History of podcasting
With the advent of broadband Internet access and portable digital audio playback devices such as the iPod, podcasting began to catch hold in late 2004.
[8] 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.
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[15] from early MP3 player manufacturer, i2Go.
[18] Winer had received other customer requests for "audioblogging" features and had discussed the enclosure concept (also in October 2000) with Adam Curry,[19] a user of Userland's Manila and Radio blogging and RSS aggregator software.
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.
Lydon, a former New York Times reporter, Boston TV news anchor and NPR talkshow host, had developed a portable recording studio,[28][29] conducted in-depth interviews with bloggers, futurists and political figures, and posted MP3 files as part of his Harvard blog.
CDs of Lydon's interviews were distributed as an example of the high-quality MP3 content enclosures could deliver;[34] Bob Doyle demonstrated the portable studio he helped Lydon develop;[35] 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.
[37] After the conference, Curry offered his blog readers an RSS-to-iPod[38] script (iPodder, re-sourced at https://github.com/cisene/daily-source-code-podcast/tree/main/iPod) that moved MP3 files from Userland Radio to iTunes, and encouraged other developers to build on the idea.
While many of the early efforts remained command-line based, the very first podcasting client with a graphic user interface was iPodderX (later called Transistr after a trademark dispute with Apple), developed by August Trometer and Ray Slakinski.
Also in September, Adam Curry launched a mailing list; then Slashdot had a 100+ message discussion,[50] 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".
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 one 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).
[56] In October 2004, detailed how-to-podcast articles[57] had begun to appear online, and a month later, Liberated Syndication, Inc. known in the industry as Libsyn launched the first Podcast Service Provider, offering storage, bandwidth, and RSS creation tools.
This was the same month that Podtrac started providing its free download tracking service and audience demographics survey to the podcasting industry.
Prior to iTunes' seamless integration, acquiring and organising podcasts required dedicated "podcatching" software that was often clunky and intimidating for the average user.
The Lance Anderson Podcast Experment (sic) included a sold-out extravaganza in The Pilgrim, a central Liverpool (UK) venue (February 23, 2006), followed by a theatrical event at The Rose Theatre, Edge Hill University (February 24, 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, Anderson 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 (February 21, 2006).
Having four regularly scheduled podcasts was a first for a major American university, which was launched as part of Virginia Tech's "Invent the Future" campaign.
In March 2007, after being on-air talent and being fired from KYSR (STAR) in Los Angeles, California, Jack and Stench started their own subscription-based podcast.
A former BBC correspondent and political editor in the East, Boni Sones OBE, worked with three other broadcast journalists—Jackie Ashley, Deborah McGurran, and Linda Fairbrother—to create an online radio station where women MPs of all parties could be interviewed impartially.
The BBC noted in 2011 that more people (eight million in the UK or about 16% of the population, with half listening at least once a week—a similar proportion to the USA) had downloaded podcasts than had used Twitter.
The Daily is designed to match the fast pace of modern news, and the show features original reporting and recordings of the newspaper's top stories.
Dead End Days, a serialized dark comedy about zombies released from October 31, 2003, through 2004, is commonly believed to be the first video podcast.
[citation needed] Classes of MBA students have been commissioned to research podcasting and compare possible business models,[86] and venture capital flowing to influential content providers.
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.
[97] While podcasting's innovators took advantage of the sound-file synchronization feature of Apple Inc.'s iPod and iTunes software—and included "pod" in the name—the technology was always compatible with other players and programs.
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.
[98] Some podcasters found that exposure to iTunes' huge number of downloaders threatened to make great demands on their bandwidth and related expenses.
Since September 2005, a number of services began featuring video-based podcasting, including Apple (via its iTunes Music Store), and the Participatory Culture Foundation.
