Education in Podcasting continued...

In September 2004, Curry launched an ipodder-dev mailing list, then Slashdot had a 100+ message discussion, bringing even more attention to the ipodder developer projects in progress at SourceForge. By October 2004, detailed how-to podcast articles had begun to appear online, and a month later, liberated syndication libsyn launched what was apparently the first Podcast Service Provider, offering storage, bandwidth, and RSS creation tools.

In February, 2005 Carl Franklin, who had for the previous 2 years been publishing an audio talk show called .NET Rocks! started Pwop Productions, the first official podcast production company, which now produces podcasts for Microsoft and other companies.

Also in Feburary 2005, Australians Cameron Reilly and Mick Stanic started a Commercial Podcast Network, The Podcast network. Reilly described his vision for the network to be the Time Warner of New media. In November of 2005, they signed a Network wide sponsorship deal with Motorola.

Precursor
Prior to the Internet, in the 1970s, RCS, Radio Computing Services, provided music and talk related software to radio stations in a digital format. Prior to online music digital distribution, the midi format as well as the Mbone, Multicast Network was used to distribute audio and video files. The MBone was a multicast network over the Internet used primarily by educational and research institutes, but there were audio talk programs.

Many other jukeboxes and websites in the mid 1990's provided a system for sorting and selecting music or audio files, talk, segue announcements of different digtal formats. There were a few websites that provided audio subscription services.

The development of downloaded music did not reach a critical mass until the launch of Napster, another system of aggregating music, but without the subscription services provided by podcasting or video blogging aggregation client or system software.

Independent of the development of podcasting via RSS, a portable player and music download system had been developed at Compaq Research as early as 1999 or 2000. Called PocketDJ, it would have been launched as a service for the Personal Jukebox or a successor, the first hard-disk based MP3-player.

A fully-conceived precursor to podcasting came from another early MP3 player manufacturer. To supply content for its players the I2Go company, makers of the eGo player, introduced a digital news service called MyAudio2Go.com that created daily audio news feeds users could download to the eGo or any other MP3 player. The eGo's file transfer application could be programmed to pull down specific feeds to a user's PC every evening.

There were dozens of focused daily feeds covering national news, business news, entertainment news, even a recap of the previous days TV shows. The service lasted over a year, but succumbed when the I2Go company ran out of capital during the dotcom crash and folded. Archive.org has an August 2000 snapshot of the MyAudio2Go site.

In 2001, Applian Technologies of San Francisco, CA introduced Replay Radio, a TiVo-like recorder for Internet Radio Shows. Besides scheduling and recording audio, one of the features was a Direct Download link, which would scan a radio publishers site for new files and copy them directly to a PC's hard disk. The first radio show to publish in this format was Web Talk Guys, produced by Rob and Dana Greenlee.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia material "Podcasting".