History of podcasting

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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^[1], 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^[2], a user of his software, and had received other customer requests for audioblogging features. Winer included the new functionality in RSS 0.92^[3], by defining a new element^[4] called "enclosure"^[5], 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^[6].

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^[7][8]. 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^[9]. 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^[11].

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^[12]; Bob Doyle demonstrated the portable studio he helped Lydon develop^[13]; 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^[14]. Curry and Marks discussed collaborating. After the conference, Curry offered his blog readers an RSStoiPod^[15] 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 [1].

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?")^[16]. In September of 2004, Dannie Gregoire also used the term to describe the automatic download^[17] 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^[18], Winer^[19] 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^[22]. 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.

Contents 1 Precursor 2 Popularization 3 Adoption by traditional broadcasters 4 Adoption by print media 5 Coping with growth 6 Notes and references

[edit] Precursor

Before the advent of the World Wide Web, 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^[23].

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.

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.

A fully conceived precursor to podcasting came from another early MP3 player manufacturer. To supply content for its players the I2Go company, makers of the eGo player, introduced a digital news service called MyAudio2Go.com that created daily audio news feeds users could download to the eGo or any other MP3 player. The eGo's file transfer application could be programmed to pull down specific feeds to a user's PC every evening.

There were dozens of focused daily feeds covering national news, business news, entertainment news, even a recap of the previous day's TV shows. The service lasted over a year, but succumbed when the I2Go company ran out of capital during the dotcom crash and folded. Archive.org has an August 2000 snapshot of the MyAudio2Go site.

In 2001, Applian Technologies of San Francisco, CA introduced Replay Radio, 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 Web Talk Guys, produced by Rob and Dana Greenlee.

[edit] Popularization

The word about podcasting rapidly spread through the already-popular weblogs of Curry, Winer and other early podcasters and podcast-listeners. Fellow blogger and technology columnist Doc Searls began keeping track of how many "hits" Google found for the word "podcasts" on September 28, 2004. On that day, the result was 24 hits^[24]. There were 526 hits on September 30, then 2,750 three days later. The number doubled every few days, passing 100,000 by October 18. A year later, Google found more than 100,000,000 hits on the word "podcasts."

On October 11, 2004 the first phonetic search engine for podcasting was launched called Podkey to assist podcasters to easily connect to each other. 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^[25]. USA Today told its readers about the "free amateur chatfests" the following February ^[26][27], 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. The newspaper quoted one directory as listing 3,300 podcast programs in February, 2005.

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 USA Today noted was popular on American broadcast radio in the 1940s. After Dawn and Drew, such "couplecasts" became quite popular among independent podcasts (those not derived from a preexisting radio show).

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 Tech Podcasts Network, PodTech.net, the Association of Music Podcasters and others.

In March of 2005, John Edwards became the first national-level US politician to hold his own podcast^[28]. Within a few episodes, the show had all the features of a major podcast: a web site with subscription feeds and show notes, guest appearances, questions from the audience, reviews and discussion of books, musical interludes of podsafe (noninfringing) songs, light banter (sports and recreation talk), even limited soundseeing from on location. Later in the summer of 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^[29]. Also, in March Of 2005, Podcast Pickle went live on the net, and became the first Podcast Community on the Internet.

In May 2005 the first book on podcasting was released, the award-winning Podcasting The Do it Yourself Guide, by Todd Cochrane

By mid-2005, the medium had acquired backlash. Some experienced Internet users declared podcasting to be either nothing special (just a variant of blogs and mp3s), or already past its peak (because of growing exposure, and/or adoption by unsavvy Internet users).

In 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, m4a audio format instead of mp3.

In July 2005 the first People's Choice Podcast Awards were held during Podcast Expo. Awards were given in 20 categories.

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^[30], 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". (See also Podcasting and Music Royalties.)

In September 2005, the first podcast encoded in 5.1-channel encoded Dolby Headphone was created by Revision3 Studios with their 14th episode of Diggnation. The Dolby encoding lasted for only a few minutes of the podcast. On October 12, 2005 Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPod with video capabilty. In his keynote speech he demonstrated the video podcasts Tiki Bar TV and Rocketboom. On December 3, 2005 Sony Computer Entertainment America announced that the PlayStation Portable would support podcasting using the RSS Channel feature after upgrading to 2.60.

In November 2005 the Podcaster News Network was launched that focuses on news and world events to include Sports, Business, Lifestyle, Politics, Religion, Health, and World and US National News.

"Podcast" was named the word of the year in 2005 by the New Oxford American Dictionary and would be in the dictionary in 2006.

The term "podmercial" was coined in early 2005 by John Iaisuilo, a radio broadcaster/podcaster in Las Vegas, who promptly trademarked it. The term "poditorial" was coined by author John Hedtke in July 2005 while writing half of "Podcasting Now: Audio Your Way!"

In February 2006 the first official Guinness Book of Records World Record for most popular podcast was awarded to The Ricky Gervais Show. The show, produced by the Guardian Unlimited and hosted by Positive Internet maintained an average of over a quarter of a million downloads per weekly episode.

On the 24th February 2006, possibly the world's first Live podcast theatrical entertainment event was held at The Rose Theatre, Ormskirk, West Lancashire in the UK. Entitled 'The Lance Anderson Podcast Experiment' it featured Lance Anderson of Verge of the Fringe, Dan Klass of The Bitterest Pill, Mark Hunter of the tartanpodcast and Jon and Rob of Top of the Pods. Dan Klass appeared via a live video link to Los Angeles and the show was audio streamed live to a global audience.

In March 2006 PodTech PodTech.net and founder John Furrier raised $5.5 million in venture capital for the second venture funded podcasting network startup. Investors of PodTech PodTech.net include Venrock Venrock Associates and USVP US Venture Partners.

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".

September 2006 Pickle's Podcast Newswas introduced. Podcasting News Stories written by podcasters.

In October 2006 the first Podcast Peer Award winners were announced. This award is meant to provide recognition of industry excellence because the winners are chosen based on votes from other podcasters.

[edit] Adoption by traditional broadcasters

Main article: Podcasting by traditional broadcasters

Traditional broadcasters were extremely quick to pick up on the podcasting format, especially those whose news or talk formats spared them the complications of music licensing. While there had been experimental feeds of radio broadcast material, such as Dave Slusher's August 2004 feed of WREK programs from Georgia Tech^[31], the American syndicated radio show Web Talk Radio^[32] apparently became the first to adopt the format on a regular basis, in September 2004, followed within weeks by Seattle news radio station KOMO and by individual programs from KFI Los Angeles and Boston's WGBH. In March 2005 the science radio program This Week in Science became the latest broadcaster to make the transition from terrestrial radio to podcasting.

The BBC began a trial in October 2004 with BBC Radio Five Live's Fighting Talk. These trials were extended in January 2005 to BBC Radio 4's In Our Time and have been extended further since^[33]. Also in January 2005, CBC Radio began a trial with its weekly national science and technology show Quirks and Quarks^[34], which has offered listeners Real Audio, MP3 and Ogg downloads since February 1996. The CBC trial also included CBC Radio 3's Canadian Music Podcast as well as limited podcasting of CBLA's popular Metro Morning Toronto show. United States National Public Radio member stations WNYC and KCRW adopted the format for many of their productions. March saw Virgin Radio become the first UK radio station to produce a daily podcast of its popular breakfast show. In April 2005 Australia's ABC launched a podcasting trial across several of its national stations^[35], and in May, Sydney station 2MBS became the first Australian community radio station to deliver content via the format with its Ultima Thule ambient music programme, and in June 2005 Chris Smith's the Naked Scientists, originating from BBC Radio Cambridgeshire, became the first BBC local and regional radio show to become a podcast.

Since March 2005, the trend has also reversed, with podcasts becoming a source of content for broadcast radio programs by Leo Laporte, Christopher Lydon and others. On March 30, Sirius Satellite began playing Wichita Rutherford's podcast 5 Minutes with Wichita making him the first person who started out as a podcaster to find a home on Satellite Radio. On April 4, KQMT began podcasting local Denver musical artists. The entire format of KYOU Radio, a San Francisco radio station, became based around broadcasting podcasts. That summer, when the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation locked out more than 5,000 of its regular on-air and technical staff, they responded by creating their own unofficial podcasts of original programming, created at and broadcast by campus and community radio stations across Canada, including CIUT in Toronto, CHSR in Fredericton and CKCU in Ottawa.

London's LBC 97.3 has launched the first paid-for podcasting service [2]. Subscribers get access to extra podcast channels and the use of an online podcast player similar to the BBC's Listen Again service. The technology used by LBC marks a watershed in podcasting, which had been almost an entirely free phenomenon. Other broadcasters, anxious to generate some revenue to cover the costs of podcasting, may follow.

In September 2005 the free satellite Internet multicast service Sat@Once on ASTRA satellites started distributing at high speed in Europe the most popular Internet podcasts (audio and video). This satellite multicast service (sponsored by ESA and SES Astra) brings podcasting experience to those who can't have broadband access in Europe and helps relieve the network bottleneck for the servers of the most popular podcasts.

[edit] Adoption by print media

Podcasting has also been picked up by some print media, e.g. newspapers, who supply their readers with spoken versions of their content.

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 "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.

[edit] Coping with growth

While podcasting's innovators took advantage of the sound-file synchronization feature of Apple Computer's iPod and iTunes 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^[36], 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.^[37]

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.

As of 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, the services handle both audio and video feeds.

Since the release of Apple's 5th Generation iPod in October 2005, which incorporated playing video files, Video Podcasting has become a major selling point for Apple.

[edit] Notes and references