Speaker 1: Hey there, it's Jonathan Strickland, and I'm here to introduce
Speaker 1: a playlist of ten episodes of my podcast tech Stuff
Speaker 1: that are all about entertainment and entertainment related fields, from
Speaker 1: video games to television series, two films to internet videos
Speaker 1: from yesteryear. So I hope you guys enjoy these episodes.
Speaker 1: You can go to the tech Stuff podcast page and
Speaker 1: subscribe to listen to all sorts of episodes about tech
Speaker 1: from all realms, and hopefully this will provide a little
Speaker 1: bit of entertainment, a little bit of education, and probably
Speaker 1: more than a few puns, because that's kind of how
Speaker 1: I roll. Enjoy this playlist. Welcome to text Stuff, a
Speaker 1: production from my Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to
Speaker 1: tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive
Speaker 1: producer with I Heart Radio, and I love all things tech.
Speaker 1: And we're gonna listen to another classic episode in our
Speaker 1: entertainment playlist. This one's on the history of podcasting, a
Speaker 1: very interesting topic, a topic in which I play a
Speaker 1: very very small part. Although honestly, by the time Tech
Speaker 1: Stuff came around, podcasting was already established, it just wasn't mainstream.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I was a listener of podcasts even into
Speaker 1: the early days. Not quite as early as the earliest days.
Speaker 1: I came around, probably in the second wave, but um,
Speaker 1: it was interesting to go back and look into how
Speaker 1: they all got started. So enjoy. I realized that while
Speaker 1: I've talked about podcasting in an episode or two, I've
Speaker 1: never done a full episode about the history of podcasting itself.
Speaker 1: And so that's what we're going to talk about today.
Speaker 1: We're going to look at the history of podcasting, how
Speaker 1: it evolved, how it got its name, the earliest examples
Speaker 1: of podcasts, and then we're gonna talk a little bit
Speaker 1: about the how stuff works history with podcasts, at least
Speaker 1: based upon what information I could glean from my Taciturn coworkers.
Speaker 1: So sit back, relax, and let's learn about some history, y'all.
Speaker 1: It's the stuff you missed in history of podcasting. I'm
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. So this particular story is a complicated one.
Speaker 1: It's filled with a lot of different people, a lot
Speaker 1: of different things have happened over the course of the
Speaker 1: evolution of podcasting. There are incidents and accidents, their hints
Speaker 1: and allegations. As Paul Simon would say, so let's dive
Speaker 1: in now. If you look at the story for like
Speaker 1: Go Anywhere and you look for the history of podcasting,
Speaker 1: you just type that into Google and you pull up
Speaker 1: some stuff you including an article that we have on
Speaker 1: house top works dot com. You will frequently see that
Speaker 1: podcasting dates back to two thousand four with Adam Curry,
Speaker 1: who I remember from my childhood. He was a VJ
Speaker 1: on MTV, which used to show music videos, and that's
Speaker 1: where a lot of the histories start. They say two
Speaker 1: thousand four, Adam Curry made the first podcast, but uh,
Speaker 1: it's not entirely accurate. Actually, the story dates back before
Speaker 1: two thousand four, and it's the first podcast was not
Speaker 1: from Adam Curry, not really. So I thought we could
Speaker 1: probably dispel some myths and learn about the truth here. Uh.
Speaker 1: And there are also a few different threads to this story,
Speaker 1: as it turns out, and one of those threads I've
Speaker 1: already covered in an episode of tech Stuff from about
Speaker 1: a year ago. I thought it was more recent than that,
Speaker 1: but as I was looking through the archives to pull
Speaker 1: up my notes, I realized that I my notes dated
Speaker 1: from two thousand and sixteen about the history of the
Speaker 1: MP three standard and This just shows how bad I
Speaker 1: am at being able to keep track of time. I
Speaker 1: was convinced that I had done the MP three episode
Speaker 1: maybe a month or two ago, and it is August
Speaker 1: as I record this now. I'm not gonna go over
Speaker 1: all of the history of the MP three standard again,
Speaker 1: because it's all there in that episode. But I'm going
Speaker 1: to give you the cliffs Notes version. Our cliffs Notes
Speaker 1: still thing. Someone tell me if cliffs notes still exist.
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure I've asked that in a previous episode,
Speaker 1: but i've I've clearly forgotten again. Anyway, I'm gonna give
Speaker 1: you a summary of what I talked about that previous episode.
Speaker 1: A research institution in Germany formed a group that dedicated
Speaker 1: itself to developing compressions strategies for digital audio files. So
Speaker 1: a raw audio file, if you didn't compress it at all,
Speaker 1: it represents a pretty decent amount of digital information. It
Speaker 1: obviously depends upon how long the audio track is. Right,
Speaker 1: the more the more information is there, the longer the file,
Speaker 1: the larger the file size will be. So a three
Speaker 1: minute song is going to have more information packed into
Speaker 1: it than say a minute of quiet room tone. So
Speaker 1: you've got this fairly large amount of data, especially for
Speaker 1: the time that we're talking about, which was late nineteen
Speaker 1: seventies early nineties, there was a need to find a
Speaker 1: way to compress that data down so it didn't take
Speaker 1: up as much space, and that then you could transmit
Speaker 1: it over various media like telephone lines. And that's what
Speaker 1: this group in Germany was trying to do. They wanted
Speaker 1: to be able to transmit digital audio over telephone lines,
Speaker 1: but in order to make it efficient, they needed to
Speaker 1: find a compression strategy or else the files were just
Speaker 1: gonna be too large. Now these days, while the file
Speaker 1: side haven't really changed, I mean, the raw audio is
Speaker 1: still what it is, we definitely have much faster throughput,
Speaker 1: Like we're able to send a lot more information in
Speaker 1: a shorter amount of time than what we used to
Speaker 1: be able to do. So it's not as big a
Speaker 1: deal today unless you're talking about just trying to store
Speaker 1: a ton of audio on a relatively small storage device.
Speaker 1: But back in the nineteen seventies and eighties, this was
Speaker 1: a pretty tough challenge. Now, whether they were successful or
Speaker 1: not in creating a compression strategy that makes the file
Speaker 1: sizes smaller without affecting the audio quality depends upon a
Speaker 1: couple of things. For one, it depends upon your sense
Speaker 1: of hearing, because some people are more sensitive to it
Speaker 1: than others, and for one person it may sound perfectly fine,
Speaker 1: and another person may say, no, I can hear all
Speaker 1: sorts of problems from the compression in that audio. For another,
Speaker 1: it depends on the settings of the compression itself. You
Speaker 1: can compress it at different rate, and that will determine
Speaker 1: how how much it affects the audio file itself. Broadly speaking,
Speaker 1: their compression strategy was to create what was essentially a
Speaker 1: virtual ear approach, in which a computer program would analyze
Speaker 1: audio an attempt to remove extraneous data. In other words,
Speaker 1: it was looking for any sounds that would lay outside
Speaker 1: the typical range of human hearing and then chuck those
Speaker 1: sounds out because people wouldn't be able to hear them anyway.
Speaker 1: So any sound that was at a frequency above or
Speaker 1: below what your typical human can hear, that would be
Speaker 1: removed because you wouldn't be able to hear it anyway.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it would be sounds that might be a soft
Speaker 1: sound that follows a very loud sound, because that loud
Speaker 1: sound would mask the softer sound, and if we can't
Speaker 1: hear the softer sound, then there's no reason to include it,
Speaker 1: at least according to this compression strategy. And that was
Speaker 1: a way of getting rid of information in so that
Speaker 1: you could compress everything together and make smaller file sizes.
Speaker 1: So really the goal was just to keep only the
Speaker 1: data that humans would really be able to perceive. And
Speaker 1: it took some time for them to tweak this and
Speaker 1: make sure that they could come up with an algorithm
Speaker 1: that worked and didn't result in a really choppy, unpleasant
Speaker 1: audio experience. So, depending upon how you set your compression rates,
Speaker 1: you might manage to reduce a file size and not
Speaker 1: notice a huge difference in quality, or you might end
Speaker 1: up with something that is truly unlistenable. If you remember,
Speaker 1: the people working on the MP three standard back in
Speaker 1: the day would use Tom's Diner as a way of
Speaker 1: measuring their success, and they said that the first few
Speaker 1: times they tried to make a compression formula, it turned
Speaker 1: Tom's Diner into an unlistenable mess. Some of the uncharitable
Speaker 1: among us might claim that the completely uncomp rest version
Speaker 1: of Tom's Diner is an unlistenable mess, but that's that's
Speaker 1: just being mean. Spirited. I would say the MP three
Speaker 1: would later make podcasting practical, but it was not a
Speaker 1: quick leap from m P three's too podcasts. There was
Speaker 1: a good amount of time between the development of the
Speaker 1: MP three and the rise of the podcast But the
Speaker 1: MP three development sort of leads us into other things
Speaker 1: that will eventually allow podcast to become a reality. Now
Speaker 1: let's skip ahead to the early nineties. The development of
Speaker 1: the MP three largely happened in the eighties, but didn't
Speaker 1: really start making a debut until the nineties. Anyway, the
Speaker 1: mainstream world was scratching its head over something called the
Speaker 1: Internet in those early nineties. Before then, the only people
Speaker 1: who really had access to the Internet were academics, government officials,
Speaker 1: and scientists who had been using it for quite some time.
Speaker 1: But the rest of us really didn't have any exposure
Speaker 1: to it. It was not something thing that your average
Speaker 1: person had any access to. Your average Joe hadn't really
Speaker 1: had any contact with it at all. Computer hobbyists had
Speaker 1: been cutting their teeth on bulletin board systems or bbs is.
Speaker 1: Now these were message boards and file repositories that typically
Speaker 1: sat on someone's spare computer. So with your very basic
Speaker 1: bulletin board system. The way it would work is you
Speaker 1: would have a phone number and that phone number would
Speaker 1: go to the modem connected to this other computer, the
Speaker 1: computer that houses the BBS. You would use your computer
Speaker 1: to dial into that number that would connect you to
Speaker 1: this other BBS, and you would then be able to
Speaker 1: browse the files that have been uploaded to that particular
Speaker 1: directory for the BBS, play games, leave messages, that kind
Speaker 1: of thing because you're dialing in. Typically a lot of
Speaker 1: those smaller BBS has had maybe one phone line, sometimes
Speaker 1: up to three, where that's how many people could connect
Speaker 1: to anyone time. So there were various ways to discourage
Speaker 1: people from spending too much time on the BBS and
Speaker 1: thus keeping it busy for everybody else. For example, UH,
Speaker 1: some of them would charge for a certain amount of time,
Speaker 1: like after a certain number of minutes had passed, you
Speaker 1: would have to pay to keep access to the BBS. UH.
Speaker 1: Some would just have a time limit and after that
Speaker 1: the when you hit your time limit, it would just
Speaker 1: kick you off and you would have to wait another
Speaker 1: day to be able to log back into your BBS. Eventually,
Speaker 1: you had some BBS is on what was called Fido Net.
Speaker 1: This was a network that allowed bbs is to exchange
Speaker 1: information with each other. So it's almost like post offices.
Speaker 1: Think about going to a post office and you would
Speaker 1: drop a letter off, and that letter would then be
Speaker 1: sent to another post office, someone else's BBS and they
Speaker 1: can receive it. That was kind of the world before
Speaker 1: the Internet had really taken off, and the Internet really
Speaker 1: is a different beast altogether. Instead of dialing into a
Speaker 1: single machine and browsing what was on that machine, you
Speaker 1: could suddenly connect to a network of networked machines. In
Speaker 1: something very important happened in the United States, the Federal
Speaker 1: Communications Commission the f c C made an important decision
Speaker 1: that encouraged explosive growth on the Internet. That that decision was,
Speaker 1: they're going to lift some restrictions. Up until there was
Speaker 1: a restriction on commercial uses for the Internet. You you
Speaker 1: weren't allowed to use it for commercial purposes. It was
Speaker 1: meant for research, it was meant for government use, and
Speaker 1: that was it. But in ninety one, the f c
Speaker 1: C said we're lifting those restrictions, and it became the
Speaker 1: Wild West for a while where lots of companies said,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure how we can use this to our advantage,
Speaker 1: but I'm sure it's huge and we have to use
Speaker 1: it to our advantage. So there were a lot of
Speaker 1: different parties rushing into the space because now it was
Speaker 1: possible to make a commercial use of it, but no
Speaker 1: one had really figured out how to actually do that yet.
Speaker 1: There was a lot of competition to try and figure
Speaker 1: out how can we dominate this space, and no one
Speaker 1: really had the answer yet. So how did this affect
Speaker 1: Internet use? Well, before the FCC lifted restrictions, there were
Speaker 1: around one thousand Internet hosts connected to this network of networks.
Speaker 1: There were more than a million Internet hosts. But for
Speaker 1: our story, the important bit is that people and companies
Speaker 1: could launch commercial interests in the Internet, including radio stations. Now,
Speaker 1: Carl Malamud gets the credit for being the first person
Speaker 1: to launch an Internet radio site, and this was called
Speaker 1: Internet Talk Radio. Malamud launched this show in and he
Speaker 1: launched it with a program called Geek of the Week.
Speaker 1: You can actually find recordings of some of those old
Speaker 1: episodes online and they tiply feature various important people in
Speaker 1: the computer and text spheres, and Malamouda would just interview
Speaker 1: them about whatever subject they wanted to talk about, and
Speaker 1: those were the programs that went out live on the Internet.
Speaker 1: On June, the band Severe Tire Damage became the first
Speaker 1: musical act to perform a concert on Internet radio. Their
Speaker 1: show went out over mbone. It's the letter M as
Speaker 1: in merry and bone, B, O and E. That stands
Speaker 1: for multicast backbone, or it's actually a protocol that sat
Speaker 1: on top of the multicast backbone, which made it feasible
Speaker 1: to send data to multiple viewers around the world simultaneously.
Speaker 1: So I thought it would be helpful to understand how
Speaker 1: this works. Generally speaking, I p multicasting involves setting up
Speaker 1: a great big convoy, and more specifically, it has to
Speaker 1: do with packets. So the Internet sends information in packets.
Speaker 1: Anytime there's data passing between computers on the Internet, you're
Speaker 1: generally talking about packets that are going back and forth.
Speaker 1: And a packet is a unit of data and it
Speaker 1: includes a few types of information within that packet. So
Speaker 1: the first type of that information is the data that's
Speaker 1: necessary to deliver it to the right destination. So you've
Speaker 1: got these sort of headers and footers inside of a packet,
Speaker 1: you know, at the very top and the very bottom
Speaker 1: of the packet, that helps tell the Internet system at
Speaker 1: large where that packet needs to go. It's essentially like
Speaker 1: the address you would find on an envelope in the
Speaker 1: post office. So the packets have that part of the information.
Speaker 1: They also have the payload, the actual data that they're
Speaker 1: carrying to the destination. Let's say it's a web page.
Speaker 1: It would be a little part of that web page,
Speaker 1: would be a small portion of the web page. And
Speaker 1: then you have a third part, which is uh the
Speaker 1: way that that packet fits in with other packets to
Speaker 1: complete whatever that payload is. So again, in the case
Speaker 1: of a web page, let's say you're going to how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com, and just for the sake of
Speaker 1: this example, we're just gonna use a nice round, simple
Speaker 1: number of one hundred packets. It takes one packets to
Speaker 1: load up the home page of how stuff works dot com.
Speaker 1: Those headers and footers will tell the packets where they
Speaker 1: need to go, which would be your browser because you're
Speaker 1: the one who typed in www dot how stuff works
Speaker 1: dot com. And they also tell your browser how they
Speaker 1: all fit together so that it can construct the website
Speaker 1: and you can see it on your side. On the
Speaker 1: client side of this exchange, Uh, packets tend to be
Speaker 1: relatively small, so you typically need a lot of them
Speaker 1: to deliver any information of significant size. This brings us
Speaker 1: to that third type, that that bit of information that says, hey,
Speaker 1: I'm the puzzle piece that goes in the top right corner.
Speaker 1: It's not exactly how it works, but it's a decent
Speaker 1: enough analogy to kind of understand what's going on. Now,
Speaker 1: why would you send data and packets. Why wouldn't you
Speaker 1: just send the entire piece all at once. It's meant
Speaker 1: to be a way to ensure the delivery of information,
Speaker 1: and by dividing it up into packets, you can actually
Speaker 1: make a better case for that information, making it to
Speaker 1: where you wanted to go. If you're sending it all
Speaker 1: out as one big file, one thing that can happen
Speaker 1: is it can slow everything down because depending on the
Speaker 1: size of the file, it might start to tax certain
Speaker 1: parts of the system, and if it fails, you're you've
Speaker 1: got to send it all over again. It just becomes
Speaker 1: a big nightmare. So the founders of the Internet, who
Speaker 1: as we all know, put the Internet on top of
Speaker 1: Big ben because that's where it gets the best reception,
Speaker 1: figured that by breaking information up into packets and sending
Speaker 1: them along the network, you had a better chance of
Speaker 1: actually receiving the information you wanted. And the reason for
Speaker 1: that is twofold. It's redundancy, and packet switching. Redundancy means
Speaker 1: that a server is sending out multiple copies of the
Speaker 1: same packet to make sure that one of them gets
Speaker 1: to their destination. So this is kind of like if
Speaker 1: you had critical message and you've got you make three
Speaker 1: copies of it and you send a copy each with
Speaker 1: a different messenger and they all rush out. Well, that
Speaker 1: means that you're more likely to get your message to
Speaker 1: where it needs to go, because even if one of
Speaker 1: them fails along the way, you have three others going.
Speaker 1: Remember us at three copies, so you have one original,
Speaker 1: that's four total, so one of them is likely to
Speaker 1: get there. So that way you can send those writers
Speaker 1: off to gone door to let them know the row
Speaker 1: end is coming out to help them or something. Packet
Speaker 1: switching is the method of sending the packets themselves, and
Speaker 1: this involves each packet taking its own path. Typically it's
Speaker 1: whichever path is the most efficient for that packet at
Speaker 1: that time for it to get to its destination and
Speaker 1: packets that all belong to the same document or file
Speaker 1: can travel very different pathways. So if you go and
Speaker 1: you're trying to pull up how supports dot com, the
Speaker 1: packets that represent that web page could be taking very
Speaker 1: different paths in order to get to your computer. Remember,
Speaker 1: the network is this network of networks. It can be
Speaker 1: bouncing from all sorts of different machines before it finally
Speaker 1: gets to you. The destination computer then assembles all those
Speaker 1: packets back into the document or file or whatever it
Speaker 1: may be. And this is really cool because it means
Speaker 1: that the Internet is really robust. If nodes on the
Speaker 1: Internet go offline for whatever reason, if if certain computers
Speaker 1: between you and the computer you're trying to get information
Speaker 1: from go down, well the packets can route around that.
Speaker 1: They don't come up to like a sinkhole in the
Speaker 1: middle of the road and say well, we wanted to
Speaker 1: get there, but we can't. No, they can take a
Speaker 1: different pathway, and you just have to make sure that
Speaker 1: you are, you know, having that redundancy there, which, by
Speaker 1: the way, you don't have to do t C P
Speaker 1: I P does it for you. But as long as
Speaker 1: that's in place with the redundancy, you don't even have
Speaker 1: to worry if some of those packets somehow lose their
Speaker 1: way for whatever reason, whatever it may be, you'll likely
Speaker 1: end up getting the information you asked for, may not
Speaker 1: be as fast as you wanted, depending upon the problems,
Speaker 1: but you'll get it. So back to Inbone, it's a
Speaker 1: little different from the approach I just mentioned. The basic
Speaker 1: packet switching strategy works great for static files and pages.
Speaker 1: So if I have a photograph and I want to
Speaker 1: send that information across to some other computer, it works
Speaker 1: great for that. Photographs don't change. It's gonna be the
Speaker 1: same photograph no matter what, so it's very easy to
Speaker 1: send that. And now I'm not talking about photo editing
Speaker 1: software here, obviously, I'm just talking about sending an image.
Speaker 1: But if you want to send something like a video
Speaker 1: where you have stuff constantly changing both the image and
Speaker 1: the audio, or even more so live video which is
Speaker 1: persistently changing and you're not sure when it's going to end,
Speaker 1: another approach was pretty important. So broadcast represents this ongoing
Speaker 1: creation of information, and how do you disseminate that across
Speaker 1: the network? Inbone would keep all the packets together, like
Speaker 1: packed together like a like a convoy, as I said earlier,
Speaker 1: until the last possible moment before they would split up
Speaker 1: and move through different routers and go through the rest
Speaker 1: of its journey. So it's more like a fire hose
Speaker 1: approach in the first half until you get to a
Speaker 1: point where you absolutely have to split things up because
Speaker 1: they will not get to their destination otherwise. This allows
Speaker 1: for a more efficient transmission of live content, and it
Speaker 1: helped make sure that those packets would arrive at their
Speaker 1: destinations at more or less the same time, because you
Speaker 1: want it to be like a broadcast. You want the
Speaker 1: people who are watching it to all have the same
Speaker 1: experience that around the same time. Otherwise you could end
Speaker 1: up in a situation where one person is watching the
Speaker 1: concert on a slight delay and someone else might be
Speaker 1: more than a minute or two behind. And this does
Speaker 1: still happen, by the way, I can't tell you how
Speaker 1: many times I've watched the w w E network and
Speaker 1: have been in a Facebook chat about what was going
Speaker 1: on with a pay per view, only to have someone's
Speaker 1: boil something for me because I was lagging a bit
Speaker 1: behind the rest of the live feed for everybody else.
Speaker 1: But that's the price we pay for this amazing technology.
Speaker 1: Xerox Park was the group that created the inbone extension
Speaker 1: and the Internet Engineering Task Force adopted it in nineteen two,
Speaker 1: so it was all well in place for the Internet
Speaker 1: Radio Days of nine and Severe Tire Damage performed at
Speaker 1: Xerox Park. You remember, Xerox Park is also the research
Speaker 1: and development area where we got things like the graphic
Speaker 1: user interface and the computer mouse, as well as a
Speaker 1: ton of other stuff. A lot of interesting research and
Speaker 1: development came out of Xerox. So their audience Severe Tire
Speaker 1: Damage for this initial concert pretty much consisted of a
Speaker 1: dude in Australia, which is really true. There was a
Speaker 1: researcher in Australia who was helping along with this project
Speaker 1: and he was the intended audience for the Severe Tire
Speaker 1: Damage concert of In slightly more famous band called the
Speaker 1: Rolling Stones performed their first live concert on the Internet,
Speaker 1: and cheekily, Severe tire Damage performed a set just before
Speaker 1: The Rolling Stones were scheduled to go on and then
Speaker 1: they put their set out over the Internet, this time
Speaker 1: broadcast to the Internet at large. So Severe Tire Damage said,
Speaker 1: we were happy to open for the Rolling Stones, even
Speaker 1: though we're not in the same city as the Rolling Stones,
Speaker 1: and that was kind of making a point saying you
Speaker 1: could now have this sort of experience where people from
Speaker 1: different parts of the world could address an audience in
Speaker 1: a sequence and they didn't have to be in the
Speaker 1: same place at the same time. The Rolling Stones, for
Speaker 1: their part, were pretty good natured about it. I think
Speaker 1: at first they called him weird furry guys from from
Speaker 1: uh Palo Alto, California. But they also said to The
Speaker 1: New York Times that it was a good reminder of
Speaker 1: the democratic nature of the Internet. There was a college
Speaker 1: radio station called w x y C still Is that
Speaker 1: became the first terrestrial radio station to start broadcasting on
Speaker 1: the Internet. They began their simulcast in the fall of
Speaker 1: n now They first started off with their off air
Speaker 1: signals using a Cornell University utility called see You See Me.
Speaker 1: On November seven, the radio station became the first to
Speaker 1: simulcast it's broadcast live over the air and on the Internet.
Speaker 1: A few months later, w R. E. K reck Over
Speaker 1: at Georgia Tech went live with its simulcast technology. And
Speaker 1: it's kind of interesting because they had actually hooked up
Speaker 1: their Internet client on November seven, which was the same
Speaker 1: day w x y C went live, but it would
Speaker 1: take a few more months before Georgia Tech Broadcast hit
Speaker 1: the Internet, and since then tons of different university and
Speaker 1: then commercial radio stations as well as public radio have
Speaker 1: joined on and used the Internet for broadcast. Now we're
Speaker 1: gonna take a quick break, but when we come back,
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about how this technology of streaming
Speaker 1: radio gradually gave people the idea of creating sort of
Speaker 1: an episodic content that would be digestible in a downloadable
Speaker 1: format and thus eventually evolve into podcast But first, let's
Speaker 1: take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Okay, So
Speaker 1: streaming radio was now available online, and to listen to
Speaker 1: any streaming radio station you needed to use an audio player,
Speaker 1: Real Audio and other companies were making software that would
Speaker 1: allow you to listen to audio over the Internet. But
Speaker 1: what about podcasts? Well, jumping back to that's when a
Speaker 1: Canadian science news program called Quirks and Works hit the Internet.
Speaker 1: The radio show had been airing on terrestrial radio since
Speaker 1: nineteen Each show lasts about an hour and consists of
Speaker 1: segments about science, news and interesting facts. The Internet versions
Speaker 1: were recorded episodes stored in MP three format available for download,
Speaker 1: and this would become really important later on. Similarly, in
Speaker 1: CNN launched its Internet newsroom, and the company began to
Speaker 1: make shows available for download and included an updated compilation file.
Speaker 1: This too would become really important later on. Meanwhile, a
Speaker 1: guy named Jim Logan had founded a company called Personal Audio.
Speaker 1: According to Alan Martin of a l phr dot com,
Speaker 1: so we're gonna call it Alpha. Personal Audio's original goal
Speaker 1: was to create a digital audio playing device, but that
Speaker 1: didn't work out. However, in the process of trying to
Speaker 1: make this happen, the company had filed four and been
Speaker 1: awarded several pat dealing with digital audio distribution on the Internet.
Speaker 1: And this would be around the mid nineties, nine six
Speaker 1: and later, and this also becomes incredibly important. That's a
Speaker 1: lot of foreshadowing right there. Some of you are way
Speaker 1: ahead of me on this, I'm sure of it, but
Speaker 1: let's get back to the nineties. Over the next few years,
Speaker 1: the MP three file format began to gain popularity, and
Speaker 1: in nineteen nine, Napster became perhaps the best known of
Speaker 1: the peer to peer networks that made sharing MP three's
Speaker 1: across computers incredibly easy. And while I would never say
Speaker 1: that Napster caused piracy. It definitely made it a lot
Speaker 1: easier to do. You could rip tracks off of a
Speaker 1: disk with one of a dozen different programs. So you
Speaker 1: buy a CD or you get a CD, you put
Speaker 1: it in your computer, you pull the music off of it,
Speaker 1: convert those files into MP three format, store them on
Speaker 1: a drive on your computer, download the Napster interface, and
Speaker 1: then you could authorize Napster to use that particular draw
Speaker 1: I've to share all those files, and the music industry
Speaker 1: got really scared. So in short, the way peer to
Speaker 1: peer works is that you have some software that allows
Speaker 1: your computer to direct directly connect in to a network
Speaker 1: of other computers running that same software. And this network
Speaker 1: is constantly changing, with some computers being connected and some
Speaker 1: computers going offline. It all depends on who's using their
Speaker 1: computer for what. And you can search that network to
Speaker 1: see if there are any copies of a particular type
Speaker 1: of file you want, and when you download, you can
Speaker 1: actually download from multiple sources at the same time. So
Speaker 1: if there's one source that is particularly slow because of
Speaker 1: whatever reason, maybe there's some problems like there's congestion and
Speaker 1: the internet between you and that particular server, then you
Speaker 1: can start getting packets from other servers that also have
Speaker 1: that same file, and it's all decentralized, and it was
Speaker 1: a very quick way to spread files across and there's
Speaker 1: nothing illegal about that, right You can you can spread
Speaker 1: any sort of file you like, and if you have
Speaker 1: the legal authorization to distribute that file, then peer to
Speaker 1: peer networks are completely valid. The problem was a lot
Speaker 1: of people were using them to spread m P three's
Speaker 1: that did not technically belong to them. Maybe they had
Speaker 1: bought an album and then they uploaded or they rather
Speaker 1: made available all of the tracks off that album and
Speaker 1: so people could get it for free. Well that's not great.
Speaker 1: It's kind of violating copyright law, and it it helped
Speaker 1: precipitate an era in which we saw crazy amounts of
Speaker 1: work in digital rights management, and it was not a
Speaker 1: bright and shining moment in Internet history. That being said,
Speaker 1: there are so many valid reasons to use peer to peer.
Speaker 1: It's a real shame that Napster and other peer to
Speaker 1: peer platforms are forever associate ned with this concept of piracy,
Speaker 1: just because that was a pretty big use for a
Speaker 1: lot of these networks, and it got a lot of
Speaker 1: press around this same time, we also started seeing MP
Speaker 1: three players popping up. Now, the earliest players were pieces
Speaker 1: of software running on your computer, not exactly convenient for
Speaker 1: on the go listening. I did a couple of episodes
Speaker 1: about the history of MP three players, including the rise
Speaker 1: of the iPod. So again I'm not going to go
Speaker 1: into it too much, but Apple's iPod really helped push
Speaker 1: MP three's even further into the mainstream, and the iPod
Speaker 1: became the device most associated with this relatively new form
Speaker 1: of consuming audio simultaneously. So much is happening that's important
Speaker 1: to podcasting. We got the birth of the RSS feed.
Speaker 1: Now RSS stands for well, it depends upon whom you ask.
Speaker 1: It could stand for rich site summary, or maybe it
Speaker 1: stands for really simple syndicate sation. It just depends upon
Speaker 1: the authority you're asking at the time. But whatever it
Speaker 1: stands for, what it does is pretty cool. It is
Speaker 1: a format for delivering updated content to people. So in
Speaker 1: the old days, you go on the web, and web
Speaker 1: pages were pretty darn static. If you went to a
Speaker 1: web page one day and you looked at it, chances
Speaker 1: are the next day it was going to look exactly
Speaker 1: the same way. There were not that many dynamically changing
Speaker 1: web pages. It just wasn't very easy to do and
Speaker 1: there wasn't much call for it. But over time we
Speaker 1: started building in more functionality on the web. We started
Speaker 1: creating more dynamic elements, and that created a new problem.
Speaker 1: How could you, as a user know if your favorite
Speaker 1: websites have been updated. You could go and check them
Speaker 1: every single day and look for differences, or you could
Speaker 1: use rs S and RSS was this set of rules
Speaker 1: that people running these websites could use. They could incorporate
Speaker 1: it into their website. You could then subscribe to that
Speaker 1: website and anytime there was a change, that change would
Speaker 1: get reflected in your RSS aggregator. You would open up
Speaker 1: your aggregator and it would give you kind of like
Speaker 1: headlines of the latest changes that had happened in the
Speaker 1: pages that you are subscribed to. So once you were
Speaker 1: able to do that, it really transformed the browsing experience.
Speaker 1: You no longer had to do all this legwork yourself
Speaker 1: and just have your laundry list of websites that you
Speaker 1: visit every single day. You could actually take a quick
Speaker 1: look at your RSS aggregator and see if there's any
Speaker 1: reason to go to that website well. That RSS model
Speaker 1: would later become helpful to podcasts. It could alert podcatching
Speaker 1: services and users to new episodes as they joined the list,
Speaker 1: removing the need to visit the home page of the program.
Speaker 1: And there was a way of enclosing audio files that
Speaker 1: would be developed a little bit later, and that really
Speaker 1: sealed the deal. All of this was happening around to
Speaker 1: the early two thousand's. In December two thousands, a software
Speaker 1: develop br named Dave Winer found himself in an unlikely
Speaker 1: partnership with Adam Curry that former MTV v j I
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier, and they were trying to adapt the RSS
Speaker 1: feed so that it could include audio. So Weiner was
Speaker 1: the guy who created that modification for RSS, and he
Speaker 1: demonstrated it in early by using it to enclose a
Speaker 1: song by The Grateful Dead, and he put it in
Speaker 1: a blog he was writing, so people who were following
Speaker 1: his blog were subscribed to it could immediately get access
Speaker 1: to that song. And while this provided the skeletal structure
Speaker 1: upon which podcasts would be built, very few people were
Speaker 1: actually using it back then. In September two thousand three,
Speaker 1: Winer adapted his approach on behalf of a colleague named
Speaker 1: Christopher Leiden over at the Harvard Brookman Center, and Lydon
Speaker 1: really wanted to create an interview show with audio tracks
Speaker 1: saved in the MP three format. He was thinking of
Speaker 1: it as like an audio blog, so he's regularly interviewing
Speaker 1: people and uploading those files, and he wanted there to
Speaker 1: be a way for people to subscribe to it. He
Speaker 1: was interviewing bloggers, futurists, and political figures, and this would
Speaker 1: eventually become a show called Radio Open Source and is,
Speaker 1: by most accounts, the first actual podcast, though at the
Speaker 1: time it wasn't called a podcast. So if you hear
Speaker 1: the Adam Curry had the very first podcast and it
Speaker 1: launched in two thousand four. Just know that two thousand
Speaker 1: three saw Christopher Leiden's show Radio Open Source, and by
Speaker 1: all measures, that really was a podcast, It just didn't
Speaker 1: have the name yet. Later in two thousand three, and
Speaker 1: influential jet named Kevin Marks whipped up some interesting technological
Speaker 1: wizardry in connection with the two thousand three Blogger Cohn event.
Speaker 1: He showed off a program that could take the audio
Speaker 1: files housed in an RSS enclosure and transfer them automatically
Speaker 1: over to Apple's iTunes and then you can use the
Speaker 1: iTunes management software to synchronize to an i hot Now, remember,
Speaker 1: in these days, you had to physically connect an iPod
Speaker 1: to a computer and use iTunes to transfer music across
Speaker 1: the cable to your iPod. There's no wireless way of
Speaker 1: doing this yet. The iPod had no access to the
Speaker 1: iTunes store directly. You had to download things or rip
Speaker 1: things from your music collection directly to iTunes and the
Speaker 1: import those things from iTunes over to your iPod or
Speaker 1: other m P three player. I had a creative zen
Speaker 1: back then and I used it with iTunes and it
Speaker 1: was a headache, but it would kind of work. But
Speaker 1: this was huge, this approach to having this automatic conversion
Speaker 1: and something that I don't think Apple necessarily anticipated when
Speaker 1: it built in the synchronization capability and iTunes. The purpose
Speaker 1: for the feature was convenience. So let's say you've got
Speaker 1: a decent music collection and you put all your songs
Speaker 1: over on iTunes and you want them to transfer those
Speaker 1: songs to your brand spanking new iPod. That's not so
Speaker 1: difficult to do the first time, though it can take
Speaker 1: a while. You just connect your iPod to iTunes and say,
Speaker 1: all right, I want all these files to be moved over.
Speaker 1: But then later on, let's say you add more music
Speaker 1: to your library. So how do you add that to
Speaker 1: your iPod. You've already got a music library on your iPod,
Speaker 1: You've got new songs in your iTunes library on your computer.
Speaker 1: How do you get those two to match up again? Well,
Speaker 1: one thing you could do is individually move those files over,
Speaker 1: but that's gonna take a while. You could try and
Speaker 1: highlight them in a batch, but that's kind of irritating.
Speaker 1: So Apple built in this function where you could have
Speaker 1: synchronization turned on and if you plugged your iPod into
Speaker 1: your computer with your iTunes library, it would automatically pull
Speaker 1: any new tracks, anything that had been added after the
Speaker 1: last time your iPod had been synchronized and add them
Speaker 1: to your iPods library, so you didn't have to wait
Speaker 1: and do it all manually. That was the secret that
Speaker 1: was able to you know, they were able to use
Speaker 1: to make this automatic updating for podcasts or what would
Speaker 1: become podcasts. But again, I don't think Apple was necessarily
Speaker 1: thinking that when they included that feature. Kevin Marks was
Speaker 1: able to take it and turn into something really useful
Speaker 1: for people who wanted to create this episodic audio content. Now,
Speaker 1: Adam Curry would make a piece of code available that
Speaker 1: would automate this RSS and closed audio to iTunes process
Speaker 1: to his blog visitors, and it's called I Potter, I believe,
Speaker 1: is what the script was named. And he also began
Speaker 1: to contact other bloggers who are interested in using audio
Speaker 1: to reach an audience in this same sort of way.
Speaker 1: On February eleven, two thousand four, The Guardian published an
Speaker 1: article titled Audible Revolution. It was written by Ben Hammersley,
Speaker 1: and he was writing about the use of the Internet
Speaker 1: as a means to distribute audio content. And in that
Speaker 1: piece Hammersley asks, quote, but what to call it? Audio blogging, podcasting,
Speaker 1: guerrilla media end quote? And so this may very well
Speaker 1: be the origin of the term podcasting. Now it's possible
Speaker 1: that the word podcasting had been mentioned by someone before,
Speaker 1: but this is the earliest piece in writing that I
Speaker 1: can find that mentions that term, and it happened at
Speaker 1: that point entered into the general conversation about audio distribution
Speaker 1: through the Internet. On September two thousand four, Danny J.
Speaker 1: Gregoire used the term podcaster in a discussion about the
Speaker 1: technical issues surrounding publishing and distributing podcasts, and this section
Speaker 1: in which he said this would go like this. Here's
Speaker 1: a quote. I can see there being the desire of
Speaker 1: users in some instances to be able to easily subscribe
Speaker 1: and get older posts slash episode slash shows. What are
Speaker 1: we calling these things? Any way? How about pode or
Speaker 1: sewed for short that no longer appear on the RSS
Speaker 1: feed right now? If, for example, someone wanted to listen
Speaker 1: to all the daily source codes back to sewed number one,
Speaker 1: they would have to manually go through the archives and
Speaker 1: download any seds not automagically received, somewhat defeating the purpose
Speaker 1: of an I potter. Not too much of a problem now,
Speaker 1: But I guess one could argue that this is simply
Speaker 1: an RSS slash server side issue, and that the podcaster, yes,
Speaker 1: I like making up new words, should be responsible enough
Speaker 1: to offer a page of separate feeds of old sods
Speaker 1: by month slash year, slash, season, slash etcetera. End quote.
Speaker 1: So he also used the word podcaster. Two days later,
Speaker 1: in the Evil Genius Chronicles podcast, Dave Slusher had this
Speaker 1: to say, somebody has registered podcasting dot net and I
Speaker 1: saw a podcaster or podcaster dot net, and I saw
Speaker 1: a podcaster hitting as a user against hitting my RSS
Speaker 1: feed and I went and looked at it. And right
Speaker 1: now it's just a coming soon page, but I'm going
Speaker 1: to pay attention to that. I want to see who's
Speaker 1: got that and what they're going, what they're doing with
Speaker 1: that term. I think they've coined the term, so iPod
Speaker 1: platform just doesn't spring from the tongue. But what I'm
Speaker 1: doing right here, and what Adams doing meaning Adam Curry,
Speaker 1: and what Dave Winer is doing, and what I T
Speaker 1: Conversations are doing, that's podcasting. I think that is the term.
Speaker 1: I'm using that from here on out. You know, so
Speaker 1: I am a podcaster and they are podcasters, and I
Speaker 1: am podcasting right now, and you listen to my podcast.
Speaker 1: The name stuck. That's an understatement and it's something that
Speaker 1: we all know because you wouldn't be listening to this
Speaker 1: if it didn't. In November two thousand four, Libson launched
Speaker 1: l I B S. White End. This was the first
Speaker 1: podcast service provider and it still exists to this day.
Speaker 1: I've actually used it. It's pretty pretty useful, pretty easy
Speaker 1: to use, not totally intuitive, but not difficult and these
Speaker 1: services make it easier for podcasters to get their content
Speaker 1: up online. They handle all the RSS feeds and all
Speaker 1: the technical side of things. All you have to do
Speaker 1: is fill out a few fields and then you can
Speaker 1: start uploading your content to the service, where we'll host
Speaker 1: your files and make them available for various podcatching services.
Speaker 1: Later on, in February two thive, Public Radio International launched
Speaker 1: The World, which was the first daily public radio news podcast.
Speaker 1: The next month, March two thousand five, the Public radio
Speaker 1: show on the Media would become the first to also
Speaker 1: be distributed as a podcast in full. In April two
Speaker 1: thousand five, Leo Laporte, who had worked in traditional media
Speaker 1: for years as a technology news communicator, a reviewer, and
Speaker 1: an educator, formed This Week in Tech, a network also
Speaker 1: known as twit. This would become one of the first
Speaker 1: podcast networks in the world. In other words, it became
Speaker 1: the umbrella to multiple shows in podcast format. On June six,
Speaker 1: two thousand five, iTunes four point nine launched with a
Speaker 1: podcast directory added to the iTunes Music store, and this
Speaker 1: made it much easier for iTunes users to find and
Speaker 1: download episodes, and it became really important to podcasters that
Speaker 1: they get their shows onto Apples directory because that was
Speaker 1: the place to be. That's where most people were getting
Speaker 1: their podcasts from in those days, so if you weren't
Speaker 1: showing up an Apple's directory, it felt like you were
Speaker 1: missing out on the people who would otherwise be able
Speaker 1: to subscribe to your show. This move also forced a
Speaker 1: different company to change its course, and that company was
Speaker 1: called Odeo o d e O. Odio's purpose originally was
Speaker 1: to create a podcasting directory as well as a suite
Speaker 1: of tools for creating podcasts. It was poised to launch
Speaker 1: in the summer of two thousand five, but then Apple
Speaker 1: got into the game with podcasting, and the people at
Speaker 1: Odeo saw the writing on the wall. There just was
Speaker 1: no way they were going to compete against Apple in
Speaker 1: that space, So rather than abandoned ship entirely, they decided
Speaker 1: to change what their company was going to do, and
Speaker 1: they also ditched the name. Instead, Odeo would become a
Speaker 1: company that would allow people to send out little messages
Speaker 1: to their friends using SMS messaging or a web client,
Speaker 1: and that's how Twitter was born. Yep, Twitter exists because
Speaker 1: of iTunes sort of. In August two five, NPR officially
Speaker 1: got into the podcast game. Making show segments available as
Speaker 1: podcast downloads. So while their rise in popularity a few
Speaker 1: years later makes it seem like they were latecomers to podcasting,
Speaker 1: the fact is they were around in some of those
Speaker 1: earliest days. The New Oxford American Dictionary would name podcast
Speaker 1: as their word of the year on December third, two
Speaker 1: thousand five, and the following year podcast would become a
Speaker 1: new word in the dictionary. We've got a lot more
Speaker 1: to talk about to wrap up, and actually to talk
Speaker 1: about some of the other influential podcasts that came out
Speaker 1: in those early years. But before we do that, let's
Speaker 1: take another quick break to thank our sponsor. So in
Speaker 1: two thousand six, Edison Research held a survey to find
Speaker 1: out how many people were aware of podcasting in general.
Speaker 1: So two thousand six is still early days for podcasting,
Speaker 1: and the survey bears it out. According to their report,
Speaker 1: twenty two of Americans who responded to this survey said
Speaker 1: they had heard about podcasting, but only half as many
Speaker 1: only eleven percent, had ever actually listened to a podcast.
Speaker 1: And this is why, in those early days of doing
Speaker 1: tech stuff, just a couple of years later, I found
Speaker 1: it really challenging to explain to people what it was
Speaker 1: I was doing. I'd say things like, yeah, it's an
Speaker 1: audio show, kind of like a radio show. No, no,
Speaker 1: it's not. It's not on the radio. It's it's on
Speaker 1: the internet. No no, no, you you don't. You don't
Speaker 1: stream it, you download it and then you then you
Speaker 1: listen to it on an iPod or like an NP
Speaker 1: three player. I've had that kind of conversation so many times. Well,
Speaker 1: in February two thousand six, Wait Wait Don't Tell Me
Speaker 1: becomes nbr's first full program podcast, which means I've been
Speaker 1: a subscriber for more than a decade. Wow. Before that,
Speaker 1: NBR had been uploading segments of shows, but not entire episodes.
Speaker 1: So wait, Wait Don't tell Me. It was kind of
Speaker 1: their experiment what would happen if they allowed an entire
Speaker 1: show that would go out on NPR to also be
Speaker 1: downloaded as a podcast. As it turns out, people would
Speaker 1: go bunkers for it. That really showed up when they
Speaker 1: started doing this American Life. Also that month, in February
Speaker 1: two thousand and six, the Ricky Gervais Show entered the
Speaker 1: gain US Book of World Records as the most downloaded
Speaker 1: podcast in history. Though, come on, be fair. Two thousand
Speaker 1: six is pretty early in the podcast game. I mean,
Speaker 1: I hadn't even started tech Stuff yet, and it could
Speaker 1: have waited a bit, to be honest. That record would
Speaker 1: be broken later on, in the spring of two thousand seven,
Speaker 1: Jack and Stench start a subscription based podcast at five
Speaker 1: dollars per month per subscription. The Jack and Stinch Show
Speaker 1: grew out of a radio program called Jamie Jack and Stinch.
Speaker 1: Their radio company had canceled their show, so they were
Speaker 1: out of a job, and that's when the creators decided
Speaker 1: that they were gonna they were gonna try and make
Speaker 1: a listener supported series and see if they can make
Speaker 1: it work. And it turns out it did work. They're
Speaker 1: still podcasting today and it's still five dollars per month
Speaker 1: or cents per show, as they say on their website.
Speaker 1: Other subscription based shows would soon follow, and so you
Speaker 1: began to see a few different ways to monetize podcasts.
Speaker 1: There were these listeners supported shows through subscriptions or later
Speaker 1: on through platforms like Patreon. Then there are sponsors supported
Speaker 1: shows such as tech Stuff, where we monetized by having
Speaker 1: ads in our shows. There's also fully sponsored content in
Speaker 1: which a company will pay for a full episode of
Speaker 1: a program, so there are a few different ways to
Speaker 1: make money from podcasting, though I'd say the vast majority
Speaker 1: of podcasters out there aren't really making a big profit
Speaker 1: from it. On April two thousand eight, Josh Clark and
Speaker 1: Chris Palette became Internet superstars forever and ever when the
Speaker 1: very first episode of Stuff You Should Know published. That
Speaker 1: is our most popular podcast here at how Stuff Works
Speaker 1: dot com and Stuff you Should Know the very first
Speaker 1: episode April two thousand eight, Chuck was not a co
Speaker 1: host yet, it was my former editor Chris Polette. The
Speaker 1: topic they covered was how grass aline works and the
Speaker 1: show was just nine minutes long. Those are the episodes
Speaker 1: saw Josh work with a couple of different potential co hosts.
Speaker 1: So there was Chris Palette and there was also Candice,
Speaker 1: who would later go on to be one of the
Speaker 1: original hosts of Stuff You Missed in History Class, which,
Speaker 1: by the way, it was originally called Factor Fiction. Chuck
Speaker 1: Bryant would join Josh for the episode why does Toothpaste
Speaker 1: make orange Juice Taste Bad? Which published on May two
Speaker 1: thousand eight, and the charisma between the two hosts was undeniable.
Speaker 1: Josh and Chuck would become the definitive voices of stuff
Speaker 1: you should know, and they still are today, and they
Speaker 1: sit on either side of me. Chuck's on my right,
Speaker 1: Josh is on my left. Other house stuff works shows
Speaker 1: that launched around that same time, where Brain Stuff, which
Speaker 1: originally featured our founder Marshall Brain giving short explanations of
Speaker 1: interesting stuff, and then stuff you Missed in History Class, which,
Speaker 1: as I said before, started life as Factor fiction. And
Speaker 1: there there was a little show called tech Stuff, tiny
Speaker 1: little show that you're listening to right now. The first
Speaker 1: official episode of tech Stuff because we recorded a few
Speaker 1: that never published, a bunch of test episodes so that
Speaker 1: we can get used to being on the microphone, and
Speaker 1: they were bad and we should feel bad. I don't
Speaker 1: think they exist anymore. I'm pretty sure there's no existing
Speaker 1: recording of those early episodes, or I would release them.
Speaker 1: Why not, I would be I would group them together
Speaker 1: and say, you want to listen to what the show
Speaker 1: sounded like back in two thousand and eight, because this
Speaker 1: is it. So the first official episode went live on
Speaker 1: June tenth, two thousand eight, and that episode was called
Speaker 1: how the Google Apple Cloud Computer Will Work. The less
Speaker 1: said about that, the better podcasts continued to grow in popularity,
Speaker 1: and podcast networks also began to grow. And then we
Speaker 1: flashed back to that story I mentioned about Personal Audio.
Speaker 1: Back in the ninety nineties, a company, Personal Audio LLC.
Speaker 1: Was what some people called a patent holding company. Me
Speaker 1: the company was in the business of making money from
Speaker 1: the patents it held. It didn't make anything else. It
Speaker 1: didn't offer any services, it didn't offer any products. It
Speaker 1: had these patents. Now, there are a couple of different
Speaker 1: ways you can make money with patents, and they are
Speaker 1: completely viable. One of this is to license your patent
Speaker 1: and designed two interested parties, And again there's nothing wrong
Speaker 1: with that. So let's say I come up with a
Speaker 1: really cool idea on how to do something, and I
Speaker 1: patent that idea and then let companies know, Hey, if
Speaker 1: you want to do this thing in this cool way
Speaker 1: that I thought of, just come on over to me
Speaker 1: and we'll make a deal. Will you'll pay a licensing fee,
Speaker 1: I allow you to use my method. Everything will be
Speaker 1: cool until the patent expires, in which case it becomes
Speaker 1: public property. Or you could go another route, which involves
Speaker 1: just sitting on your patents and looking around and then
Speaker 1: suing people who appeared to be using your patent did ideas,
Speaker 1: Then you can either win money through a lawsuit or,
Speaker 1: as is more common, reach a settlement agreement where a
Speaker 1: company will pay you for using that patented idea. Lawsuits
Speaker 1: are really expensive, and often you'll find parties willing to
Speaker 1: settle out of court just to avoid risking a full,
Speaker 1: full blown court battle where even if you win, it's expensive,
Speaker 1: but if you don't win, it's even more expensive. Well,
Speaker 1: Personal Audio had sued Apple a couple of times in
Speaker 1: an East Texas court over patents involving playlists Why East Texas.
Speaker 1: Personal Audio claimed it had an office nast Texas, but
Speaker 1: a lot of different technology journalists said that that office
Speaker 1: was essentially empty and really was just connected to their
Speaker 1: patent lawyer's office. I don't know if that's true or not,
Speaker 1: but that's how it was reported, and that to East
Speaker 1: Texas was known as being a very favorable court when
Speaker 1: it came to patent litigation. It was very favorable towards
Speaker 1: patent holders. So in Personal Audio sued several parties, including
Speaker 1: Adam Carolla and how Stuff Works, among others. Although technically
Speaker 1: they were going after Discovery because How Stuff Works was
Speaker 1: owned by Discovery at that time. The claim was that
Speaker 1: Personal Audio held the patented approach that these other podcasts
Speaker 1: were using to distribute audio over the web, and then
Speaker 1: a long legal battle followed. Now I was in the
Speaker 1: dark throughout the entire process, for which I am thankful.
Speaker 1: I only learned about developments after they had hit the
Speaker 1: news cycle. The Electronic Frontier Foundation got involved. The e
Speaker 1: f F and they're very much a a consumer based
Speaker 1: organization that tries to look out for protections against corporations
Speaker 1: encroaching upon the Internet. They view the Internet as a
Speaker 1: public utility that should be UH, should be accessible by all,
Speaker 1: and that no company should have this kind of of
Speaker 1: leverage over it. So the tech news sites did some
Speaker 1: digging and made some allegations about Personal Audio about UH,
Speaker 1: the fact that the company had not ever produced a podcast,
Speaker 1: nor ever planned to do so, and so a lot
Speaker 1: of people were throwing around the words patent troll about
Speaker 1: Personal Audio. That's not my place to say, but the
Speaker 1: courts did ultimately find in favor of the podcasters. This
Speaker 1: was after Personal Audio had already started to back off
Speaker 1: from the lawsuits, not because the company was saying they
Speaker 1: didn't have a case. They said, no, we've got a case.
Speaker 1: There's just no money in podcasting, so no one could
Speaker 1: pay us, which was kind of like a back end
Speaker 1: its slap against podcasters. I mean, I can't necessarily disagree
Speaker 1: with him. There's not a whole lot of money in
Speaker 1: podcasting for for the vast majority of podcasters out there.
Speaker 1: You gotta do it because you love it, and maybe
Speaker 1: you wind up finding a profitable approach to it. It
Speaker 1: does happen, but it's hard to do. Now, it turns
Speaker 1: out that all of that was moot because there have
Speaker 1: been further UH lawsuits. The e f F pursued a
Speaker 1: claim that the patents that Personal Audio was depending upon
Speaker 1: are invalid, and that has gone to court, and that
Speaker 1: ended up being decided in the favor of e f
Speaker 1: and against Personal Audio. So there's you know, some of
Speaker 1: those examples I was talking about earlier, like Quirks and
Speaker 1: Quirks and Malamud's Internet talk radio platform, we're exhibiting features
Speaker 1: that were described in the Personal Audio patent. Now, that
Speaker 1: patent that they were really relying upon in this particular
Speaker 1: case was filed in two thousand nine, but it was
Speaker 1: given a priority date of N and this does happen
Speaker 1: in patent law. If you have filed for certain patents
Speaker 1: and you have a later patent that you feel is
Speaker 1: derivative of a previous one, and you want that effective
Speaker 1: date to be early earlier than what you're filing it for,
Speaker 1: you can appeal for a priority date, and they did
Speaker 1: and they got it. It was in but the examples
Speaker 1: of Quirks and Quirks and internet talk radio predated N
Speaker 1: and that led the court to rule that the patent
Speaker 1: was invalid as it was describing something that had already existed.
Speaker 1: So the case went to the Court of Appeals and
Speaker 1: the Court of Appeals upheld that ruling. So as of
Speaker 1: the recording of this podcast, there's been no word if
Speaker 1: Personal Audio will pursue this to the Supreme Court, because
Speaker 1: they could it could go that next step, but two
Speaker 1: courts so far have said, you know, there's evidence here
Speaker 1: that this stuff existed before you described it in your patent,
Speaker 1: and you can't patent an idea that already exists. I
Speaker 1: hope you guys enjoyed this episode of the history of podcasting.
Speaker 1: If you have any suggestions for future episodes, send me
Speaker 1: a message You can send it to me via Twitter
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Speaker 1: W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text
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