The decade’s most important radio trends: #4 Podcasting
#4 in our series on radio trends of the decade
August 13 of this year marked the fifth anniversary of podcasting. On that date in 2004 former MTV VJ Adam Curry began his Daily Source Code podcast, ushering the term into the popular consciousness.
Like so many innovative ideas, podcasting is quite simple. It’s not like there weren’t online radio programs prior to 2004. The A-Infos Radio Project has been providing free hosting for independent and grassroots radio programs since 1996. Live365 made live webcasting broadly available back in 1999. But what podcasting brought to the party was a way to make finding and downloading online programs easy and automatic.
Prior to 2005 if there was a online radio program you wanted to listen to you had to check its website on a regular basis to see if a new program was available. Or if it was a live program you had to make sure to tune in to the stream at the right time, just like conventional radio. If you didn’t check in with your program’s website, then you wouldn’t know if there was a new episode.
At its essence podcasting is just an extension to an earlier innovation known as RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, depending on who you ask. Developed in the late 1990s and finding popularity with the emergence of blogs in the early 2000s, RSS provides a site summary to a “feed reader” which allows you to know when blogs and other sites are updated, rather than having to check back.
Podcasting resulted from the simple addition of the “enclosure” tag which tells a feed reader or “podcatcher” to download an audio or video file. This little addition to the RSS specification meant that you could now use a piece of software to periodically check your favorite radio sites and download new programs as soon as they became available.
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