10 years of podcasting: Code, comedy, and patent lawsuits

A decade ago today—August 13, 2004—former MTV VJ Adam Curry spoke these words, recorded in his car in rural Belgium while driving to the Netherlands:

“Well, good morning everybody, and welcome to the Daily Source Code. Thank you very much for taking the time to download this MP3 file. Some of you may have received it overnight as an enclosure in your aggregator. In that case, thanks for subscribing. So first what I’d like to do is to explain exactly what this is, and what the Daily Source Code is going to be.”

Now, Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code (DSC) was not the very first podcast ever recorded. That honor belongs to Christopher Lydon, who recorded one back in July 2003. (Amazingly, Lydon is still going strong with Radio Open Source, which now exists as both a podcast and a public radio show on WBUR in Boston.)

Still, Curry's DSC remains an important early marker in the history of podcasting. It was created essentially as a proof of concept for Curry’s first foray into software development, utilizing an Apple Script designed to pull audio enclosures off RSS and then synch them via iTunes to an iPod. That became iPodder, one of the first “podcatchers.” It was inspired by Winer's blogging software, Radio UserLand, which was the first to debut this feature to send and receive RSS enclosures. This "podcatching" feature has since been incorporated into iTunes, rendering iPodder and its ilk obsolete.

And tech aside, the DSC was an iconic podcast. At the time, Wired reported that when Curry promoted a new podcast, “downloads double for the show he mentions.” In its heyday, DSC may have been something analogous to the 1950s-era Ed Sullivan Show—ambitious and popular but almost simple and quaint when measured by modern media standards.

While podcasting hasn’t yet become as massive as other media, it’s made its mark on the popular culture landscape despite being the baby of the group. A 2014 study from Pew Research shows that podcasting appears to have leveled off after its first decade—the number of Americans who have “ever” listened to an audio podcast was down slightly from 29 percent in 2012 to 27 percent in 2013. Today, fifteen percent of the United States population still listens to podcasts weekly, according to a survey of over 2,000 Americans by Edison Research. If true, that would be around 48 million people in the US alone.

“It’s getting to the point where once my producer Nick said, ‘Have you ever tried to explain what podcasting is to your dentist?’” Jesse Thorn, the founder of the Maximum Fun podcast network, told Ars. “It’s getting to the point where you don’t have to explain it. It’s not quite all the way there, but it’s almost there.”

"There's a big sticky problem in the way"

While audio distributed online long predates podcasting (hello, Usenet!), having an automated way to get regular audio content to a portable device is really what separates podcasting from its predecessors.

In this regard, it took a few years for podcasting to go from concept to launch. In October 2000, Tristan Louis, a developer on the XML development e-mail list, suggested something resembling an enclosure to the upcoming 0.92 version of Real Simple Syndication (RSS), Dave Winer’s now-ubiquitous XML-based format for delivering updates of Web content.

It was around that same time that Curry, independently, started thinking about how to deliver audio and video content to people with some of the earliest forms of broadband.

“I had an idea as to how we could use these always-on but rather slow connections for large media files,” he told Ars. “To have some kind of subscription-based service that would be alerted when there was a new episode and that would download at night during your unused cycles. There was no click-and-wait, that sucked. Now the idea was just like the nightly news: it didn’t just happen, it was taped [hours] ago. When it comes in and you’re alerted, you click and it plays immediately—there’s some satisfaction.”

This was in the early days of broadband in the United States—when only around 1.5 million Americans even had DSL—and only five percent of home Internet users had broadband. Sometime in October 2000, Curry met Winer in person in New York and pitched his idea for making this tweak to RSS to include audio or video elements.

As Winer wrote at the time:

Adam wants the Internet to be Everyman's broadcast medium, to route around TV and radio broadcast networks, with no compromise in quality. Now if this were easy, or the solution obvious, we'd already be doing it. But there's a big sticky problem in the way, the pipes don't seem big enough.

Believe me, I know about that. I have a relatively slow DSL connection. If I download a multi-megabyte QuickTime movie, it can take five minutes for less than a minute's worth of video. So it's hardly ever worth it to me to click on a video link.

“He had to beat me over the head to get me to listen to the idea,” Winer told Ars in a recent interview. “The whole idea of video on the Internet didn’t interest me due to the latency problem. At the time I thought video and audio whatever, the pipes were small. The whole idea of waiting for the thing to download would not be worth the wait. I had written off the idea at first—it took me a few times to listen. If those barriers are there for me [as a software developer], you can only imagine how they were for everybody else.”

Ultimately, the technical solution of futzing with RSS to support enclosures was relatively easy, Winer said. On January 11, 2001, Winer released a Grateful Dead recording via RSS—a proto-podcast, if you will. He called it: “Payloads for RSS.” With that, the delivery mechanism was born. However, there wasn’t much of an audience for it just yet, despite the original iPod’s release in October 2001.