What is Podcasting?

With the sudden growth in the popularity of RSS and syndicating technologies, a way of distributing audio/ video content over the internet came to be known as Pod-casting, a word derived from the combination of “i-Pod “ & “Broadcasting”.

A podcast is a web feed of audio or video files placed on the internet for anyone to subscribe to. It always delivers new and updated content and this is what distinguishes it from a single download via a broadcast. Currently most Podcasts contain audio content.

Podcasts are delivered to the audience through an RSS feed, in XML format. Like with RSS, podcast subscribers do not need to go back and check for the latest version of the content.

Since it is based on RSS, it shares all the benefit of the latter. This means that it enables the user to subscribe and access content from multiple sources as opposed to a single source, as in the case with broadcasting.

There are three distinct entities involved in the “Podcast” experience. The creator, the audience and the advertiser.

The creator is one that creates and publishes the Podcast for other users that subscribe to it, to download via RSS Feeds. There are considerable software/ hardware and marketing costs that go into creating your own podcast.

On the other side are the listeners or subscribers to the podcasts who get highly filtered “podshows” or programs of interest. They may have to pay for certain “podshows” via their subscription to them.

As podcasting becomes more and more popular, a third entity becomes involved with the delivery of this new and fascinating way of delivering audio content. The Advertiser.

More than 20 million Americans own i-Pods or mp3 players and a about a third of them have downloaded and listened to podshows. That makes for a whopping 6 million people. A huge harvest for the advertiser.

What is involved in creating a Podcast?

Production
This involves recording, editing, cutting and optimizing audio/ video content so that it can be podcast. There already exists many software and hardware tools for getting content ready for podcasting (eg.Adobe Audition & Audacity)

Publishing
Publishing is the process of making content available on the internet and accessible to subscribers (as in this case). A Podcast essentially is a group of media files in conjuction with an RSS file that describes the content and retrieval instructions. Once these files are created they need to be hosted on a server for the audience to access them.

RSS is simply an XML file that may be built in a simple text editor defined with XML grammar. Podcasters may choose to build this file either manually or use available tools with drag-and-drop functionality for the purpose(eg. See www.ipodcastle.com)

Hosting your podcast is similar to hosting any other web content. The only consideration is that it takes significantly more bandwidth and therefore has substantial cost implications

RSS is simply an XML file that may be built in a simple text editor defined with XML grammar. Podcasters may choose to build this file either manually or use available tools with drag-and-drop functionality for the purpose(eg. See www.ipodcastle.com)

Hosting your podcast is similar to hosting any other web content. The only consideration is that it takes significantly more bandwidth and therefore has substantial cost implications.

Receiving and Catching Software

Receiving and Catching softwares keep track of the subscriptions of the user, automatically downloading new episodes as they are published. Currently this application is a separate software installed on the listeners computer. In the future, we should hope to see media players with this software integrated. Two very popular software for this purpose is iPodder and Doppler radio.