[HCDX] 'Podcasters' deliver radio-on-demand

["Mike Terry" <miketerry73@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

3 February 2005
New Scientist
Celeste Biever

Every night, Adam Curry's iPod downloads a raft of radio shows from the
internet while he is asleep. Then, as the former MTV DJ drives to work the
next day, he listens to his selection on his iPod. And he is not limited to
conventional broadcasters. He has a wide choice of geeky talk shows, tracks
by indie bands, satirical comedy and reviews of obscure movies.

What UK-based Curry is using is an emerging method of audio file
distribution that he helped develop. He and co-creator David Winer call the
idea "podcasting", although it works just as well on other types of MP3
player.

As a DJ constantly on the lookout for new music, Curry found it tiresome and
time-consuming to surf the net for new material and then manually transfer
tracks from his PC to his iPod.

A new piece of software solves both these problems because it automatically
sends newly posted audio files to an MP3 player's music management software
as soon as they arrive online. "The beautiful thing about it is that you can
take the internet with you and you don't need to sit there and download it,"
Curry says.

It differs from internet radio because you do not have to tune in at
specific times. "It's really TiVo for the radio," says Mikel Ellcessor of
WNYC Radio, a New York City station that is broadcast on National Public
Radio (NPR). WNYC started podcasting its weekly show On the Media at the
beginning of the year. "Timing has been taken out of the equation," he says.

Unlike the MP3 files that stations such as NPR, the BBC and ABC in Australia
make available online, which you can pick up after they have been broadcast,
podcasts are downloaded directly to subscribers' MP3 players during the
owner's downtime - which is usually the small hours.

"Say you are interested in new material from 100 websites. If you didn't
have podcasting, how in the hell would you process so much info?" says Eric
Rice of San Francisco, who runs his own podcast - the Eric Rice Show.

Podcasting is in effect an audio version of Really Simple Syndication (RSS),
which enables a website like newscientist.com to scan itself continuously
for new postings and send subscribers each new headline as a pop-up. It
saves subscribers from having to visit hundreds of websites just to keep up
with the news (New Scientist print edition, 29 May 2004).

The difference is that podcasting has to deliver large audio files, which
may contain tens of megabytes of data, rather than simple news headlines.
So, Winer wrote a new version of RSS software to handle large audio files.
Then Curry wrote a "podcatcher" program called iPodder, downloadable from
www.ipodder.org that automatically downloads any new audio files that appear
on any RSS 2.0 feeds an individual subscribes to.

It works on a PC or Mac and downloads to any MP3 player, not just iPod. As
pods arrive on the computer, iPodder creates separate folders or "playlists"
inside the PC's music management software, such as iTunes, and names the
folder after the feed, such as "The Eric Rice Show".

Making RSS audio-capable "was not rocket science" says Tim Bray, a web
technologist at Sun Microsystems in Vancouver, Canada, who helped to develop
the original RSS. But it was "an important conceptual leap" that could not
have come at a more appropriate time.

The ubiquity of MP3 players, the emergence of easy-to-use, inexpensive
audio-editing software, and the explosion in the number of blogs where
information on new podcasts is posted, has created an environment ripe for
podcasting. There are now more than 700,000 different podcasts to subscribe
to, compared with 5000 only three months ago.

While some traditional broadcasters are now podcasting, the majority of
postings are by geeks who keep up with the emerging technology. As a result
the casts tend to be a little rough at the edges, and some are positively
bizarre. Fancy musical news? Try the Tapdancing News, a satirical news
round-up sung by California-based Sondra Lowell while she tap dances.

Meanwhile, a host of talk shows on computer programming has sprung up.
Religious shows are being dubbed "godcasts" by bloggers. "None of these
would find themselves on mainstream radio," Curry says. "You can literally
set up a radio station in your basement," says Michael Geogehan, who runs
Reel Reviews, a movie review podcast, based in Newport Beach, California,
US.

But even traditional broadcasters see podcasting as useful. "The technology
is not a threat to us, but rather a way to attract more listeners by
providing new ways to access programmes," says John Marino, a spokesman for
the US National Association of Broadcasters. Curry agrees that the immediacy
of conventional radio ensures it will always have a place. "If they find
Osama bin Laden, don't run to your iPod for the news," he says.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6982



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