TechList: The History of Podcasting

You can go to the tech Stuff podcast page and subscribe to listen to all sorts of episodes about tech from all realms, and hopefully this will provide a little bit of entertainment, a little bit of education, and probably more than a few puns, because that's kind of how I roll. Enjoy this playlist. Welcome to text Stuff, a production from my Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to

tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio, and I love all things tech. And we're gonna listen to another classic episode in our entertainment playlist. This one's on the history of podcasting, a very interesting topic, a topic in which I play a very very small part. Although honestly, by the time Tech Stuff came around, podcasting was already established, it just wasn't mainstream. But yeah, I was a listener of podcasts even into

the early days. Not quite as early as the earliest days. I came around, probably in the second wave, but um, it was interesting to go back and look into how they all got started. So enjoy. I realized that while I've talked about podcasting in an episode or two, I've never done a full episode about the history of podcasting itself. And so that's what we're going to talk about today.

We're going to look at the history of podcasting, how it evolved, how it got its name, the earliest examples of podcasts, and then we're gonna talk a little bit about the how stuff works history with podcasts, at least based upon what information I could glean from my Taciturn coworkers. So sit back, relax, and let's learn about some history, y'all. It's the stuff you missed in history of podcasting. I'm Jonathan Strickland. So this particular story is a complicated one.

It's filled with a lot of different people, a lot of different things have happened over the course of the evolution of podcasting. There are incidents and accidents, their hints and allegations. As Paul Simon would say, so let's dive in now. If you look at the story for like Go Anywhere and you look for the history of podcasting, you just type that into Google and you pull up some stuff you including an article that we have on

house top works dot com. You will frequently see that podcasting dates back to two thousand four with Adam Curry, who I remember from my childhood. He was a VJ on MTV, which used to show music videos, and that's where a lot of the histories start. They say two thousand four, Adam Curry made the first podcast, but uh, it's not entirely accurate. Actually, the story dates back before two thousand four, and it's the first podcast was not from Adam Curry, not really. So I thought we could

probably dispel some myths and learn about the truth here. Uh. And there are also a few different threads to this story, as it turns out, and one of those threads I've already covered in an episode of tech Stuff from about a year ago. I thought it was more recent than that, but as I was looking through the archives to pull up my notes, I realized that I my notes dated from two thousand and sixteen about the history of the MP three standard and This just shows how bad I

am at being able to keep track of time. I was convinced that I had done the MP three episode maybe a month or two ago, and it is August as I record this now. I'm not gonna go over all of the history of the MP three standard again, because it's all there in that episode. But I'm going to give you the cliffs Notes version. Our cliffs Notes still thing. Someone tell me if cliffs notes still exist. I'm pretty sure I've asked that in a previous episode,

but i've I've clearly forgotten again. Anyway, I'm gonna give you a summary of what I talked about that previous episode. A research institution in Germany formed a group that dedicated itself to developing compressions strategies for digital audio files. So a raw audio file, if you didn't compress it at all, it represents a pretty decent amount of digital information. It obviously depends upon how long the audio track is. Right, the more the more information is there, the longer the file,

the larger the file size will be. So a three minute song is going to have more information packed into it than say a minute of quiet room tone. So you've got this fairly large amount of data, especially for the time that we're talking about, which was late nineteen seventies early nineties, there was a need to find a way to compress that data down so it didn't take up as much space, and that then you could transmit it over various media like telephone lines. And that's what

this group in Germany was trying to do. They wanted to be able to transmit digital audio over telephone lines, but in order to make it efficient, they needed to find a compression strategy or else the files were just gonna be too large. Now these days, while the file side haven't really changed, I mean, the raw audio is still what it is, we definitely have much faster throughput, Like we're able to send a lot more information in a shorter amount of time than what we used to

be able to do. So it's not as big a deal today unless you're talking about just trying to store a ton of audio on a relatively small storage device. But back in the nineteen seventies and eighties, this was a pretty tough challenge. Now, whether they were successful or not in creating a compression strategy that makes the file sizes smaller without affecting the audio quality depends upon a

couple of things. For one, it depends upon your sense of hearing, because some people are more sensitive to it than others, and for one person it may sound perfectly fine, and another person may say, no, I can hear all sorts of problems from the compression in that audio. For another, it depends on the settings of the compression itself. You can compress it at different rate, and that will determine

how how much it affects the audio file itself. Broadly speaking, their compression strategy was to create what was essentially a virtual ear approach, in which a computer program would analyze audio an attempt to remove extraneous data. In other words, it was looking for any sounds that would lay outside the typical range of human hearing and then chuck those sounds out because people wouldn't be able to hear them anyway.

So any sound that was at a frequency above or below what your typical human can hear, that would be removed because you wouldn't be able to hear it anyway. Sometimes it would be sounds that might be a soft sound that follows a very loud sound, because that loud sound would mask the softer sound, and if we can't hear the softer sound, then there's no reason to include it,

at least according to this compression strategy. And that was a way of getting rid of information in so that you could compress everything together and make smaller file sizes. So really the goal was just to keep only the data that humans would really be able to perceive. And it took some time for them to tweak this and make sure that they could come up with an algorithm that worked and didn't result in a really choppy, unpleasant

audio experience. So, depending upon how you set your compression rates, you might manage to reduce a file size and not notice a huge difference in quality, or you might end up with something that is truly unlistenable. If you remember, the people working on the MP three standard back in the day would use Tom's Diner as a way of measuring their success, and they said that the first few times they tried to make a compression formula, it turned

Tom's Diner into an unlistenable mess. Some of the uncharitable among us might claim that the completely uncomp rest version of Tom's Diner is an unlistenable mess, but that's that's just being mean. Spirited. I would say the MP three would later make podcasting practical, but it was not a quick leap from m P three's too podcasts. There was a good amount of time between the development of the MP three and the rise of the podcast But the MP three development sort of leads us into other things

that will eventually allow podcast to become a reality. Now let's skip ahead to the early nineties. The development of the MP three largely happened in the eighties, but didn't really start making a debut until the nineties. Anyway, the mainstream world was scratching its head over something called the Internet in those early nineties. Before then, the only people who really had access to the Internet were academics, government officials, and scientists who had been using it for quite some time.

But the rest of us really didn't have any exposure to it. It was not something thing that your average person had any access to. Your average Joe hadn't really had any contact with it at all. Computer hobbyists had been cutting their teeth on bulletin board systems or bbs is. Now these were message boards and file repositories that typically sat on someone's spare computer. So with your very basic

bulletin board system. The way it would work is you would have a phone number and that phone number would go to the modem connected to this other computer, the computer that houses the BBS. You would use your computer to dial into that number that would connect you to this other BBS, and you would then be able to browse the files that have been uploaded to that particular directory for the BBS, play games, leave messages, that kind

of thing because you're dialing in. Typically a lot of those smaller BBS has had maybe one phone line, sometimes up to three, where that's how many people could connect to anyone time. So there were various ways to discourage people from spending too much time on the BBS and thus keeping it busy for everybody else. For example, UH, some of them would charge for a certain amount of time, like after a certain number of minutes had passed, you

would have to pay to keep access to the BBS. UH. Some would just have a time limit and after that the when you hit your time limit, it would just kick you off and you would have to wait another day to be able to log back into your BBS. Eventually, you had some BBS is on what was called Fido Net. This was a network that allowed bbs is to exchange information with each other. So it's almost like post offices.

Think about going to a post office and you would drop a letter off, and that letter would then be sent to another post office, someone else's BBS and they can receive it. That was kind of the world before the Internet had really taken off, and the Internet really is a different beast altogether. Instead of dialing into a single machine and browsing what was on that machine, you

could suddenly connect to a network of networked machines. In something very important happened in the United States, the Federal Communications Commission the f c C made an important decision that encouraged explosive growth on the Internet. That that decision was, they're going to lift some restrictions. Up until there was a restriction on commercial uses for the Internet. You you weren't allowed to use it for commercial purposes. It was meant for research, it was meant for government use, and

that was it. But in ninety one, the f c C said we're lifting those restrictions, and it became the Wild West for a while where lots of companies said, I'm not sure how we can use this to our advantage, but I'm sure it's huge and we have to use it to our advantage. So there were a lot of different parties rushing into the space because now it was possible to make a commercial use of it, but no one had really figured out how to actually do that yet.

There was a lot of competition to try and figure out how can we dominate this space, and no one really had the answer yet. So how did this affect Internet use? Well, before the FCC lifted restrictions, there were around one thousand Internet hosts connected to this network of networks. There were more than a million Internet hosts. But for our story, the important bit is that people and companies

could launch commercial interests in the Internet, including radio stations. Now, Carl Malamud gets the credit for being the first person to launch an Internet radio site, and this was called Internet Talk Radio. Malamud launched this show in and he launched it with a program called Geek of the Week.

You can actually find recordings of some of those old episodes online and they tiply feature various important people in the computer and text spheres, and Malamouda would just interview them about whatever subject they wanted to talk about, and those were the programs that went out live on the Internet. On June, the band Severe Tire Damage became the first musical act to perform a concert on Internet radio. Their

show went out over mbone. It's the letter M as in merry and bone, B, O and E. That stands for multicast backbone, or it's actually a protocol that sat on top of the multicast backbone, which made it feasible to send data to multiple viewers around the world simultaneously. So I thought it would be helpful to understand how this works. Generally speaking, I p multicasting involves setting up a great big convoy, and more specifically, it has to

do with packets. So the Internet sends information in packets. Anytime there's data passing between computers on the Internet, you're generally talking about packets that are going back and forth. And a packet is a unit of data and it includes a few types of information within that packet. So the first type of that information is the data that's

necessary to deliver it to the right destination. So you've got these sort of headers and footers inside of a packet, you know, at the very top and the very bottom of the packet, that helps tell the Internet system at large where that packet needs to go. It's essentially like the address you would find on an envelope in the post office. So the packets have that part of the information. They also have the payload, the actual data that they're

carrying to the destination. Let's say it's a web page. It would be a little part of that web page, would be a small portion of the web page. And then you have a third part, which is uh the way that that packet fits in with other packets to complete whatever that payload is. So again, in the case of a web page, let's say you're going to how stuff works dot com, and just for the sake of this example, we're just gonna use a nice round, simple

number of one hundred packets. It takes one packets to load up the home page of how stuff works dot com. Those headers and footers will tell the packets where they need to go, which would be your browser because you're the one who typed in www dot how stuff works dot com. And they also tell your browser how they all fit together so that it can construct the website

and you can see it on your side. On the client side of this exchange, Uh, packets tend to be relatively small, so you typically need a lot of them to deliver any information of significant size. This brings us to that third type, that that bit of information that says, hey, I'm the puzzle piece that goes in the top right corner. It's not exactly how it works, but it's a decent enough analogy to kind of understand what's going on. Now, why would you send data and packets. Why wouldn't you

just send the entire piece all at once. It's meant to be a way to ensure the delivery of information, and by dividing it up into packets, you can actually make a better case for that information, making it to where you wanted to go. If you're sending it all out as one big file, one thing that can happen is it can slow everything down because depending on the size of the file, it might start to tax certain parts of the system, and if it fails, you're you've

got to send it all over again. It just becomes a big nightmare. So the founders of the Internet, who as we all know, put the Internet on top of Big ben because that's where it gets the best reception, figured that by breaking information up into packets and sending them along the network, you had a better chance of actually receiving the information you wanted. And the reason for

that is twofold. It's redundancy, and packet switching. Redundancy means that a server is sending out multiple copies of the same packet to make sure that one of them gets to their destination. So this is kind of like if you had critical message and you've got you make three copies of it and you send a copy each with

a different messenger and they all rush out. Well, that means that you're more likely to get your message to where it needs to go, because even if one of them fails along the way, you have three others going. Remember us at three copies, so you have one original, that's four total, so one of them is likely to get there. So that way you can send those writers off to gone door to let them know the row

end is coming out to help them or something. Packet switching is the method of sending the packets themselves, and this involves each packet taking its own path. Typically it's whichever path is the most efficient for that packet at that time for it to get to its destination and packets that all belong to the same document or file can travel very different pathways. So if you go and you're trying to pull up how supports dot com, the packets that represent that web page could be taking very

different paths in order to get to your computer. Remember, the network is this network of networks. It can be bouncing from all sorts of different machines before it finally gets to you. The destination computer then assembles all those packets back into the document or file or whatever it may be. And this is really cool because it means

that the Internet is really robust. If nodes on the Internet go offline for whatever reason, if if certain computers between you and the computer you're trying to get information from go down, well the packets can route around that. They don't come up to like a sinkhole in the middle of the road and say well, we wanted to

get there, but we can't. No, they can take a different pathway, and you just have to make sure that you are, you know, having that redundancy there, which, by the way, you don't have to do t C P

I P does it for you. But as long as that's in place with the redundancy, you don't even have to worry if some of those packets somehow lose their way for whatever reason, whatever it may be, you'll likely end up getting the information you asked for, may not be as fast as you wanted, depending upon the problems, but you'll get it. So back to Inbone, it's a little different from the approach I just mentioned. The basic packet switching strategy works great for static files and pages.

So if I have a photograph and I want to send that information across to some other computer, it works great for that. Photographs don't change. It's gonna be the same photograph no matter what, so it's very easy to send that. And now I'm not talking about photo editing software here, obviously, I'm just talking about sending an image.

But if you want to send something like a video where you have stuff constantly changing both the image and the audio, or even more so live video which is persistently changing and you're not sure when it's going to end, another approach was pretty important. So broadcast represents this ongoing creation of information, and how do you disseminate that across

the network? Inbone would keep all the packets together, like packed together like a like a convoy, as I said earlier, until the last possible moment before they would split up and move through different routers and go through the rest of its journey. So it's more like a fire hose approach in the first half until you get to a point where you absolutely have to split things up because

they will not get to their destination otherwise. This allows for a more efficient transmission of live content, and it helped make sure that those packets would arrive at their destinations at more or less the same time, because you want it to be like a broadcast. You want the people who are watching it to all have the same experience that around the same time. Otherwise you could end up in a situation where one person is watching the concert on a slight delay and someone else might be

more than a minute or two behind. And this does still happen, by the way, I can't tell you how many times I've watched the w w E network and have been in a Facebook chat about what was going on with a pay per view, only to have someone's boil something for me because I was lagging a bit behind the rest of the live feed for everybody else. But that's the price we pay for this amazing technology.

Xerox Park was the group that created the inbone extension and the Internet Engineering Task Force adopted it in nineteen two, so it was all well in place for the Internet Radio Days of nine and Severe Tire Damage performed at Xerox Park. You remember, Xerox Park is also the research and development area where we got things like the graphic user interface and the computer mouse, as well as a ton of other stuff. A lot of interesting research and

development came out of Xerox. So their audience Severe Tire Damage for this initial concert pretty much consisted of a

dude in Australia, which is really true. There was a researcher in Australia who was helping along with this project and he was the intended audience for the Severe Tire Damage concert of In slightly more famous band called the Rolling Stones performed their first live concert on the Internet, and cheekily, Severe tire Damage performed a set just before The Rolling Stones were scheduled to go on and then they put their set out over the Internet, this time

broadcast to the Internet at large. So Severe Tire Damage said, we were happy to open for the Rolling Stones, even though we're not in the same city as the Rolling Stones, and that was kind of making a point saying you could now have this sort of experience where people from different parts of the world could address an audience in a sequence and they didn't have to be in the same place at the same time. The Rolling Stones, for

their part, were pretty good natured about it. I think at first they called him weird furry guys from from uh Palo Alto, California. But they also said to The New York Times that it was a good reminder of the democratic nature of the Internet. There was a college radio station called w x y C still Is that became the first terrestrial radio station to start broadcasting on

the Internet. They began their simulcast in the fall of n now They first started off with their off air signals using a Cornell University utility called see You See Me. On November seven, the radio station became the first to simulcast it's broadcast live over the air and on the Internet. A few months later, w R. E. K reck Over

at Georgia Tech went live with its simulcast technology. And it's kind of interesting because they had actually hooked up their Internet client on November seven, which was the same day w x y C went live, but it would take a few more months before Georgia Tech Broadcast hit the Internet, and since then tons of different university and then commercial radio stations as well as public radio have

joined on and used the Internet for broadcast. Now we're gonna take a quick break, but when we come back, we're going to talk about how this technology of streaming radio gradually gave people the idea of creating sort of an episodic content that would be digestible in a downloadable format and thus eventually evolve into podcast But first, let's

take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Okay, So streaming radio was now available online, and to listen to any streaming radio station you needed to use an audio player, Real Audio and other companies were making software that would allow you to listen to audio over the Internet. But what about podcasts? Well, jumping back to that's when a Canadian science news program called Quirks and Works hit the Internet.

The radio show had been airing on terrestrial radio since nineteen Each show lasts about an hour and consists of segments about science, news and interesting facts. The Internet versions were recorded episodes stored in MP three format available for download, and this would become really important later on. Similarly, in CNN launched its Internet newsroom, and the company began to make shows available for download and included an updated compilation file.

This too would become really important later on. Meanwhile, a guy named Jim Logan had founded a company called Personal Audio. According to Alan Martin of a l phr dot com, so we're gonna call it Alpha. Personal Audio's original goal was to create a digital audio playing device, but that didn't work out. However, in the process of trying to make this happen, the company had filed four and been awarded several pat dealing with digital audio distribution on the Internet.

And this would be around the mid nineties, nine six and later, and this also becomes incredibly important. That's a lot of foreshadowing right there. Some of you are way ahead of me on this, I'm sure of it, but let's get back to the nineties. Over the next few years, the MP three file format began to gain popularity, and in nineteen nine, Napster became perhaps the best known of the peer to peer networks that made sharing MP three's across computers incredibly easy. And while I would never say

that Napster caused piracy. It definitely made it a lot easier to do. You could rip tracks off of a disk with one of a dozen different programs. So you buy a CD or you get a CD, you put it in your computer, you pull the music off of it, convert those files into MP three format, store them on a drive on your computer, download the Napster interface, and then you could authorize Napster to use that particular draw I've to share all those files, and the music industry

got really scared. So in short, the way peer to peer works is that you have some software that allows your computer to direct directly connect in to a network of other computers running that same software. And this network is constantly changing, with some computers being connected and some computers going offline. It all depends on who's using their

computer for what. And you can search that network to see if there are any copies of a particular type of file you want, and when you download, you can

actually download from multiple sources at the same time. So if there's one source that is particularly slow because of whatever reason, maybe there's some problems like there's congestion and the internet between you and that particular server, then you can start getting packets from other servers that also have that same file, and it's all decentralized, and it was a very quick way to spread files across and there's nothing illegal about that, right You can you can spread

any sort of file you like, and if you have the legal authorization to distribute that file, then peer to peer networks are completely valid. The problem was a lot of people were using them to spread m P three's that did not technically belong to them. Maybe they had bought an album and then they uploaded or they rather made available all of the tracks off that album and so people could get it for free. Well that's not great.

It's kind of violating copyright law, and it it helped precipitate an era in which we saw crazy amounts of work in digital rights management, and it was not a bright and shining moment in Internet history. That being said, there are so many valid reasons to use peer to peer.

It's a real shame that Napster and other peer to peer platforms are forever associate ned with this concept of piracy, just because that was a pretty big use for a lot of these networks, and it got a lot of press around this same time, we also started seeing MP three players popping up. Now, the earliest players were pieces of software running on your computer, not exactly convenient for on the go listening. I did a couple of episodes about the history of MP three players, including the rise

of the iPod. So again I'm not going to go into it too much, but Apple's iPod really helped push MP three's even further into the mainstream, and the iPod became the device most associated with this relatively new form of consuming audio simultaneously. So much is happening that's important to podcasting. We got the birth of the RSS feed. Now RSS stands for well, it depends upon whom you ask. It could stand for rich site summary, or maybe it

stands for really simple syndicate sation. It just depends upon the authority you're asking at the time. But whatever it stands for, what it does is pretty cool. It is a format for delivering updated content to people. So in the old days, you go on the web, and web pages were pretty darn static. If you went to a web page one day and you looked at it, chances are the next day it was going to look exactly the same way. There were not that many dynamically changing

web pages. It just wasn't very easy to do and there wasn't much call for it. But over time we started building in more functionality on the web. We started creating more dynamic elements, and that created a new problem. How could you, as a user know if your favorite websites have been updated. You could go and check them every single day and look for differences, or you could use rs S and RSS was this set of rules that people running these websites could use. They could incorporate

it into their website. You could then subscribe to that website and anytime there was a change, that change would get reflected in your RSS aggregator. You would open up your aggregator and it would give you kind of like headlines of the latest changes that had happened in the pages that you are subscribed to. So once you were able to do that, it really transformed the browsing experience. You no longer had to do all this legwork yourself and just have your laundry list of websites that you

visit every single day. You could actually take a quick look at your RSS aggregator and see if there's any reason to go to that website well. That RSS model would later become helpful to podcasts. It could alert podcatching services and users to new episodes as they joined the list, removing the need to visit the home page of the program. And there was a way of enclosing audio files that would be developed a little bit later, and that really sealed the deal. All of this was happening around to

the early two thousand's. In December two thousands, a software develop br named Dave Winer found himself in an unlikely partnership with Adam Curry that former MTV v j I mentioned earlier, and they were trying to adapt the RSS

feed so that it could include audio. So Weiner was the guy who created that modification for RSS, and he demonstrated it in early by using it to enclose a song by The Grateful Dead, and he put it in a blog he was writing, so people who were following his blog were subscribed to it could immediately get access to that song. And while this provided the skeletal structure upon which podcasts would be built, very few people were

actually using it back then. In September two thousand three, Winer adapted his approach on behalf of a colleague named Christopher Leiden over at the Harvard Brookman Center, and Lydon really wanted to create an interview show with audio tracks saved in the MP three format. He was thinking of it as like an audio blog, so he's regularly interviewing people and uploading those files, and he wanted there to

be a way for people to subscribe to it. He was interviewing bloggers, futurists, and political figures, and this would eventually become a show called Radio Open Source and is, by most accounts, the first actual podcast, though at the time it wasn't called a podcast. So if you hear the Adam Curry had the very first podcast and it

launched in two thousand four. Just know that two thousand three saw Christopher Leiden's show Radio Open Source, and by all measures, that really was a podcast, It just didn't have the name yet. Later in two thousand three, and influential jet named Kevin Marks whipped up some interesting technological wizardry in connection with the two thousand three Blogger Cohn event.

He showed off a program that could take the audio files housed in an RSS enclosure and transfer them automatically over to Apple's iTunes and then you can use the iTunes management software to synchronize to an i hot Now, remember, in these days, you had to physically connect an iPod to a computer and use iTunes to transfer music across the cable to your iPod. There's no wireless way of doing this yet. The iPod had no access to the

iTunes store directly. You had to download things or rip things from your music collection directly to iTunes and the import those things from iTunes over to your iPod or other m P three player. I had a creative zen back then and I used it with iTunes and it was a headache, but it would kind of work. But this was huge, this approach to having this automatic conversion and something that I don't think Apple necessarily anticipated when

it built in the synchronization capability and iTunes. The purpose for the feature was convenience. So let's say you've got a decent music collection and you put all your songs over on iTunes and you want them to transfer those songs to your brand spanking new iPod. That's not so difficult to do the first time, though it can take a while. You just connect your iPod to iTunes and say, all right, I want all these files to be moved over. But then later on, let's say you add more music

to your library. So how do you add that to your iPod. You've already got a music library on your iPod, You've got new songs in your iTunes library on your computer. How do you get those two to match up again? Well, one thing you could do is individually move those files over, but that's gonna take a while. You could try and highlight them in a batch, but that's kind of irritating.

So Apple built in this function where you could have synchronization turned on and if you plugged your iPod into your computer with your iTunes library, it would automatically pull any new tracks, anything that had been added after the last time your iPod had been synchronized and add them to your iPods library, so you didn't have to wait and do it all manually. That was the secret that was able to you know, they were able to use to make this automatic updating for podcasts or what would

become podcasts. But again, I don't think Apple was necessarily thinking that when they included that feature. Kevin Marks was able to take it and turn into something really useful for people who wanted to create this episodic audio content. Now, Adam Curry would make a piece of code available that would automate this RSS and closed audio to iTunes process to his blog visitors, and it's called I Potter, I believe,

is what the script was named. And he also began to contact other bloggers who are interested in using audio to reach an audience in this same sort of way. On February eleven, two thousand four, The Guardian published an article titled Audible Revolution. It was written by Ben Hammersley, and he was writing about the use of the Internet as a means to distribute audio content. And in that piece Hammersley asks, quote, but what to call it? Audio blogging, podcasting,

guerrilla media end quote? And so this may very well be the origin of the term podcasting. Now it's possible that the word podcasting had been mentioned by someone before, but this is the earliest piece in writing that I can find that mentions that term, and it happened at that point entered into the general conversation about audio distribution

through the Internet. On September two thousand four, Danny J. Gregoire used the term podcaster in a discussion about the technical issues surrounding publishing and distributing podcasts, and this section in which he said this would go like this. Here's a quote. I can see there being the desire of users in some instances to be able to easily subscribe and get older posts slash episode slash shows. What are

we calling these things? Any way? How about pode or sewed for short that no longer appear on the RSS feed right now? If, for example, someone wanted to listen to all the daily source codes back to sewed number one, they would have to manually go through the archives and download any seds not automagically received, somewhat defeating the purpose

of an I potter. Not too much of a problem now, But I guess one could argue that this is simply an RSS slash server side issue, and that the podcaster, yes, I like making up new words, should be responsible enough to offer a page of separate feeds of old sods by month slash year, slash, season, slash etcetera. End quote.

So he also used the word podcaster. Two days later, in the Evil Genius Chronicles podcast, Dave Slusher had this to say, somebody has registered podcasting dot net and I saw a podcaster or podcaster dot net, and I saw a podcaster hitting as a user against hitting my RSS feed and I went and looked at it. And right now it's just a coming soon page, but I'm going to pay attention to that. I want to see who's got that and what they're going, what they're doing with

that term. I think they've coined the term, so iPod platform just doesn't spring from the tongue. But what I'm doing right here, and what Adams doing meaning Adam Curry, and what Dave Winer is doing, and what I T Conversations are doing, that's podcasting. I think that is the term. I'm using that from here on out. You know, so I am a podcaster and they are podcasters, and I am podcasting right now, and you listen to my podcast.

The name stuck. That's an understatement and it's something that we all know because you wouldn't be listening to this if it didn't. In November two thousand four, Libson launched l I B S. White End. This was the first podcast service provider and it still exists to this day. I've actually used it. It's pretty pretty useful, pretty easy to use, not totally intuitive, but not difficult and these services make it easier for podcasters to get their content

up online. They handle all the RSS feeds and all the technical side of things. All you have to do is fill out a few fields and then you can start uploading your content to the service, where we'll host your files and make them available for various podcatching services. Later on, in February two thive, Public Radio International launched The World, which was the first daily public radio news podcast.

The next month, March two thousand five, the Public radio show on the Media would become the first to also be distributed as a podcast in full. In April two thousand five, Leo Laporte, who had worked in traditional media for years as a technology news communicator, a reviewer, and an educator, formed This Week in Tech, a network also known as twit. This would become one of the first podcast networks in the world. In other words, it became

the umbrella to multiple shows in podcast format. On June six, two thousand five, iTunes four point nine launched with a podcast directory added to the iTunes Music store, and this made it much easier for iTunes users to find and download episodes, and it became really important to podcasters that they get their shows onto Apples directory because that was

the place to be. That's where most people were getting their podcasts from in those days, so if you weren't showing up an Apple's directory, it felt like you were missing out on the people who would otherwise be able to subscribe to your show. This move also forced a different company to change its course, and that company was called Odeo o d e O. Odio's purpose originally was to create a podcasting directory as well as a suite

of tools for creating podcasts. It was poised to launch in the summer of two thousand five, but then Apple got into the game with podcasting, and the people at Odeo saw the writing on the wall. There just was no way they were going to compete against Apple in that space, So rather than abandoned ship entirely, they decided to change what their company was going to do, and

they also ditched the name. Instead, Odeo would become a company that would allow people to send out little messages to their friends using SMS messaging or a web client, and that's how Twitter was born. Yep, Twitter exists because of iTunes sort of. In August two five, NPR officially got into the podcast game. Making show segments available as

podcast downloads. So while their rise in popularity a few years later makes it seem like they were latecomers to podcasting, the fact is they were around in some of those earliest days. The New Oxford American Dictionary would name podcast as their word of the year on December third, two thousand five, and the following year podcast would become a

new word in the dictionary. We've got a lot more to talk about to wrap up, and actually to talk about some of the other influential podcasts that came out in those early years. But before we do that, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. So in two thousand six, Edison Research held a survey to find out how many people were aware of podcasting in general. So two thousand six is still early days for podcasting,

and the survey bears it out. According to their report, twenty two of Americans who responded to this survey said they had heard about podcasting, but only half as many only eleven percent, had ever actually listened to a podcast. And this is why, in those early days of doing tech stuff, just a couple of years later, I found it really challenging to explain to people what it was I was doing. I'd say things like, yeah, it's an audio show, kind of like a radio show. No, no,

it's not. It's not on the radio. It's it's on the internet. No no, no, you you don't. You don't stream it, you download it and then you then you listen to it on an iPod or like an NP three player. I've had that kind of conversation so many times. Well, in February two thousand six, Wait Wait Don't Tell Me becomes nbr's first full program podcast, which means I've been a subscriber for more than a decade. Wow. Before that, NBR had been uploading segments of shows, but not entire episodes.

So wait, Wait Don't tell Me. It was kind of their experiment what would happen if they allowed an entire show that would go out on NPR to also be downloaded as a podcast. As it turns out, people would go bunkers for it. That really showed up when they started doing this American Life. Also that month, in February two thousand and six, the Ricky Gervais Show entered the gain US Book of World Records as the most downloaded podcast in history. Though, come on, be fair. Two thousand

six is pretty early in the podcast game. I mean, I hadn't even started tech Stuff yet, and it could have waited a bit, to be honest. That record would be broken later on, in the spring of two thousand seven, Jack and Stench start a subscription based podcast at five dollars per month per subscription. The Jack and Stinch Show grew out of a radio program called Jamie Jack and Stinch.

Their radio company had canceled their show, so they were out of a job, and that's when the creators decided that they were gonna they were gonna try and make a listener supported series and see if they can make it work. And it turns out it did work. They're still podcasting today and it's still five dollars per month or cents per show, as they say on their website. Other subscription based shows would soon follow, and so you began to see a few different ways to monetize podcasts.

There were these listeners supported shows through subscriptions or later on through platforms like Patreon. Then there are sponsors supported shows such as tech Stuff, where we monetized by having ads in our shows. There's also fully sponsored content in which a company will pay for a full episode of a program, so there are a few different ways to make money from podcasting, though I'd say the vast majority of podcasters out there aren't really making a big profit

from it. On April two thousand eight, Josh Clark and Chris Palette became Internet superstars forever and ever when the very first episode of Stuff You Should Know published. That is our most popular podcast here at how Stuff Works dot com and Stuff you Should Know the very first episode April two thousand eight, Chuck was not a co host yet, it was my former editor Chris Polette. The topic they covered was how grass aline works and the

show was just nine minutes long. Those are the episodes saw Josh work with a couple of different potential co hosts. So there was Chris Palette and there was also Candice, who would later go on to be one of the original hosts of Stuff You Missed in History Class, which, by the way, it was originally called Factor Fiction. Chuck Bryant would join Josh for the episode why does Toothpaste

make orange Juice Taste Bad? Which published on May two thousand eight, and the charisma between the two hosts was undeniable. Josh and Chuck would become the definitive voices of stuff you should know, and they still are today, and they sit on either side of me. Chuck's on my right,

Josh is on my left. Other house stuff works shows that launched around that same time, where Brain Stuff, which originally featured our founder Marshall Brain giving short explanations of interesting stuff, and then stuff you Missed in History Class, which, as I said before, started life as Factor fiction. And there there was a little show called tech Stuff, tiny

little show that you're listening to right now. The first official episode of tech Stuff because we recorded a few that never published, a bunch of test episodes so that we can get used to being on the microphone, and they were bad and we should feel bad. I don't think they exist anymore. I'm pretty sure there's no existing recording of those early episodes, or I would release them.

Why not, I would be I would group them together and say, you want to listen to what the show sounded like back in two thousand and eight, because this is it. So the first official episode went live on June tenth, two thousand eight, and that episode was called how the Google Apple Cloud Computer Will Work. The less said about that, the better podcasts continued to grow in popularity, and podcast networks also began to grow. And then we flashed back to that story I mentioned about Personal Audio.

Back in the ninety nineties, a company, Personal Audio LLC. Was what some people called a patent holding company. Me the company was in the business of making money from the patents it held. It didn't make anything else. It didn't offer any services, it didn't offer any products. It had these patents. Now, there are a couple of different ways you can make money with patents, and they are

completely viable. One of this is to license your patent and designed two interested parties, And again there's nothing wrong with that. So let's say I come up with a really cool idea on how to do something, and I patent that idea and then let companies know, Hey, if you want to do this thing in this cool way that I thought of, just come on over to me and we'll make a deal. Will you'll pay a licensing fee,

I allow you to use my method. Everything will be cool until the patent expires, in which case it becomes public property. Or you could go another route, which involves just sitting on your patents and looking around and then suing people who appeared to be using your patent did ideas, Then you can either win money through a lawsuit or, as is more common, reach a settlement agreement where a

company will pay you for using that patented idea. Lawsuits are really expensive, and often you'll find parties willing to settle out of court just to avoid risking a full, full blown court battle where even if you win, it's expensive, but if you don't win, it's even more expensive. Well, Personal Audio had sued Apple a couple of times in an East Texas court over patents involving playlists Why East Texas.

Personal Audio claimed it had an office nast Texas, but a lot of different technology journalists said that that office was essentially empty and really was just connected to their patent lawyer's office. I don't know if that's true or not, but that's how it was reported, and that to East Texas was known as being a very favorable court when it came to patent litigation. It was very favorable towards patent holders. So in Personal Audio sued several parties, including

Adam Carolla and how Stuff Works, among others. Although technically they were going after Discovery because How Stuff Works was owned by Discovery at that time. The claim was that Personal Audio held the patented approach that these other podcasts were using to distribute audio over the web, and then a long legal battle followed. Now I was in the dark throughout the entire process, for which I am thankful. I only learned about developments after they had hit the

news cycle. The Electronic Frontier Foundation got involved. The e f F and they're very much a a consumer based organization that tries to look out for protections against corporations encroaching upon the Internet. They view the Internet as a public utility that should be UH, should be accessible by all, and that no company should have this kind of of

leverage over it. So the tech news sites did some digging and made some allegations about Personal Audio about UH, the fact that the company had not ever produced a podcast, nor ever planned to do so, and so a lot of people were throwing around the words patent troll about Personal Audio. That's not my place to say, but the

courts did ultimately find in favor of the podcasters. This was after Personal Audio had already started to back off from the lawsuits, not because the company was saying they didn't have a case. They said, no, we've got a case. There's just no money in podcasting, so no one could pay us, which was kind of like a back end its slap against podcasters. I mean, I can't necessarily disagree with him. There's not a whole lot of money in podcasting for for the vast majority of podcasters out there.

You gotta do it because you love it, and maybe you wind up finding a profitable approach to it. It does happen, but it's hard to do. Now, it turns out that all of that was moot because there have been further UH lawsuits. The e f F pursued a claim that the patents that Personal Audio was depending upon are invalid, and that has gone to court, and that ended up being decided in the favor of e f

and against Personal Audio. So there's you know, some of those examples I was talking about earlier, like Quirks and Quirks and Malamud's Internet talk radio platform, we're exhibiting features that were described in the Personal Audio patent. Now, that patent that they were really relying upon in this particular case was filed in two thousand nine, but it was given a priority date of N and this does happen

in patent law. If you have filed for certain patents and you have a later patent that you feel is derivative of a previous one, and you want that effective date to be early earlier than what you're filing it for, you can appeal for a priority date, and they did and they got it. It was in but the examples of Quirks and Quirks and internet talk radio predated N and that led the court to rule that the patent was invalid as it was describing something that had already existed.

So the case went to the Court of Appeals and the Court of Appeals upheld that ruling. So as of the recording of this podcast, there's been no word if Personal Audio will pursue this to the Supreme Court, because they could it could go that next step, but two courts so far have said, you know, there's evidence here that this stuff existed before you described it in your patent, and you can't patent an idea that already exists. I hope you guys enjoyed this episode of the history of podcasting.

If you have any suggestions for future episodes, send me a message You can send it to me via Twitter or Facebook. The handle for both is tech stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.