRIPTION SERVICE

Description

The CastingWords offers it's customers the option ordering transcription via RSS feeds. These feeds are polled at least hourly, and all new entries are transcribed, until the customer's prepaid balance is depleted

Payment

Customers who wish to use the Podcast Subscription service must open a prepaid account with us, and prepay for all transcription. As your balance gets low you will receive notifications in the customer center, and well as emails to your email account on record.

Acceptable Formats

CastingWords supports only RSS 2.0 feeds with enclosures, or direct links to audio files. Enclosures may be MP3, MP4, and WAV, and WMA/WMV. We highly recommend MP3 enclosures.

RSS Items

Certain parts of an RSS Item have more importance to CastingWords than others. Here are the ones of note:

enclosure - This is the way we pull audio/video from your feed.
description - This is passed along to the transcribers and can help them with technical terms
itunes:duration - This allows for us to confirm the length of your file, and prevent corruption issues
giud - An ID which prevents us from re-transcribing a file your the audio is relocated. Highly recommended!
media:group, media:content - A discouraged element we can use retrieve audio/video URLs from
itunes:keywords - passed along to transcribers

Notifications

You will be mailed a notification for each file completed. Additionally we provide you with an RSS Feed linking to all completed transcriptions

Technical Notes

When polling we do a HEAD request every hour and only pull down content if the feed is newer than our last update date - or our ETags don't match. A well-behaved web server with ETags configured saves everyone bandwidth.

Additional Reading

RSS Spec iTunes RSS Spec Media RSS Spec