PodCast History


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What makes podcasting distinct from other digital audio and video delivery is the use of syndication feed enclosures. The concept was proposed in a draft by Tristan Louis in October, 2000, and implemented in somewhat different form by Dave Winer, a software developer and an author of the RSS format. Winer had discussed the concept, also in October 2000, with Adam Curry, a user of his software, and had received other customer requests for audioblogging features. Winer included the new functionality in RSS 0.92, by defining a new element called "enclosure", which would simply pass the address of a media file to the RSS aggregator. Winer demonstrated the feature by enclosing a Grateful Dead song in his Scripting News weblog on January 11th, 2001.


For its first two years, the enclosure element had relatively few users. Winer's company incorporated the new feature 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.


While few developers of RSS-capable blogging software or aggregators made use of the enclosure element, 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 and NPR talkshow host, had posted 25 in-depth interviews with bloggers, futurists and political figures, which Winer gradually released to the feed[10]. 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.


In 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 RSStoiPod script that moved mp3 files from Userland Radio to iTunes, and encouraged other developers to build on the idea. The iPodder idea was picked up by multiple developer groups. While many of the early efforts remained command-line based, the first podcasting client with a user interface was iPodderX (now called Transistr), developed by August Trometer and Ray Slakinski and released in mid-September, 2004. Shortly thereafter, another group (iSpider) rebranded their software as iPodder and released it under that name as Free Software (under GPL). Since it was free-software this program was developed extensively and used quite a lot. This project is terminated after a cease and desist letter from Apple (over iPodder trademark issues). It's reincarnated in Juice and CastPodder. The PodNova desktop client is also a derivative of iSpider. The PodNova desktop client is slightly modified so that it can keep the subscriptions on the server.


The term "podcasting" was one of several terms for portable listening to audioblogs suggested by Ben Hammersley in The Guardian on February 12, 2004, referring to Lydon's interview programs ("...all the ingredients are there for a new boom in amateur radio. But what to call it? Audioblogging? Podcasting? GuerillaMedia?"). In September of 2004, Dannie Gregoire also used the term 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, Wine and Curry, and entered common usage.


In September 2004, Curry launched an ipodder-dev mailing list, then Slashdot had a 100+ message discussion[20], bringing even more attention to the ipodder developer projects in progress at SourceForge. By October 2004, detailed how-to podcast articles[21] 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.


In February 2005, Carl Franklin, publisher of the audio talk show .NET Rocks!, started the first official podcast production company, Pwop Productions, which now produces podcasts for Microsoft and other companies. Also in February 2005, Australians Cameron Reilly and Mick Stanic started a Commercial Podcast Network, The Podcast network. Reilly described his vision for the network to be the Time Warner of New media. In May of 2005 John Furrier founded PodTech PodTech.net a podcasting site focused on Silicon Valley and the pioneering InfoTalk format.


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. In February 2006, 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 95pence 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.

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