What is a Podcast?
A podcast is something similar to a blog in audio format: it's a series of audio "episodes" published using the RSS technology. Unlike blogs, which are generally written by a single author in first person voice, podcasts can often feature two or more people who talk to each other while discussing a topic.
How Podcasting Works?
RSS allows any RSS client to download information about articles, entries, or episodes from an RSS feed on the Internet. However, the information on this feed is merely textual. For a podcast to work, entries in the RSS feed must link to the URLs of audio files containing the content of episodes that are hosted on some web server.
A podcaster will typically use some service where they can simply upload their audio episodes to, such as Buzzsprout [buzzsprout.com], and this service will host the audio files on their web servers and generate an RSS feed for the podcast. The podcaster can then take the URL of this RSS feed and give it to anyone so they can subscribe to the podcast using an RSS client.
Most people don't use RSS clients, even if they subscribe to podcasts. In this case, what happens is that they listen to podcasts using a service like Spotify. So the podcaster would have to take the RSS feed from Buzzsprout and somehow give it to Spotify, so Spotify could act as an RSS client, fetch the information from all episodes, and display the podcast on Spotify. The same concept applies to various other podcast-related websites.
There is a website that hosts the podcast for the author, and a website that lists podcasts for listeners.
The reason why this split exists is that originally you would just use a local RSS client to follow the podcast. You don't need Spotify. If you have the RSS feed URL, you can follow the podcast in a web browser that supports RSS like Vivaldi. This freedom is very important. The podcast isn't locked into a single platform. It can be hosted wherever. The services that allow you to search for podcasts and that list podcasts can't monopolize the information because it's public on the Internet.
Observations
Although you can follow any RSS feed with an RSS client, not all clients provide proper support for podcasts.
Technically, the audio file is declared in the RSS feed's XML code as an enclosure with an audio MIME type.
Ideally, an RSS client would embed an audio player to play the podcast episode. Some RSS clients display a link to the enclosure's URL instead if they don't support an enclosure MIME type, which should allow you to listen to the episode. However, there are also some clients that just don't show anything at all, as if the enclosure didn't even exist.
For the record, Vivaldi and Liferea embed audio players, RSS Guard displays s a link, and Fluent Reader doesn't display anything.
Learn More
- What is podcasting? - TechTarget (accessed 2024-11-07)
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