TAL Still Free

It’s good to see to see that This American Life will remain free.

Thanks to Everyone Who Pitched in to Keep Our Podcast Free

A few weeks back, we asked you to help our home station pay the substantial bill for offering our show as a free podcast and online stream. A huge thank-you to the thousands and thousands of people who contributed: in a few, short weeks we raised enough to cover all the bandwidth we used in 2007. All of us at This American Life and Chicago Public Radio thank you, again, for your generosity!

Of course, it’s always been free to the technorati who have know the secret URI to download whatever episode they’ve wanted. To find it, fire up Wireshark, start it on the interface that is connected to the Internet, and you will see a GET command in the INFO field similar to the following:

HTTP GET /jomamashouse/ismymamashouse/(EpisodeNumber).mp3 HTTP/1.1

So, in layman’s terms, you can simply put the following URI in your browser window to download and listen to past episodes!

http://audio.thisamericanlife.org/jomamashouse/ismymamashouse/(EpisodeNumber).mp3

(Or, if you have Linux or OS X, go to the command line and put a wget before the URI. A win32 version of wget can be found here)