Internet Case Study – Podcasting

The concept for podcasting (using syndication feed inclosures) was proposed in a draft by Tristan Louis in 2000, and in a slighlty different form by Dave Winer. It had relatively few users for the first couple of years. Winer’s company then added a new feature called radio userland which assisted the technical side of ‘audioblogging’ as it was then known.
In June 2003, Stepehn Downes syndicated audio files using his Ed Radio application.
In Sept 2003, Winer created an audio RSS-with-enclosures feed for his Harvard Berkman Cebter colleague Christopher Lydon’s weblog, which had 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.
In Oct 2003 Winer and friends organized the first Bloggercon weblogger conference. CDs of Lydon’s interviews were distributed as an example of the high-quality MP3 content that enclosures could deliver. Kevin Marks demonstrated a script to download RSS enclosures and pass them to iTunes to transfer to an iPod.
After the conference, Curry offered his blog readers an RSS to iPod script that moved MP3 files from Userland Radio to iTunes, and encouraged other developers to build on the idea.
The user interface iPodderX (now called Transistr) was developed by August Trometer and Ray Slakinski and released in mid-September 1994. Shortly after iSpider rebranded their software as iPodder and released it as free software. It was then taken up by others and developed extensively, though the original project was terminated after Apple objected to trademark issues. It led to other interfaces such as Juice, CastPodder and PodNova.
The term “podcasting” was one of several terms for portable listening to audioblogs suggested by Ben Hammersley in The Guardian on Feb 12, 2004, referring to Lydon’s interview programmes. In Sept 2004, Dannie Gregoire also used the term to describe the automatic download and synchronization of audio content. The use of ‘podcast’ by Gregoire was picked up by podcasting evangelists such as Dave Slusher, Winer and Curry, and entered common usage.
By Oct 2004, detailed how-to podcast articles had begun to appear online, and a month later, libsyn launched the first Podcast Service Provider, offering storage, bandwidth and RSS creation tools, allowing anyone to create a podcast.
In Feb 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 Feb 2005, Australians Cameron Reilly and Mike Stanic started The Podcast Network (the first commercial podcast network). Reilly wanted the network to be the Time Warner of new media.
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 Feb 2006, 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 customers to download, 95p per half-hour episode. The first series had been freely distributed by Positive Internet, and marketed through The Guadrian newspaper’s website, and had become the most successful podcast to date with an average 295,000 downloads per episode. Even now its paid for, the Ricky Gervais Show is regularly the most-downloaded podcast on iTunes.