The History of Podcasting

Excerpted from Podcasting the Do it Your Self Guide with Permission printed initially in 2005

For some of you this short history will be a trip down memory lane. But many reporters have bungled the true history behind the evolution of podcasting. I want to give you the skinny and set the record straight.

The true godfathers of podcasting are Dave Winer and Adam Curry. Dave Winer (scripting.com) is a software developer, RSS evangelist, and developer of the popular weblog package Radio Userland, (userland.com). Today he produces Morning Coffee Notes and Trade Secrets (secrets.scripting.com), Adam Curry produces the wildly popular Daily Source Code (live.curry.com). Adam is well known as mid 80s former MTV VJ (live.curry.com). 

Podcasting started, before the term was even invented, with an idea from a meeting in 2000 between Adam and Dave. The two were talking about automated media distribution. The conversation centered around video rather than audio. Dave was against the idea of a subscription-based system for video downloads.

Remember this was 2000 before the world-wide leap in the number of Broadband Internet connections. Dave felt the Internet simply had not evolved to the point where it would support large video downloads, not to mention the cost of delivering content. His analogy was that it was taking longer to download video than it was to play it, and many times the video was poor quality and you really did not know what you were going to get.

Adam’s idea was to look at Internet connections differently and to consider all of the bandwidth that goes to waste when you are not using your Internet connection. He wanted a software solution that could download items that he subscribed to. This really wasn’t a new idea, but there were no tools to do this in the fashion they desired. 

Dave was already working on Real Simple Syndication (RSS). The site: http://webreference.com/authoring/languages/xml/rss/intro/ offers a detailed discussion of this exciting lightweight XML format. RSS is specifically designed for creating new stories. It enables you to share headings and other Web content across the Internet. Because an RSS text file can include dynamic content as well as static content, you can use it to distribute new content from your site to others.

Dave had made some revisions to the original RSS 0.91 specification developed by Netscape and formalized RSS 2.0 in 2003. The RSS 2.0 standard was released by Harvard under a Creative Commons license. More information on RSS can be found at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/rssVersionHistory.html

In the meantime Dave wanted to come up with a format to deliver content via a subscription system. So Dave thought the process would need to be broken into three problems:

 1. What software do you use when creating the content?
 2. What software reads the content?
 3. Where do you find the content?

These three elements needed to come together to make the vision developed at that meeting in 2000 happen. 

Until the summer of 2004 progress was slow and even though many of the individual pieces were there in place, they were not all tied together until Adam decided to try his hand at programming and developed the first rudimentary podcatcher application with Apple Scripts.

Dave initially thought that what Adam had created would not work, but with his hacked together Apple Script, Adam was able to capture and download Dthe audio post that Dave embedded in his weblog.

Then Adam’s program read Dave’s RSS feed and downloaded the audio file. You may be asking how Adam’s program knew what to look for. Adam’s podcatcher was looking for items within Dave’s RSS feed known as enclosures. Adam’s Podcatcher simply grabbed the file within these enclosures, downloaded it, and then utilizing the API released for iTunes, it put the file in his iTunes playlist, which then could be synced to Adam’s iPod

Dave and Adam worked for four years after that  original meeting to make subscription and automatic file downloads of video and audio content easy for the masses. Things seem to always come full circle and by a little luck in that we had a quasi celebrity promoting what they had accomplished, Adam’s simple Apple script lit a fire for the development of podcasting which is in full swing today.

Adam Curry says, “Podcasting is where developers and users party together”. This has been a profound battle cry and has resulted in amazing acheivments in a short time. The momentum behind podcasting is simply amazing. The number of people racing to make it easier to produce and consume podcasts is going on at a frenzied pace with at least a dozen teams bringing software products that are largely free to the market place. The Open Source community and the initial innovations and foresight of Adam and Dave were the keys to the explosive growth and initial creation of software tools that sky rocketed the growth of this medium. Today teams of individuals collaborate to bring new features to the software tools we are going to discuss in detail.

Note: This is an Excerpt from my book “Podcasting The Do It Yourself Guide”  While this is the history as I published it in May of 2005 Todd Cochrane