Libsyn, a popular podcast hosting service, has debuted a new site for heavy-hitting podcast customers, LibsynPRO.

Libsyn currently provides many podcasters with hosting, syndication and blogging services. Their new offering provides the same types of services, but aimed towards corporate publishers.

Early adopters of LibsynPRO include the National Geographic Society, National Public Radio (NPR), and agency Blue Sky Factory.

“We’ve launched LibsynPRO to meet the larger needs of our business customers. Now podcasters can manage multiple shows through a single account, with a guarantee of 99.99% up-time, and a single bill that tracks each feed, each file, each month, individually,” explained Chris MacDonald, Executive Vice President, Business Development and Operations at Liberated Syndication.

MacDonald and Libsyn co-founder Dave Mansueto talked recently with Elisabeth McLaury Lewin of Podcasting News about the new service.

“Since the beginning of last year, and even before, we’d been getting requests for other services,” beyond what Libsyn offered, Chris MacDonald said.

Agencies needed a place to host podcasts for multiple clients, notes MacDonald. Businesses want a single invoice to pay, but detailed breakouts of activity on each individual RSS feed. Academic clients seek a service that can accommodate podcast creations of many students and teachers under a single umbrella. Event organizers need a short-term hosting resource — or a virtual vault for hosting archival materials long after the conference is over.

LibsynPRO offers a “metered bandwidth” plan to podcasters with multiple feeds. Clients’ costs are calculated based on how much data is stored with LibsynPRO, and how much data is transferred — that is, how many audio and video files are downloaded by the podcast’s audience.

The new service “focuses on making the podcasting system very easy for the non-technical business podcaster,” said Dave Mansueto. Other changes include easy conversion of file sizes to fit iTunes’ thumbnail format, and “big buttons” for ease of use. Creative services are available for clients needing more hands-on production help.

“We are in the field of helping businesses podcast. If somebody has other needs, whatever they need, we can do that as well,” MacDonald added.

What has surprised Mansueto and MacDonald about the launch of LibsynPRO? “We’ve been pleasantly surprised by the amount of interested people,” laughs MacDonald. “We didn’t make a big splashy announcement or anything.”

“And I’ve been surprised by the way people want to use podcasts — by the applications and creativity folks have that we’d never imagined, including using podcasts for short-term projects, promoting movies or medical conferences… and using podcasts as legacy content,” MacDonald continued.

Mansueto added, “It makes sense for business to create a podcast, and to advertise and sponsor other podcasts, other kinds of user-generated content. One thing that’s very cool is that all of this is going to feed the (podcast) ecosystem.”

Details on the new service are available at the LibsynPRO site.