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• Checking out podcasts

The Digital Domain has breached the surface of the online distribution in the past regarding television, so this week we’ll be diving deeper and shifting the spotlight to focus on podcasts.  

The term “podcast” was introduced in 2004 to describe the portable listening of audio blogs and news casts, though the phenomenon had been developing since 2002 in the form of web scripts which fed audio files through iTunes to an iPod. The name was initially proposed because the iPod was easily the most accessible and popular portable device for their distribution. As more and more players emerged to compete with the iPod though, an acronym was developed around the word to describe the process and product: podcast came to stand for ‘Personal On Demand Cast,” to animate its difference from a broadcast. 

Many terrestrial radio stations are migrating their more popular content from the airwaves to internet. Of the most successful of these are public radio segments, such as Chicago Public Radio’s This American Life and National Public Radio’s Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!, which both consistently rank in iTunes' top ten downloaded podcasts.  

But the podcast format transcends direct translations from radio to the web. There are podcasts on almost any subject. Television, music, business, art, comedy, games, news, family, technology, science, literature; there are literally hundreds, if not thousands of podcasts for each.  

Though still very much in its infancy, podcasts are developing as a unique medium for delivering very user specific content, catered directly to the interests of the audience.