I had my own podcasts around this time, just me, recording by myself in the attic, and rolling my own RSS feed manually with every new episode. iOS 2.2 was released in November of 2008 and for the first time you could download podcasts over the air directly to your iPhone.įast forward a few years and in 2012 Apple finally made a dedicated Podcast app on the iPhone, which in the typical skeuomorphic design of the early oughts, was a literal reel to reel player. Once the iPhone launched in 2007 and smart phones became ubiquitous, podcasting had its chance to hit the mainstream public. Some of the earliest podcasts to gain popularity was This Week In Tech with Leo Laporte in 2005, This American Life in 2006, Marc Maron in 2009, and then podcasting began to grow! Shudders The Oxford dictionary even named the word 'podcast' the 2005 word of the year. Maybe even sync them to a Palm Treo or Blackberry if they really wanted. SO even if you didn't have an iPod, podcast creators could link to their RSS feed publicly on the web, and listeners could download those audio files directly to their computer. The iPod was the primary device for listening to podcasts for several years, and the only place to really find them was the directory held by Apple.īut the beauty of podcasting, even in the early days, was that each podcast was simply an RSS feed held in an XML file on the internet, which linked to audio files that could be downloaded for free! During that 2005 event, Steve Jobs coined the phrase by combining “iPod”, with “broadcasts.” For the next decade, podcasts, Apple, and the iPod would be inextricably linked.

We could go all the way back to the advent of radio broadcasts, but let's start our history lesson with the iPod.Īpple debuted the first iPod in 2001 and a few years later, Apple brought Podcasts into the iTunes Music Store. By the way, this video is sponsored by Buzzsprout. My hope is that even if there are big names and big companies doing the podcast thing, the small shows, the independent creators, and the open standards that made podcasts special, stick around for years to come.īut to understand why that’s in danger, let’s take a brief look at the history of podcasting. So consider this my manifesto for the future of podcasting.

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