Podcating
Podcasting is a method
of publishing audio broadcasts via the Internet, allowing users to
subscribe to a feed of new files (usually MP3s). It became popular
in late 2004, largely due to automatic downloading of audio onto portable
players or personal computers.
Podcasting is distinct
from other types of online media delivery because of its subscription
model, which uses a feed (such as RSS or Atom) to deliver an enclosed
file. Podcasting enables independent producers to create self-published,
syndicated "radio shows," and gives broadcast radio programs
a new distribution method. Listeners may subscribe to feeds using
"podcatching" software (a type of aggregator), which periodically
checks for and downloads new content automatically. Some podcatching
software is also able to synchronise (copy) podcasts to portable music
players. Any digital audio player or computer with audio-playing software
can play podcasts. The same technique can deliver video files, and
by 2005 some aggregators could play video as well as audio.
"Podcasting"
is a portmanteau word that combines the words "broadcasting"
and "iPod." The term can be misleading since neither podcasting
nor listening to podcasts requires an iPod or any portable music player.
For that reason, various writers have suggested reinterpreting the
letters POD to create "backronyms" such as "Personal
On-Demand."[1] The term "Radio Me" was coined by Peter
Day of the BBC for the same reason. A little-used alternate is "blogcasting",
although this usually only refers to recordings that are based on,
or similar in format to, blogs.
History
Initial development
By 2003, web radio had existed for a decade, digital audio players
had been on the market for several years, blogs and broadcasters frequently
published MP3 audio online, and the RSS file format was widely used
for summarizing or syndicating content. While RSS/RDF already supported
media resources implicitly, applications rarely took advantage of
this. In 2001, users Adam Curry[2] and Tristan Louis[3], aided by
UserLand founder and RSS evangelist Dave Winer[4], added support for
a specific enclosure element to Userland's non-RDF branch of RSS,
then to its Radio Userland feed-generator and aggregator.
In June 2003, Stephen
Downes demonstrated aggregation and syndication of audio files using
RSS 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 an RSS-with-enclosures feed for his Harvard Berkman Center
colleague Christopher Lydon, a former newspaper and television journalist
and NPR radio talk show host [6]. For several months Lydon had been
linking full-length MP3 interviews to his Berkman weblog, which focused
on blogging and coverage of the 2004 U.S. presidential campaigns.
Having Lydon's interviews as RSS enclosures helped inspire Adam Curry's
pre-iPodder script, and related experiments leading to a variety of
open source iPodder development. Indeed, blogs would become an important
factor in the popularization of podcasting before many professional
radio broadcasters and entrepreneurs with business plans adopted the
form.
Possibly the first use
of the term podcasting was as a synonym for audioblogging or weblog-based
amateur radio in an article by Ben Hammersley in The Guardian on February
12, 2004 [7]. In September of that year, Dannie Gregoire used the
term to describe the automatic download and synchronization idea that
Adam Curry had developed [8]. Gregoire had also registered multiple
domain names associated with podcasting. That usage was discovered
and reported on by Curry and Dave Slusher of the Evil Genius Chronicles
website.
By October 2004, detailed
how-to podcast articles[9] had begun to appear online. By July 2005,
a Google search for "'how to' +podcast" returned 2,050,000
hits.
Independently of the
development of Podcasting and its distribution via RSS, an idea that
resembles Podcasting was 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 proposed successor, the first hard-disk
based MP3-player, that Compaq's R&D department had started developing
in 1998. See appropriate section in the Personal Jukebox article.
Popularization
The word about podcasting rapidly spread through the already-popular
weblogs of Curry 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, when the result was 24 hits. "A year from
now," he wrote, "it will pull up hundreds of thousands,
or perhaps even millions." [10]
Searls kept track of
the search results in his blog through the next month. There were
526 hits for "podcasts" on September 30, then 2,750 three
days later. The number doubled every few days, passing 100,000 by
October 18. His prediction of "perhaps millions" in a year
proved to be quite conservative. After only nine months, a search
for "podcasts" produced more than 10 million hits.
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 reported podcasts
across the United States and in Canada, Australia and Sweden, mentioning
podcast topics from technology to veganism and movie reviews. [11]
USA Today told its readers about these "free amateur chatfests"
the following February [12] [13], 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 No. 1 on the list -- "The
Dawn and Drew Show," described as "married-couple banter,"
a program format that USA Today noted was quite popular on American
broadcast radio in the 1940s.
In June, 2005, Apple
added podcasting to its iTunes music software, staking a claim to
the medium.
A little over a month
later, U.S. President George W. Bush became a podcaster[14], when
an RSS 2.0 feed was added to the previously downloadable files of
his weekly radio addresses at the White House website.
As is often the case
with new technologies, pornography has become a part of the scene
- producing what is sometimes called podnography.
Podsafe
"Podsafe" refers to a track that is legally permissibly
to play on a podcast, usually because the band or artist is not signed
to a major label or the recording was made under the Creative Commons
license. At podsafe sites (like Podsafe Music Network) artists can
submit podsafe tracks and podcasters can sign up and get the music
for their shows.
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. The American syndicated radio show Web Talk Radio[15]
became the first to adopt the format, in September 2004, followed
within weeks by Seattle news radio station KOMO and by individual
programs from KFI Los Angeles and Boston's WGBH.
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[16]. January
2005 also saw CBC begin a trial with its technology show /Nerd[17].
United States National Public Radio affiliates WNYC and KCRW adopted
the format for many of their productions. In April 2005 the BBC announced
it was extending the trial to twenty more programmes, including music
radio[18] and in the same month Australia's ABC launched a podcasting
trial across several of its national stations[19].
In May, 2005, the trend
began to go the other way, with amateur podcasts becoming a source
of content for broadcast radio programs by Adam Curry, Christopher
Lydon and others.
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.
The podcasting selection views of iTunes 4.9When it added a podcast-subscription
feature to its June 28, 2005, release of iTunes 4.9[20], 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.[21]
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 Akamai; a peer-to-peer solution, BitTorrent; or use
of free hosting services, such as those offered by Ourmedia, BlipMedia
and the Internet Archive.
Notes and references
- Technology writer
Doc Searls had proposed "Personal Option Digital" in September,
2004. The "Personal On-Demand" interpretation (with that
capitalization) had been in international circulation as early as
October 2004. In July 2005, Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble used
that same version when countering reports that his company was pushing
the word "blogcasting" to avoid mentioning an Apple product.
Scoble, Robert, 2005. "Blogger gives incorrect data about podcasting
at Microsoft."
- Winer, Dave, Oct.
31, 2000 Virtual Bandwidth; and Jan. 11, 2001 Payloads for RSS
- Curry, Adam, Oct.
27, 2000. The Bandwidth Issue
- Louis, Tristan, Oct.
13, 2000. Suggestion for RSS 0.92 specification
- Ed Radio
- Christopher Lydon
Interviews
- Hammersley, Ben. 2004.
"Audible revolution." In The Guardian, Thu, Feb 12 2004.
- Gregoire, Dannie J.
2004. "How to handle getting past episodes?" In the ipodder-dev
mailing list, Thu, Sep 16 2004.
- Torrone, Phillip.
2004. "How-To: Podcasting." In Engadget, Oct 5 2004.
- Searls, Doc. Sept.
28, 2004. Doc Searls' IT Garage, "DIY Radio with PODcasting."
- Farivar, Cyrus. Oct.
28, 2004. The New York Times, "New Food for IPods: Audio by
Subscription."
- Acohido, Byron. Feb.
9, 2005. USA Today, "Radio to the MP3 degree: Podcasting."
- Della Cava, Marco
R. Feb. 9, 2005. USA Today, "Podcasting: It's all over the
dial."
- Web Talk Radio, 2004-09-15.
"WebTalk Launches New Website."
- BBC Press Office,
2005. "BBC podcasting sparks Fighting Talk."
- Newitz, Annalee. 2005.
"Adam Curry Wants to Make You an iPod Radio Star." In
Wired Magazine. See also: CBC Podcasting page, CBC /Nerd page.
- BBC Press Office,
2005. "BBC to podcast up to 20 more programmes including Today
and Radio 1 speech highlights."
- ABC Radio National
podcasts.
- Apple – iTunes
- iTunes Podcast Subscriptions
Top One Million
- Musselburgh Grammar
School Podcast
- Heinen, Tom. 2005.
"Podcasting becomes another pulpit." In JS Online, Jun
11 2005.
- St Mark's Church,
Clayfield
- Disciples With Microphones
- Kennedy, Randy. 2005.
"With Irreverence and an iPod, Recreating the Museum Tour."
In The New York Times, May 28 2005.
- BBC Collective, 2005.
Podcasting for beginners
Article source: http://en.wikipedia.org
