History of podcasting
Encyclopedia
Podcasting
began to catch hold in late 2004, though the ability to distribute audio and video files easily has been around since before the dawn of the Internet
.
, in the 1980s, RCS (Radio Computing Services)
, provided music and talk-related software to radio stations in a digital format. Before online music digital distribution, the MIDI format as well as the Mbone
, Multicast Network was used to distribute audio and video files. The MBone was a multicast network over the Internet used primarily by educational and research institutes, but there were audio talk programs.
Many other jukeboxes and websites in the mid 1990s provided a system for sorting and selecting music or audio files, talk, segue announcements of different digital formats. There were a few websites that provided audio subscription services. In 1993, the early days of Internet radio
, Carl Malamud
launched Internet Talk Radio which was the "first computer-radio talk show, each week interviewing a computer expert." It was distributed "as audio files that computer users fetch one by one."
The development of downloaded music did not reach a critical mass until the launch of Napster
, another system of aggregating music, but without the subscription services provided by podcasting or video blogging aggregation client or system software.
Independent of the development of podcasting via RSS, a portable player and music download system had been developed at Compaq
Research as early as 1999 or 2000. Called PocketDJ, it would have been launched as a service for the Personal Jukebox or a successor, the first hard-disk based MP3-player.
In 2001, Applian Technologies of San Francisco, California
introduced Replay Radio (later renamed into Replay AV), a TiVo
-like recorder for Internet Radio Shows. Besides scheduling and recording audio, one of the features was a Direct Download link, which would scan a radio publishers site for new files and copy them directly to a PC's hard disk. The first radio show to publish in this format was WebTalkGuys World Radio Show (WebTalk Radio), produced by Rob and Dana Greenlee.
as an officially adopted standard, allowed audio to be digitally transmitted over the Internet in an easier fashion. Then, by 1999, the emergence of serial port microphones, the proper software, and faster Internet connection speeds, allowed audio uploading and downloading to take place, with more ease. In September 2000, the first system that enabled the selection, automatic downloading and storage of serial episodic audio content on PCs and portable devices was launched by September 2000 http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2000/ego.html from another early MP3 player manufacturer, i2Go. To supply content for its portable MP3 players, i2Go, makers of the eGo player, introduced a digital audio news and entertainment service called MyAudio2Go.com that enabled users to download episodic news, sports, entertainment, weather, and music in audio format for listening on a PC, the eGo portable audio player, or other MP3 players. The i2GoMediaManager and the eGo file transfer application could be programmed to automatically download the latest episodic content available from user selected content types to a PC or portable device as desired. The service lasted over a year, but succumbed when the i2Go company ran out of capital during the dot-com crash and folded.
In October 2000, the concept of using enclosures in RSS
feeds was proposed in a draft by Tristan Louis
, The idea was implemented (in a somewhat different form) by Dave Winer
, a software developer and an author of the RSS format
. Winer had received other customer requests for audioblogging features and had discussed the enclosure concept (also in October 2000), with Adam Curry
, a user of Userland's Manila and Radio blogging and RSS aggregator software. Winer included the new functionality in RSS 0.92 by defining a new element called "enclosure", which would simply pass the address to a media aggregator.
On January 11, 2001, Winer demonstrated the RSS enclosure feature by enclosing a Grateful Dead
song in his Scripting News weblog. For its first two years, the enclosure element had relatively few users and many developers simply avoided using it. Winer's company incorporated both RSS-enclosure and feed-aggregator features in its weblogging product, Radio Userland
, the program favored by Curry
, audioblogger Harold Gilchrist and others. Since Radio Userland
had a built-in aggregator, it provided both the "send" and "receive" components of what was then called audioblogging. All that was needed for "podcasting" was a way to automatically move audio files from Radio Userland's download folder to an audio player (either software or hardware) -- along with enough compelling audio to make such automation worth the trouble.
In June, 2003, Stephen Downes
demonstrated aggregation and syndication of audio files in his Ed Radio application. Ed Radio scanned RSS feeds for MP3 files, collected them into a single feed, and made the result available as SMIL
or Webjay
audio feeds.
In September, 2003, Winer created a special RSS-with-enclosures feed for his Harvard Berkman Center
colleague Christopher Lydon
's weblog, which previously had a text-only RSS feed. Lydon, a former New York Times
reporter, Boston TV news anchor and NPR
talkshow host, had developed a portable recording studio with Bob Doyle of Skybuilders.com, conducted in-depth interviews with bloggers, futurists and political figures, and posted MP3 files as part of his Harvard blog. When Lydon had accumulated about 25 audio interviews, Winer gradually released them as a new RSS feed. Announcing the feed in his weblog, Winer challenged other aggregator developers to support this new form of content and provide enclosure support.
Not long after, Pete Prodoehl released a skin for the Amphetadesk aggregator that displayed enclosure links. Doug Kaye, who had been publishing MP3 recordings of his interviews at IT Conversations since June, created an RSS feed with enclosures. IT Conversations, now part of the nonprofit Conversations Network
, remains the oldest still-running podcast, while Lydon's blog eventually became Radio Open Source and moved to Brown University.
October 2003, Winer and friends organized the first Bloggercon
weblogger conference at Berkman Center
. CDs of Lydon's interviews were distributed as an example of the high-quality MP3 content enclosures could deliver; Bob Doyle demonstrated the portable studio he helped Lydon develop; Harold Gilchrist presented a history of audioblogging, including Curry's early role, and Kevin Marks
demonstrated a script to download RSS enclosures and pass them to iTunes
for transfer to an iPod
. Curry and Marks discussed collaborating. After the conference, Curry offered his blog readers an RSS-to-iPod script (iPodder) that moved MP3 files from Userland Radio to iTunes, and encouraged other developers to build on the idea. In November 2003, The company AudioFeast (later renamed PodBridge, later renamed VoloMedia
) files patent application for “Method for Providing Episodic Media” with the USPTO based on its work in developing the AudioFeast service launched in September, 2004. Although AudioFeast did not refer to itself as a podcasting service and was not built on RSS, it provided a way of downloading episodic audio content through desktop software and portable devices, with a system simililar to the MyAudio2Go.com service four years before it. (AudioFeast shut down its service in July 2005 due to the unwillingness of its free customers to pay for its $49.95 paid annual subscription service, and a lack of a strong competitive differentiation in the market with the emergence of free RSS podcatchers.) On February 12, 2004, The term "podcasting" was one of several terms for portable listening to audioblogs suggested by Ben Hammersley
in The Guardian
, referring to Lydon's interview programs.
In September, 2004, the media-in-newsfeed idea was picked up by multiple developer groups. While many of the early efforts remained command-line based, the very first podcasting client with a user interface was iPodderX (later called Transistr after a trademark issue with Apple), developed by August Trometer and Ray Slakinski. It was released first for the Mac, then for the PC. Shortly thereafter, another group (iSpider) rebranded their software as iPodder and released it under that name as Free Software (under GPL). The project was terminated after a cease and desist letter from Apple (over iPodder trademark issues). It was reincarnated as Juice and CastPodder. The PodNova desktop client is also a derivative of iSpider. At the same time, Dannie Gregoire used the term podcasting to describe the automatic download and synchronization of audio content; he also registered several 'podcast' related domains (e.g. podcast.net). The use of 'podcast' by Gregoire was picked up by podcasting evangelists such as Dave Slusher, Winer and Curry, and entered common usage. Also in September, Adam Curry launched a mailing list, then Slashdot
had a 100+ message discussion, bringing even more attention to the podcasting developer projects in progress.
On September 28, 2004, Blogger and technology columnist Doc Searls began keeping track of how many "hits" Google
found for the word "podcasts". His first query reportedly returned 24 results. On September 28, 2004, there were 526 hits on Google's search engine for the word "podcasts". Google Trends
marks the beginning of searches for 'podcast' at the end of September. On October 1, 2004, there were 2,750 hits on Google's search engine for the word "podcasts". This number continued to double every few days.
October 11, 2004 Capturing the early distribution and variety of podcasts was more difficult than counting Google hits, but before the end of October, The New York Times had reported podcasts across the United States and in Canada, Australia and Sweden, mentioning podcast topics from technology to veganism to movie reviews.
USA Today
told its readers about the "free amateur chatfests" the following February, profiling several podcasters, giving instructions for sending and receiving podcasts, and including a "Top Ten" list from one of the many podcast directories that had sprung up. Those Top Ten programs gave further indication of podcast topics: four were about technology (including Curry's Daily Source Code
, which also included music and personal chat), three were about music, one about movies, one about politics, and—at the time number 1 on the list—The Dawn and Drew Show
, described as "married-couple banter," a program format that (as USA Today
noted) was popular on American broadcast radio in the 1940s (e.g. Breakfast with Dorothy and Dick
). After Dawn and Drew, such "couplecasts" became quite popular among independent podcasts, the most notable being the London couple Sowerby and Luff, whose talk show The Big Squeeze quickly achieved a global audience via the podcast Comedy 365. On October 18, 2004, the number of hits on Google's search engine for the word "podcasts" surpassed 100,000. See September 28, 2005. In October, 2004, detailed how-to podcast articles had begun to appear online, and a month later, Liberated Syndication
(LibSyn) launched what was apparently the first Podcast Service Provider, offering storage, bandwidth
, and RSS creation tools. "Podcasting" was first defined in Wikipedia.
In November, 2004, podcasting networks started to appear on the scene with podcasters affiliating with one another. The first was the GodCast Network, followed by The Podcast Network
, the Tech Podcasts Network which was later acquired by RawVoice, PodTech.net, the Association of Music Podcasting and others. In February, 2005, PRI
's The World
became the first daily public radio news program to podcast on February 11, 2005, through its Technology podcast hosted by Clark Boyd. June, 2005, Apple staked its claim on the medium by adding podcasting to its iTunes
4.9 music software and building a directory of podcasts at its iTunes Music Store. The new iTunes could subscribe to, download and organize podcasts, which made a separate aggregator application unnecessary for many users. Apple also promoted creation of podcasts using its GarageBand
and QuickTime
Pro software and the MPEG 4 Audio (M4A) format instead of MP3. In July, 2005, U.S. President
George W. Bush
became a podcaster of sorts, when the White House
website added an RSS 2.0 feed to the previously downloadable files of the president's weekly radio addresses. Also in July, the first People's Choice Podcast Awards were held during Podcast Expo. Awards were given in 20 categories. On September 28, 2005, exactly a year after first tracking hits for the word "podcasts" on Google's search engine, Google found more than 100,000,000 hits on the word "podcasts." In November, 2005, the first Portable Media Expo and Podcasting Conference was held at the Ontario Convention Center in Ontario
, California
. The annual conference is now called the Podcast and New Media Expo. On December 3, 2005, "Podcast" was named the word of the year in 2005 by the New Oxford American Dictionary
and would be in the dictionary in 2006.
In February, 2006, following London radio station LBC's successful launch of the first premium-podcasting platform LBC Plus, there was widespread acceptance that podcasting had considerable commercial potential. UK comedian Ricky Gervais
launched a new series of his popular podcast The Ricky Gervais Show
. The second series of the podcast was distributed through audible.co.uk
and was the first major podcast to charge consumers to download the show at 95 pence per half-hour episode. The first series of The Ricky Gervais Show podcast had been freely distributed by Positive Internet
and marketed through The Guardian
newspaper's website, and had become the world's most successful podcast to date with an average of 295,000 downloads per episode according to The Guinness Book of World Records. Even in its new subscription format, The Ricky Gervais Show
is regularly the most-downloaded podcast on iTunes
.
In February 2006, podcaster Lance Anderson became the first to take a podcast and create a live venue tour. The Lance Anderson Podcast Experiment included a sold out night in The Pilgrim, (23rd Feb 2006) a central Liverpool (UK) venue followed by a theatrical event at The Rose Theatre, Edge Hill University (24th Feb 2006) which included appearances by Mark Hunter from The Tartan Podcast, Jon and Rob from Top of the Pods, Dan Klass from The Bitterest Pill via video link from Los Angeles and live music from The Hotrod Cadets. In addition, Lance was also invited to take part in the first ever Podcast Forum at CARET, the Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies at the University of Cambridge (21st Feb 2006). Lance was joined at this event by Dr. Chris Smith from Naked Scientists Podcast, Debbie McGowan, an Open University lecturer and advocate for podcasting in education and Nigel Paice, a professional music producer and podcasting tutor. In March, 2006, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper
became the first head of government to issue a podcast, the "Prime Minister of Canada's Podcast". In July, 2009, the company VoloMedia
is awarded the "Podcast patent" by the USPTO in patent number 7,568,213. Dave Winer, the co-inventor of podcasting (with Adam Curry), points out that his invention predated this patent by two years.
The growing popularity of podcasting introduced a demand for music available for use on the shows without significant cost or licensing difficulty. Out of this demand, a growing number of tracks, by independent as well as signed acts, are now being designated "podsafe
". (See also Podcasting and Music Royalties.)
Podcasting has been given a major push by conventional media and can be read about further in podcasting by traditional broadcasters
.
Podcasting has also been picked up by some print media, e.g. newspaper
s, who supply their readers with spoken versions of their content.
Podcasting has presented both opportunities and challenges for mainstream radio outlets who on the one hand see it as an alternative medium for their programs while on the other hand struggle to identify its unique affordances and subtle differences. In a famous example of the way online statistics can be misused by those unused to the nuances of the online world, marketing executives from the ABC in Australia were unsure of how to make sense of why Digital Living, at that stage a little known podcast from one of their local stations, outrated all of their expensively produced shows. It turned out that a single segment on Blu-ray had been downloaded a massive 150,000 times in one day from a single location in China.
One of the first examples of a print publication to produce an audio podcast to supplement their printed content was the international scientific journal Nature
. The Nature Podcast was set up in October 2005 by Cambridge University
's award-winning "Naked Scientist
", Chris Smith, who produces and presents the weekly show.
Although firm business models have yet to be established, podcasting represents a chance to bring additional revenue to a newspaper through advertising, subscription fees and licensing.
software—and included "pod" in the name—the technology was always compatible with other players and programs. Apple was not actively involved until mid-2005, when it joined the market on three fronts: as a source of "podcatcher" software, as publisher of a podcast directory, and as provider of tutorials on how to create podcasts with Apple products GarageBand
and QuickTime
Pro. Apple CEO Steve Jobs
demonstrated creating a podcast during his January 10, 2006 keynote address to the Macworld Conference & Expo
using new "podcast studio" features in GarageBand 3.
When it added a podcast-subscription feature to its June 28, 2005, release of iTunes 4.9, Apple also launched a directory of podcasts at the iTunes Music Store, starting with 3,000 entries. Apple's software enabled AAC encoded podcasts to use chapters, bookmarks, external links, and synchronized images displayed on iPod screens or in the iTunes artwork viewer. Two days after release of the program, Apple reported one million podcast subscriptions.
Some podcasters found that exposure to iTunes' huge number of downloaders threatened to make great demands on their bandwidth and related expenses. Possible solutions were proposed, including the addition of a content delivery system, such as Liberated Syndication
; Podcast Servers
; Akamai
; a peer-to-peer
solution, BitTorrent; or use of free hosting services, such as those offered by Ourmedia
, BlipMedia and the Internet Archive
.
Since September 2005, a number of services began featuring video-based podcasting including Apple, via its iTunes Music Store, Participatory Culture Foundation
and Loomia
. Known by some as a vodcast, or vidcast, the services handle both audio and video feeds.
Podcasting
A podcast is a series of digital media files that are released episodically and often downloaded through web syndication...
began to catch hold in late 2004, though the ability to distribute audio and video files easily has been around since before the dawn of the Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
.
Precursors
Before the advent of the World Wide WebWorld Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
, in the 1980s, RCS (Radio Computing Services)
Radio Computing Services
Radio Computing Services, also known as RCS Inc., is a provider of scheduling and broadcast software for radio, Internet and television stations. The company was established in 1979 by Dr. Andrew Economos. On January 26, 2006, Clear Channel Communications purchased RCS as a subsidiary...
, provided music and talk-related software to radio stations in a digital format. Before online music digital distribution, the MIDI format as well as the Mbone
Mbone
Mbone was an experimental backbone for IP multicast traffic across the Internet developed in the early 1990s. It required specialized hardware and software...
, Multicast Network was used to distribute audio and video files. The MBone was a multicast network over the Internet used primarily by educational and research institutes, but there were audio talk programs.
Many other jukeboxes and websites in the mid 1990s provided a system for sorting and selecting music or audio files, talk, segue announcements of different digital formats. There were a few websites that provided audio subscription services. In 1993, the early days of Internet radio
Internet radio
Internet radio is an audio service transmitted via the Internet...
, Carl Malamud
Carl Malamud
Carl Malamud is a technologist, author, and public domain advocate, currently known for his foundation public.resource.org. He was the founder of the Internet Multicasting Service. During his time with this group, he was responsible for creating the first Internet radio station, for putting the...
launched Internet Talk Radio which was the "first computer-radio talk show, each week interviewing a computer expert." It was distributed "as audio files that computer users fetch one by one."
The development of downloaded music did not reach a critical mass until the launch of Napster
Napster
Napster is an online music store and a Best Buy company. It was originally founded as a pioneering peer-to-peer file sharing Internet service that emphasized sharing audio files that were typically digitally encoded music as MP3 format files...
, another system of aggregating music, but without the subscription services provided by podcasting or video blogging aggregation client or system software.
Independent of the development of podcasting via RSS, a portable player and music download system had been developed at Compaq
Compaq
Compaq Computer Corporation is a personal computer company founded in 1982. Once the largest supplier of personal computing systems in the world, Compaq existed as an independent corporation until 2002, when it was acquired for US$25 billion by Hewlett-Packard....
Research as early as 1999 or 2000. Called PocketDJ, it would have been launched as a service for the Personal Jukebox or a successor, the first hard-disk based MP3-player.
In 2001, Applian Technologies of San Francisco, California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
introduced Replay Radio (later renamed into Replay AV), a TiVo
TiVo
TiVo is a digital video recorder developed and marketed by TiVo, Inc. and introduced in 1999. TiVo provides an on-screen guide of scheduled broadcast programming television programs, whose features include "Season Pass" schedules which record every new episode of a series, and "WishList"...
-like recorder for Internet Radio Shows. Besides scheduling and recording audio, one of the features was a Direct Download link, which would scan a radio publishers site for new files and copy them directly to a PC's hard disk. The first radio show to publish in this format was WebTalkGuys World Radio Show (WebTalk Radio), produced by Rob and Dana Greenlee.
Timeline
In, 1984, the emergence of the Internet Transmission Control ProtocolTransmission Control Protocol
The Transmission Control Protocol is one of the core protocols of the Internet Protocol Suite. TCP is one of the two original components of the suite, complementing the Internet Protocol , and therefore the entire suite is commonly referred to as TCP/IP...
as an officially adopted standard, allowed audio to be digitally transmitted over the Internet in an easier fashion. Then, by 1999, the emergence of serial port microphones, the proper software, and faster Internet connection speeds, allowed audio uploading and downloading to take place, with more ease. In September 2000, the first system that enabled the selection, automatic downloading and storage of serial episodic audio content on PCs and portable devices was launched by September 2000 http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2000/ego.html from another early MP3 player manufacturer, i2Go. To supply content for its portable MP3 players, i2Go, makers of the eGo player, introduced a digital audio news and entertainment service called MyAudio2Go.com that enabled users to download episodic news, sports, entertainment, weather, and music in audio format for listening on a PC, the eGo portable audio player, or other MP3 players. The i2GoMediaManager and the eGo file transfer application could be programmed to automatically download the latest episodic content available from user selected content types to a PC or portable device as desired. The service lasted over a year, but succumbed when the i2Go company ran out of capital during the dot-com crash and folded.
In October 2000, the concept of using enclosures in RSS
RSS
-Mathematics:* Root-sum-square, the square root of the sum of the squares of the elements of a data set* Residual sum of squares in statistics-Technology:* RSS , "Really Simple Syndication" or "Rich Site Summary", a family of web feed formats...
feeds was proposed in a draft by Tristan Louis
Tristan Louis
Tristan Louis is a French-born American author, entrepreneur and blogger.-Early work:...
, The idea was implemented (in a somewhat different form) by Dave Winer
Dave Winer
Dave Winer is an American software developer, entrepreneur and writer in New York City. Winer is noted for his contributions to outliners, scripting, content management, and web services, as well as blogging and podcasting...
, a software developer and an author of the RSS format
RSS (file format)
RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format...
. Winer had received other customer requests for audioblogging features and had discussed the enclosure concept (also in October 2000), with Adam Curry
Adam Curry
Adam Clark Curry is a broadcasting and Internet personality well known for his stint from 1987 to 1994 as a video jockey on the music video channel MTV. In the mid-1990s, Curry was a World Wide Web entrepreneur and one of the first celebrities to personally create and administer a Web site...
, a user of Userland's Manila and Radio blogging and RSS aggregator software. Winer included the new functionality in RSS 0.92 by defining a new element called "enclosure", which would simply pass the address to a media aggregator.
On January 11, 2001, Winer demonstrated the RSS enclosure feature by enclosing a Grateful Dead
Grateful Dead
The Grateful Dead was an American rock band formed in 1965 in the San Francisco Bay Area. The band was known for its unique and eclectic style, which fused elements of rock, folk, bluegrass, blues, reggae, country, improvisational jazz, psychedelia, and space rock, and for live performances of long...
song in his Scripting News weblog. For its first two years, the enclosure element had relatively few users and many developers simply avoided using it. Winer's company incorporated both RSS-enclosure and feed-aggregator features in its weblogging product, Radio Userland
Radio UserLand
Radio UserLand is a software package from UserLand Software, first released in 2000, which includes not only a client-side blogging tool but also an RSS aggregator, an outliner and a scripting language.-Features:...
, the program favored by Curry
Adam Curry
Adam Clark Curry is a broadcasting and Internet personality well known for his stint from 1987 to 1994 as a video jockey on the music video channel MTV. In the mid-1990s, Curry was a World Wide Web entrepreneur and one of the first celebrities to personally create and administer a Web site...
, audioblogger Harold Gilchrist and others. Since Radio Userland
Radio UserLand
Radio UserLand is a software package from UserLand Software, first released in 2000, which includes not only a client-side blogging tool but also an RSS aggregator, an outliner and a scripting language.-Features:...
had a built-in aggregator, it provided both the "send" and "receive" components of what was then called audioblogging. All that was needed for "podcasting" was a way to automatically move audio files from Radio Userland's download folder to an audio player (either software or hardware) -- along with enough compelling audio to make such automation worth the trouble.
In June, 2003, Stephen Downes
Stephen Downes
Stephen Downes is a designer and commentator in the fields of online learning and new media. Downes has explored and promoted the educational use of computer and online technologies since 1995...
demonstrated aggregation and syndication of audio files in his Ed Radio application. Ed Radio scanned RSS feeds for MP3 files, collected them into a single feed, and made the result available as SMIL
Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language
SMIL , the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language, is a W3C recommended XML markup language for describing multimedia presentations. It defines markup for timing, layout, animations, visual transitions, and media embedding, among other things...
or Webjay
Webjay
- History :Webjay was a web-based playlist service launched in early 2004. Playlists consisted of links to Vorbis, MP3, WMA, RealAudio and/or other audio files on the web. Webjay users could create new playlists by copying from existing playlists, or by web scraping audio file links from external...
audio feeds.
In September, 2003, Winer created a special RSS-with-enclosures feed for his Harvard Berkman Center
Harvard Law School
Harvard Law School is one of the professional graduate schools of Harvard University. Located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it is the oldest continually-operating law school in the United States and is home to the largest academic law library in the world. The school is routinely ranked by the U.S...
colleague Christopher Lydon
Christopher Lydon
Christopher Lydon is an American media personality and author. He is best known for being the original host of The Connection, produced by WBUR and syndicated to other NPR stations.-Background:...
's weblog, which previously had a text-only RSS feed. Lydon, a former New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
reporter, Boston TV news anchor and NPR
NPR
NPR, formerly National Public Radio, is a privately and publicly funded non-profit membership media organization that serves as a national syndicator to a network of 900 public radio stations in the United States. NPR was created in 1970, following congressional passage of the Public Broadcasting...
talkshow host, had developed a portable recording studio with Bob Doyle of Skybuilders.com, conducted in-depth interviews with bloggers, futurists and political figures, and posted MP3 files as part of his Harvard blog. When Lydon had accumulated about 25 audio interviews, Winer gradually released them as a new RSS feed. Announcing the feed in his weblog, Winer challenged other aggregator developers to support this new form of content and provide enclosure support.
Not long after, Pete Prodoehl released a skin for the Amphetadesk aggregator that displayed enclosure links. Doug Kaye, who had been publishing MP3 recordings of his interviews at IT Conversations since June, created an RSS feed with enclosures. IT Conversations, now part of the nonprofit Conversations Network
Conversations Network
The Conversations Network is a California non-profit corporation founded by Doug Kaye with the intent of coordinating a global team of volunteer podcasters to capture and publish lectures, seminars, and other significant events that would otherwise go unrecorded. They are modeled after Kaye's...
, remains the oldest still-running podcast, while Lydon's blog eventually became Radio Open Source and moved to Brown University.
October 2003, Winer and friends organized the first Bloggercon
BloggerCon
BloggerCon was a user-focused conference for the blogger community that ran between 2003 and 2006. BloggerCon I and II , were organized by Dave Winer and friends at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for the Internet and Society in Cambridge, Mass. Bloggercon III took place in San Francisco on...
weblogger conference at Berkman Center
Harvard Law School
Harvard Law School is one of the professional graduate schools of Harvard University. Located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it is the oldest continually-operating law school in the United States and is home to the largest academic law library in the world. The school is routinely ranked by the U.S...
. CDs of Lydon's interviews were distributed as an example of the high-quality MP3 content enclosures could deliver; Bob Doyle demonstrated the portable studio he helped Lydon develop; Harold Gilchrist presented a history of audioblogging, including Curry's early role, and Kevin Marks
Kevin Marks
Kevin Marks is author of the weblog . He was Vice President of Web Services at BT. He became Principal Engineer for Technorati after working for both Apple and the BBC. At the TechCrunch event Realtime Stream Crunchup he announced that he would be joining BT to work together with JP Rangaswami. In...
demonstrated a script to download RSS enclosures and pass them to iTunes
ITunes
iTunes is a media player computer program, used for playing, downloading, and organizing digital music and video files on desktop computers. It can also manage contents on iPod, iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad....
for transfer to an iPod
IPod
iPod is a line of portable media players created and marketed by Apple Inc. The product line-up currently consists of the hard drive-based iPod Classic, the touchscreen iPod Touch, the compact iPod Nano, and the ultra-compact iPod Shuffle...
. Curry and Marks discussed collaborating. After the conference, Curry offered his blog readers an RSS-to-iPod script (iPodder) that moved MP3 files from Userland Radio to iTunes, and encouraged other developers to build on the idea. In November 2003, The company AudioFeast (later renamed PodBridge, later renamed VoloMedia
VoloMedia
VoloMedia is a Sunnyvale, California based advertising network that has developed technology to enable advertisements to be dynamically inserted into downloadable audio and video, such as podcasts. Large media publishers such as Public Radio International, MSNBC and Fox News utilize their...
) files patent application for “Method for Providing Episodic Media” with the USPTO based on its work in developing the AudioFeast service launched in September, 2004. Although AudioFeast did not refer to itself as a podcasting service and was not built on RSS, it provided a way of downloading episodic audio content through desktop software and portable devices, with a system simililar to the MyAudio2Go.com service four years before it. (AudioFeast shut down its service in July 2005 due to the unwillingness of its free customers to pay for its $49.95 paid annual subscription service, and a lack of a strong competitive differentiation in the market with the emergence of free RSS podcatchers.) On February 12, 2004, The term "podcasting" was one of several terms for portable listening to audioblogs suggested by Ben Hammersley
Ben Hammersley
Ben Hammersley is a British internet technologist, journalist, author, broadcaster, and diplomat, currently based in London, England....
in The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
, referring to Lydon's interview programs.
In September, 2004, the media-in-newsfeed idea was picked up by multiple developer groups. While many of the early efforts remained command-line based, the very first podcasting client with a user interface was iPodderX (later called Transistr after a trademark issue with Apple), developed by August Trometer and Ray Slakinski. It was released first for the Mac, then for the PC. Shortly thereafter, another group (iSpider) rebranded their software as iPodder and released it under that name as Free Software (under GPL). The project was terminated after a cease and desist letter from Apple (over iPodder trademark issues). It was reincarnated as Juice and CastPodder. The PodNova desktop client is also a derivative of iSpider. At the same time, Dannie Gregoire used the term podcasting to describe the automatic download and synchronization of audio content; he also registered several 'podcast' related domains (e.g. podcast.net). The use of 'podcast' by Gregoire was picked up by podcasting evangelists such as Dave Slusher, Winer and Curry, and entered common usage. Also in September, Adam Curry launched a mailing list, then Slashdot
Slashdot
Slashdot is a technology-related news website owned by Geeknet, Inc. The site, which bills itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters", features user-submitted and ‑evaluated current affairs news stories about science- and technology-related topics. Each story has a comments section...
had a 100+ message discussion, bringing even more attention to the podcasting developer projects in progress.
On September 28, 2004, Blogger and technology columnist Doc Searls began keeping track of how many "hits" Google
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
found for the word "podcasts". His first query reportedly returned 24 results. On September 28, 2004, there were 526 hits on Google's search engine for the word "podcasts". Google Trends
Google Trends
Google Trends is a public web facility of Google Inc., based on Google Search, that shows how often a particular search-term is entered relative to the total search-volume across various regions of the world, and in various languages...
marks the beginning of searches for 'podcast' at the end of September. On October 1, 2004, there were 2,750 hits on Google's search engine for the word "podcasts". This number continued to double every few days.
October 11, 2004 Capturing the early distribution and variety of podcasts was more difficult than counting Google hits, but before the end of October, The New York Times had reported podcasts across the United States and in Canada, Australia and Sweden, mentioning podcast topics from technology to veganism to movie reviews.
USA Today
USA Today
USA Today is a national American daily newspaper published by the Gannett Company. It was founded by Al Neuharth. The newspaper vies with The Wall Street Journal for the position of having the widest circulation of any newspaper in the United States, something it previously held since 2003...
told its readers about the "free amateur chatfests" the following February, profiling several podcasters, giving instructions for sending and receiving podcasts, and including a "Top Ten" list from one of the many podcast directories that had sprung up. Those Top Ten programs gave further indication of podcast topics: four were about technology (including Curry's Daily Source Code
Daily Source Code
The Daily Source Code is a podcast by Adam Curry, often considered a pioneer of podcasting. Curry talks about his everyday life and events in the podcasting scene or the news in general, as well as playing music from the Podsafe Music Network and promotions for other podcasts...
, which also included music and personal chat), three were about music, one about movies, one about politics, and—at the time number 1 on the list—The Dawn and Drew Show
The Dawn and Drew Show
The Dawn and Drew Show is a podcast starring and produced by a married couple, Dawn Miceli and Drew Domkus . They just recently celebrated their 7th podcast anniversary. The couple moved back to their farmhouse in Wayne, WI after being robbed and nearly killed in their home in Cocles, Costa Rica...
, described as "married-couple banter," a program format that (as USA Today
USA Today
USA Today is a national American daily newspaper published by the Gannett Company. It was founded by Al Neuharth. The newspaper vies with The Wall Street Journal for the position of having the widest circulation of any newspaper in the United States, something it previously held since 2003...
noted) was popular on American broadcast radio in the 1940s (e.g. Breakfast with Dorothy and Dick
Dorothy Kilgallen
Dorothy Mae Kilgallen was an American journalist and television game show panelist. She started her career early as a reporter for the Hearst Corporation's New York Evening Journal after spending only two semesters at The College of New Rochelle in New Rochelle, New York...
). After Dawn and Drew, such "couplecasts" became quite popular among independent podcasts, the most notable being the London couple Sowerby and Luff, whose talk show The Big Squeeze quickly achieved a global audience via the podcast Comedy 365. On October 18, 2004, the number of hits on Google's search engine for the word "podcasts" surpassed 100,000. See September 28, 2005. In October, 2004, detailed how-to podcast articles had begun to appear online, and a month later, Liberated Syndication
Liberated Syndication
Liberated Syndication, often shortened to LibSyn, is a podcast media hosting company which opened in November 2004. It offers hosting of files to podcast producers under a monthly subscription model...
(LibSyn) launched what was apparently the first Podcast Service Provider, offering storage, bandwidth
Bandwidth (computing)
In computer networking and computer science, bandwidth, network bandwidth, data bandwidth, or digital bandwidth is a measure of available or consumed data communication resources expressed in bits/second or multiples of it .Note that in textbooks on wireless communications, modem data transmission,...
, and RSS creation tools. "Podcasting" was first defined in Wikipedia.
In November, 2004, podcasting networks started to appear on the scene with podcasters affiliating with one another. The first was the GodCast Network, followed by The Podcast Network
The Podcast Network
The Podcast Network is a company founded by Cameron Reilly and Mick Stanic. The company launched on 14 February 2005. The company's stated goal is to produce high quality digital programming on a wide variety of niche topics to global audiences and to attempt to re-invent media business models and...
, the Tech Podcasts Network which was later acquired by RawVoice, PodTech.net, the Association of Music Podcasting and others. In February, 2005, PRI
Public Radio International
Public Radio International is a Minneapolis-based American public radio organization, with locations in Boston, New York, London and Beijing. PRI's tagline is "Hear a different voice." PRI is a major public media content creator and also distributes programs from many sources...
's The World
The World (radio program)
PRI's The World is a global news radio, audio and multi-platform program created by Public Radio International based on the program's congruence with PRI's mission, and in order to fulfill the critical need for more original global news created for and provided to Americans. This was partly a...
became the first daily public radio news program to podcast on February 11, 2005, through its Technology podcast hosted by Clark Boyd. June, 2005, Apple staked its claim on the medium by adding podcasting to its iTunes
ITunes
iTunes is a media player computer program, used for playing, downloading, and organizing digital music and video files on desktop computers. It can also manage contents on iPod, iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad....
4.9 music software and building a directory of podcasts at its iTunes Music Store. The new iTunes could subscribe to, download and organize podcasts, which made a separate aggregator application unnecessary for many users. Apple also promoted creation of podcasts using its GarageBand
GarageBand
GarageBand is a software application for Mac OS X and iOS that allows users to create music or podcasts. It is developed by Apple Inc. as a part of the iLife software package on Mac OS X.-Audio recording:...
and QuickTime
QuickTime
QuickTime is an extensible proprietary multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc., capable of handling various formats of digital video, picture, sound, panoramic images, and interactivity. The classic version of QuickTime is available for Windows XP and later, as well as Mac OS X Leopard and...
Pro software and the MPEG 4 Audio (M4A) format instead of MP3. In July, 2005, U.S. President
President
A president is a leader of an organization, company, trade union, university, or country.Etymologically, a president is one who presides, who sits in leadership...
George W. Bush
George W. Bush
George Walker Bush is an American politician who served as the 43rd President of the United States, from 2001 to 2009. Before that, he was the 46th Governor of Texas, having served from 1995 to 2000....
became a podcaster of sorts, when the White House
White House
The White House is the official residence and principal workplace of the president of the United States. Located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., the house was designed by Irish-born James Hoban, and built between 1792 and 1800 of white-painted Aquia sandstone in the Neoclassical...
website added an RSS 2.0 feed to the previously downloadable files of the president's weekly radio addresses. Also in July, the first People's Choice Podcast Awards were held during Podcast Expo. Awards were given in 20 categories. On September 28, 2005, exactly a year after first tracking hits for the word "podcasts" on Google's search engine, Google found more than 100,000,000 hits on the word "podcasts." In November, 2005, the first Portable Media Expo and Podcasting Conference was held at the Ontario Convention Center in Ontario
Ontario, California
Ontario is a city located in San Bernardino County, California, United States, 35 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. Located in the western part of the Inland Empire region, it lies just east of the Los Angeles county line and is part of the Greater Los Angeles Area...
, California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
. The annual conference is now called the Podcast and New Media Expo. On December 3, 2005, "Podcast" was named the word of the year in 2005 by the New Oxford American Dictionary
New Oxford American Dictionary
The New Oxford American Dictionary is a single-volume dictionary of American English compiled by American editors at the Oxford University Press....
and would be in the dictionary in 2006.
In February, 2006, following London radio station LBC's successful launch of the first premium-podcasting platform LBC Plus, there was widespread acceptance that podcasting had considerable commercial potential. UK comedian Ricky Gervais
Ricky Gervais
Ricky Dene Gervais is an English comedian, actor, director, radio presenter, producer, musician, and writer.Gervais achieved mainstream fame with his television series The Office and the subsequent series Extras, both of which he co-wrote and co-directed with friend and frequent collaborator...
launched a new series of his popular podcast The Ricky Gervais Show
The Ricky Gervais Show
The Ricky Gervais Show is a comedy audio show in the UK starring Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant, and Karl Pilkington, later adapted into an animated televised version debuting for HBO and Channel 4 in 2010. The show started in November 2001 on Xfm, and aired in weekly periods for months at a time...
. The second series of the podcast was distributed through audible.co.uk
Audible.com
Audible.com is an Internet provider of spoken audio entertainment, information, and educational programming.Audible sells digital audiobooks, radio and TV programs, and audio versions of magazines and newspapers....
and was the first major podcast to charge consumers to download the show at 95 pence per half-hour episode. The first series of The Ricky Gervais Show podcast had been freely distributed by Positive Internet
Positive Internet
The Positive Internet Company Ltd is a Web hosting service provider originally founded in the United Kingdom and now operating in both the United States and the UK...
and marketed through The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
newspaper's website, and had become the world's most successful podcast to date with an average of 295,000 downloads per episode according to The Guinness Book of World Records. Even in its new subscription format, The Ricky Gervais Show
The Ricky Gervais Show
The Ricky Gervais Show is a comedy audio show in the UK starring Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant, and Karl Pilkington, later adapted into an animated televised version debuting for HBO and Channel 4 in 2010. The show started in November 2001 on Xfm, and aired in weekly periods for months at a time...
is regularly the most-downloaded podcast on iTunes
ITunes
iTunes is a media player computer program, used for playing, downloading, and organizing digital music and video files on desktop computers. It can also manage contents on iPod, iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad....
.
In February 2006, podcaster Lance Anderson became the first to take a podcast and create a live venue tour. The Lance Anderson Podcast Experiment included a sold out night in The Pilgrim, (23rd Feb 2006) a central Liverpool (UK) venue followed by a theatrical event at The Rose Theatre, Edge Hill University (24th Feb 2006) which included appearances by Mark Hunter from The Tartan Podcast, Jon and Rob from Top of the Pods, Dan Klass from The Bitterest Pill via video link from Los Angeles and live music from The Hotrod Cadets. In addition, Lance was also invited to take part in the first ever Podcast Forum at CARET, the Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies at the University of Cambridge (21st Feb 2006). Lance was joined at this event by Dr. Chris Smith from Naked Scientists Podcast, Debbie McGowan, an Open University lecturer and advocate for podcasting in education and Nigel Paice, a professional music producer and podcasting tutor. In March, 2006, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper
Stephen Harper
Stephen Joseph Harper is the 22nd and current Prime Minister of Canada and leader of the Conservative Party. Harper became prime minister when his party formed a minority government after the 2006 federal election...
became the first head of government to issue a podcast, the "Prime Minister of Canada's Podcast". In July, 2009, the company VoloMedia
VoloMedia
VoloMedia is a Sunnyvale, California based advertising network that has developed technology to enable advertisements to be dynamically inserted into downloadable audio and video, such as podcasts. Large media publishers such as Public Radio International, MSNBC and Fox News utilize their...
is awarded the "Podcast patent" by the USPTO in patent number 7,568,213. Dave Winer, the co-inventor of podcasting (with Adam Curry), points out that his invention predated this patent by two years.
Popularization
As is often the case with new technologies, pornography has become a part of the scene, producing what is sometimes called podnography. Other approaches include enlisting a class full of MBA students to research podcasting and compare possible business models, and venture capital flowing to influential content providers.The growing popularity of podcasting introduced a demand for music available for use on the shows without significant cost or licensing difficulty. Out of this demand, a growing number of tracks, by independent as well as signed acts, are now being designated "podsafe
Podsafe
Podsafe is a term created in the podcasting community to refer to any work which, through its licensing, specifically allows the use of the work in podcasting, regardless of restrictions the same work might have in other realms...
". (See also Podcasting and Music Royalties.)
Podcasting has been given a major push by conventional media and can be read about further in podcasting by traditional broadcasters
Podcasting by traditional broadcasters
Podcasting by traditional broadcasters started around the third quarter of 2004 when radio stations began to investigate the suitability of podcasting for delivering their programming...
.
Podcasting has also been picked up by some print media, e.g. newspaper
Newspaper
A newspaper is a scheduled publication containing news of current events, informative articles, diverse features and advertising. It usually is printed on relatively inexpensive, low-grade paper such as newsprint. By 2007, there were 6580 daily newspapers in the world selling 395 million copies a...
s, who supply their readers with spoken versions of their content.
Podcasting has presented both opportunities and challenges for mainstream radio outlets who on the one hand see it as an alternative medium for their programs while on the other hand struggle to identify its unique affordances and subtle differences. In a famous example of the way online statistics can be misused by those unused to the nuances of the online world, marketing executives from the ABC in Australia were unsure of how to make sense of why Digital Living, at that stage a little known podcast from one of their local stations, outrated all of their expensively produced shows. It turned out that a single segment on Blu-ray had been downloaded a massive 150,000 times in one day from a single location in China.
One of the first examples of a print publication to produce an audio podcast to supplement their printed content was the international scientific journal Nature
Nature
Nature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical world, or material world. "Nature" refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general...
. The Nature Podcast was set up in October 2005 by Cambridge University
University of Cambridge
The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...
's award-winning "Naked Scientist
The Naked Scientists
The Naked Scientists is a one-hour audience-interactive science radio talk show broadcast live by the BBC in the East of England, nationally by BBC Radio 5 Live and internationally as a podcast. The programme was created and is edited by Cambridge University Pathology Department clinical lecturer...
", Chris Smith, who produces and presents the weekly show.
Although firm business models have yet to be established, podcasting represents a chance to bring additional revenue to a newspaper through advertising, subscription fees and licensing.
Coping with growth
While podcasting's innovators took advantage of the sound-file synchronization feature of Apple Inc.'s iPod and iTunesITunes
iTunes is a media player computer program, used for playing, downloading, and organizing digital music and video files on desktop computers. It can also manage contents on iPod, iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad....
software—and included "pod" in the name—the technology was always compatible with other players and programs. Apple was not actively involved until mid-2005, when it joined the market on three fronts: as a source of "podcatcher" software, as publisher of a podcast directory, and as provider of tutorials on how to create podcasts with Apple products GarageBand
GarageBand
GarageBand is a software application for Mac OS X and iOS that allows users to create music or podcasts. It is developed by Apple Inc. as a part of the iLife software package on Mac OS X.-Audio recording:...
and QuickTime
QuickTime
QuickTime is an extensible proprietary multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc., capable of handling various formats of digital video, picture, sound, panoramic images, and interactivity. The classic version of QuickTime is available for Windows XP and later, as well as Mac OS X Leopard and...
Pro. Apple CEO Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs
Steven Paul Jobs was an American businessman and inventor widely recognized as a charismatic pioneer of the personal computer revolution. He was co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Apple Inc...
demonstrated creating a podcast during his January 10, 2006 keynote address to the Macworld Conference & Expo
Macworld Conference & Expo
Produced by Boston-based IDG World Expo, Macworld | iWorld is a trade-show with conference tracks dedicated to the Apple Macintosh platform. It is held annually in the United States, usually during the second week of January...
using new "podcast studio" features in GarageBand 3.
When it added a podcast-subscription feature to its June 28, 2005, release of iTunes 4.9, Apple also launched a directory of podcasts at the iTunes Music Store, starting with 3,000 entries. Apple's software enabled AAC encoded podcasts to use chapters, bookmarks, external links, and synchronized images displayed on iPod screens or in the iTunes artwork viewer. Two days after release of the program, Apple reported one million podcast subscriptions.
Some podcasters found that exposure to iTunes' huge number of downloaders threatened to make great demands on their bandwidth and related expenses. Possible solutions were proposed, including the addition of a content delivery system, such as Liberated Syndication
Liberated Syndication
Liberated Syndication, often shortened to LibSyn, is a podcast media hosting company which opened in November 2004. It offers hosting of files to podcast producers under a monthly subscription model...
; Podcast Servers
Web syndication
Web syndication is a form of syndication in which website material is made available to multiple other sites. Most commonly, web syndication refers to making web feeds available from a site in order to provide other people with a summary or update of the website's recently added content...
; Akamai
Akamai Technologies
Akamai Technologies, Inc. is an Internet content delivery network headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US.The company was founded in 1998 by then-MIT graduate student Daniel M. Lewin, and MIT Applied Mathematics professor Tom Leighton...
; a peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads among peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application...
solution, BitTorrent; or use of free hosting services, such as those offered by Ourmedia
Ourmedia
Ourmedia is a media archive, supported by the Internet Archive, which freely hosts any non-pornographic images, text, and video or audio clips, where this would not violate copyright laws. The website, which launched on March 21, 2005, was founded by Marc Canter and J.D. Lasica.The media archive,...
, BlipMedia and the Internet Archive
Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...
.
Since September 2005, a number of services began featuring video-based podcasting including Apple, via its iTunes Music Store, Participatory Culture Foundation
Participatory Culture Foundation
The Participatory Culture Foundation is a 501 non-profit organization whose mission is to “enable and support independent, non-corporate creativity and political engagement.”...
and Loomia
Loomia
Loomia is a Internet technology company based in San Francisco, California in the United States. Loomia offers a module that recommends content on a Web site. The company is part of a growing Internet trend that aims to bridge the gap between technological capabilities and user intents...
. Known by some as a vodcast, or vidcast, the services handle both audio and video feeds.