Podcasts, previously known as "audioblogs", have roots dating back to the 1980s. 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. Today there are more than 115,000 English-language podcasts available on the Internet, approximately 4,550,000 podcasts available globally, and dozens of websites available for distribution at little or no cost to the producer or listener.
Precursors
The Illusion of Independent Radio is a Russian samizdat "radio program" created in 1989 in Rostov-on-Don and distributed on magnetic tape and cassettes. It was the first Soviet Russian prototype of the media phenomenon that was widely developed in the 2000s as podcasting.Белова Л. И. Универсальная журналистика: учебник для вузов. — М.: Аспект Пресс, 2016. — С. 66. — .Некрасова В. Известного ростовского блогера обвинили в клевете из-за хакеров // РБК. — 2016. — 16 июня.Дорофеева А. А. Подкастинг: новое радио в Интернете // Журналистика XXI века: в координатах исторического времени. — 2018. — № 1. — С. 194.Банцекин О. Как записать подкаст своими руками? // Школа Жизни. — 2018. — 27 дек.Козинаки М., Птицева О. и др. В голос! Нескучное руководство по созданию подкаста. — М.: Манн, Иванов и Фербер, 2020. — С. 32. — .Посиделов В. Свято место не бывает пусто // Наше время. — 2021. — 29 окт. — № 332.
Before the advent of the internet, in the 1980s, RCS (Radio Computing Services), provided music and talk-related software to radio stations in a digital format. Before online music digital distribution, the MIDI format as well as the Mbone, Multicast Network was used to distribute audio and video files. The MBone was a multicast network over the Internet used primarily by educational and research institutes, but there were audio talk programs.Miles, Peggy and Dean Sakai, Internet Age Broadcaster I and II, National Association of Broadcasters.
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. There were a few websites that provided audio subscription services. In 1993, the early days of Internet radio, Carl Malamud launched Internet Talk Radio which was the "first computer-radio talk show, each week interviewing a computer expert". It was distributed "as audio files that computer users fetch one by one". A 1993 episode of The Computer Chronicles described the concept as "asynchronous radio". Malamud said listeners could pause and restart the audio files at will, as well as skip content they did not like.
Some websites allowed downloadable audio shows, such as the comedy show The Dan & Scott Show, available on AOL.com from 1996. Additionally, in 1998, Radio Usach, a radio station from the University of Santiago, Chile, explored the option to broadcast online and on demand streaming talk shows. However, the development of downloaded music did not reach a critical mass until the launch of Napster, another system of aggregating music, but without the subscription services provided by podcasting or video blogging aggregation client or system software. Independent of the development of podcasting via RSS, a portable player and music download system had been 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 successor, the first hard-disk based MP3-player.
RantMedia were early pioneers of various internet radio programs dating back to 1999 (What The Hell podcast, incorporating IRC chat and video before YouTube chat was created) and 2005 (Newsreal with Sean Kennedy podcast).
In 2001, Applian Technologies of San Francisco introduced Replay Radio (later renamed into Replay AV), a TiVo-like recorder for Internet Radio Shows. Besides scheduling and recording audio, one of the features was a Direct Download link, which would scan a radio publisher's site for new files and copy them directly to a PC's hard disk. The first radio show to publish in this format was WebTalkGuys World Radio Show, produced by Rob and Dana Greenlee.
Timeline 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 from early MP3 player manufacturer, i2Go. To supply content for its portable MP3 players, i2Go introduced a digital audio news and entertainment service called MyAudio2Go.com that enabled users to download episodic news, sports, entertainment, weather, and music in audio format for listening on a PC, the eGo portable audio player, or other MP3 players. The i2GoMediaManager and the eGo file transfer application could be programmed to automatically download the latest episodic content available from user selected content types to a PC or portable device as desired. The service lasted over a year, but succumbed when the i2Go company ran out of capital during the dot-com crash and folded.
The RSS connection
In October 2000, the concept of attaching sound and video files in RSS feeds was proposed in a draft by Tristan Louis.Louis, Tristan, October 13, 2000 Suggestions for RSS 0.92 specification The idea was implemented by Dave Winer, a software developer and an author of the RSS format.Pot, Justin, August 23, 2013 The Evolution Of The Podcast — How A Medium Was Born Winer had received other customer requests for "audioblogging" features and had discussed the enclosure concept (also in October 2000) with Adam Curry,Curry, Adam, October 27, 2000 The Bandwidth Issue ; server discontinued by Userland, late 2005. a user of Userland's Manila and Radio blogging and RSS aggregator software.
Winer included the new functionality in RSS 0.92Winer, Dave, December 25, 2000 RSS 0.92 Specification by defining a new elementWiner, Dave, December 27, 2000 Scripting News:Heads-up, I'm working on new features for RSS that build on 0.91. Calling it 0.92... called "enclosure",Winer, Dave, October 31, 2000 Virtual Bandwidth ; and January 11, 2001 Payloads for RSS . which would simply pass the address to a media aggregator. On January 11, 2001, Winer demonstrated the RSS enclosure feature by enclosing a Grateful Dead song in his Scripting News weblog.Winer, Dave, January 11, 2001 Scripting News: Tonight's song on the Grateful Dead audio weblog is Truckin...
For its first two years, the enclosure element had relatively few users and many developers simply avoided using it. 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. Since Radio Userland had a built-in aggregator, it provided both the "send" and "receive" components of what was then called "audioblogging".Curry, Adam, October 21, 2002 UserNum 1014: Cool to hear my own audio-blog... Gilchrist, Harold October 27, 2002 Audioblog/Mobileblogging News this morning I'm experimenting with producing an audioblogging show... All that was needed for "podcasting" was a way to automatically move audio files from Radio Userland's download folder to an audio player (either software or hardware)—along with enough compelling audio to make such automation worth the trouble.
In June 2003, Stephen Downes demonstrated aggregation and syndication of audio files in his Ed Radio application.Downes, Stephen, June 2003 Ed Radio 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.
The first on-demand radio show and the first podcast In August 2000, the New England Patriots launched the Internet radio show PFW in Progress. It was a live show that was recorded and made available for on-demand download to visitors of Patriots.com, although this wasn't technically a podcast at the time, since the technology had not yet been invented to automatically download new episodes—a key differentiator that sets podcasts apart from simple audio files that can be downloaded manually. In 2005, two years after the introduction of the iTunes platform, the show was also offered there as a bona fide podcast. Today, it is still in existence, under the name Patriots Unfiltered, and is available on all podcast platforms.
In September 2003, the aforementioned Dave Winer created a special RSS-with-enclosures feed for his Harvard Berkman Center colleague Christopher Lydon's weblog, which previously had a text-only RSS feed. Lydon, a former New York Times reporter, Boston TV news anchor and NPR talkshow host, had developed a portable recording studio, conducted in-depth interviews with bloggers, futurists and political figures, and posted MP3 files as part of his Harvard blog. When Lydon had accumulated about 25 audio interviews, Winer gradually released them as a new RSS feed.Lydon, Chris 2003 Chris Lydon Interviews... Announcing the feed in his weblog, Winer challenged other aggregator developers to support this new form of content and provide enclosure support.
Not long after, Pete Prodoehl released a skin for the Amphetadesk aggregator that displayed enclosure links.Prodoehl, Peter, September 24, 2003, RasterWeb: Enclose This! Doug Kaye, who had been publishing MP3 recordings of his interviews at IT Conversations since June, created an RSS feed with enclosures, thus creating the first true podcast.Kaye, Doug, September 24, 2003 Blogarithms Lydon's blog eventually became Radio Open Source; its accompanying podcast, titled Open Source (not to be confused with Adam Curry's Daily Source Code, which was also one of the first podcasts), is now the oldest still-running podcast.
BloggerCon October 2003, Winer and friends organized the first BloggerCon weblogger conference at Berkman Center. CDs of Lydon's interviews were distributed as an example of the high-quality MP3 content enclosures could deliver;Andrew Grumet, 2005. A slice of podcasting history . Bob Doyle demonstrated the portable studio he helped Lydon develop; 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.Marks, Kevin. October 2003 video excerpt of Marks's demo (MPEG-4) Real stream of full Audioblogging session (start 48 minutes in) blog post Curry and Marks discussed collaborating."syncPod Channel", October 5, 2003, Adam Curry's Weblog (via Archive.org)
Pushing audio to a device After the conference, Curry offered his blog readers an RSS-to-iPodCurry, Adam, October 12, 2003 RSS2iPod 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.
In November 2003, the company AudioFeast (later renamed PodBridge, then VoloMedia) filed a patent application for "Method for Providing Episodic Media" with the USPTO based on its work in developing the AudioFeast service launched in September 2004. Although AudioFeast did not refer to itself as a podcasting service and was not built on RSS, it provided a way of downloading episodic audio content through desktop software and portable devices, with a system similar to the MyAudio2Go.com service four years before it. (AudioFeast shut down its service in July 2005 due to the unwillingness of its free customers to pay for its $49.95 paid annual subscription service, and a lack of a strong competitive differentiation in the market with the emergence of free RSS podcatchers.)
In May 2004, Eric Rice, then of SlackStreet.com, along with Randy Dryburgh of VocalSpace.com launched Audioblog.com as the first commercial podcasting hosting service. Audioblog.com became Hipcast.com in June 2006 and has hosted hundreds of thousands of podcasts since.