Mint, the business daily from HT Media, has launched podcasts at its website LiveMint. Titled LiveMint Radio, it features interviews with entrepreneurs and investors from the Silicon Valley, and is hosted by Kamla Bhatt of the KamlaShow. The first interview to go live is with Yogen Dalal, Managing Director of Mayfield Fund, and this will be followed up with interviews with Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn and Mitchell Baker, Chairman of the Mozilla Corporation. Remember that Kamla Bhatt earlier used to do podcasts for Podtech, though the KamlaShow has been live for much longer.

Another show worth noting is the Expat Podcast, which provides an expatriates view of life in India, with inputs on how to “get your phone working, get a gas connection”. At present it features some expat Mint journalists, but they intend to follow it up with views from other expatriates.

Playthings, a Mint blog, also has its own show called Playcast, with inputs on websites, gadgets, games, game culture etc. The first Playcast features, interestingly, local search startup AskLaila.

No downloads, no permalinks?
While I liked the fact that some of the shows - particularly those with Kamla Bhatt, have transcripts available (this helps in SEO, and more importantly, the readers who’d rather skim through the interview) - there isn’t an option for downloading the interviews. In a bandwidth constrained country like ours, audio streaming might be an issue, although I must confess that I didn’t face any such issues. Nevertheless, an integration with iTunes for iPod downloads, and an MP3 download might help.  For some reason, IBNLive doesn’t allow download of podcasts either, though it’s not difficult if you’re using RealPlayer.

The other thing is - the Expat Podcast and PlayCast are available only via a popup window, with no permalinks to the podcasts, making it difficult for users to share with others.

In terms of an interface, I think Podtech had it figured out.

HT Media, Mint, Portal
Tags: Expat, HT Media, Kamla Bhatt, Livemint, Mint, Online Radio, Podcasts, Radio

1. Another perfect example of traditional media just not “getting it”. There might be a few people that are content with sitting in front of their computers and “watching” a podcast with all their popups, etc. However, most people I know would prefer to get an RSS feed of podcasts or video blogs. We can then automatically download the podcasts as new episodes are available and pull them into our computers to listen at to our convenience or carry them on our portable media devices to listen to while on the run.

   It’s surprising that Kamla Bhatt didn’t force LiveMint to take a step forward with podcasting. LiveMint, instead, choose to take podcasting back to the dark ages.

   Posted by Pankaj | November 10, 2008, 8:24 pm

2. I think it is more about preference. Do you want to “read” (web), “see and hear” (TV/video on web) or just “hear and WORK!!” (radio/podcasts)

   For those who are into the listening habit, I think this feature would be useful

   Mahesh

   Posted by BG Mahesh | November 11, 2008, 11:58 am