Speaker 1: Text technology with tech Stuff from works dot com. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm a senior writer with how stuff Works dot com
Speaker 1: and I've been doing this for a while, like like
Speaker 1: a long while. I've been podcasting for so long, and
Speaker 1: as I think back to all of those episodes, I've
Speaker 1: done more than eight d fifty of them. At this point,
Speaker 1: I realized that while I've talked about podcasting in an
Speaker 1: episode or two, I've never done a full episode about
Speaker 1: the history of podcasting itself. And so that is what
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about today. We're going to look
Speaker 1: at the history of podcasting, how it evolved, how it
Speaker 1: got its name, the earliest examples of podcasts, and then
Speaker 1: we gonna talk a little bit about the how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works history with podcasts, at least based upon what information
Speaker 1: I could glean from my taciturn coworkers. So sit back, relax,
Speaker 1: and let's learn about some history. Y'all. There's the stuff
Speaker 1: you missed in history of podcasting. I'm Jonathan Strickland. So
Speaker 1: this particular story is a complicated one. It's filled with
Speaker 1: a lot of different people, a lot of different things
Speaker 1: have happened over the course of the evolution of podcasting.
Speaker 1: There are incidents and accidents, their hints and allegations. As
Speaker 1: Paul Simon would say, So let's dive in now. If
Speaker 1: you look at the story for like go Anywhere and
Speaker 1: you look for the history of podcasting, you just type
Speaker 1: that into Google and you pull up some stuff you
Speaker 1: including an article that we have on house to wars
Speaker 1: dot com. You will frequently see that podcasting dates back
Speaker 1: to two thousand four with Adam Curry, who I remember
Speaker 1: from my childhood. He was a a VJ on MTV,
Speaker 1: which used to show music videos, and that's where a
Speaker 1: lot of the histories start. They say two thousand four,
Speaker 1: Adam Curry made the first podcast, but uh, it's not
Speaker 1: entirely accurate. Actually, the story dates back before two thousand four,
Speaker 1: and it's the first podcast was not from Adam Curry,
Speaker 1: not really. So I thought we could probably dispel some
Speaker 1: myths and learn about the truth here. Uh. And there
Speaker 1: are also a few different threads to this story, as
Speaker 1: it turns out, and one of those threads I've already
Speaker 1: covered in an episode of tech Stuff from about a
Speaker 1: 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 gonna
Speaker 1: give you the cliffs notes version. Our cliffs notes still thing.
Speaker 1: Someone tell me if cliffs notes still exist. I'm pretty
Speaker 1: sure I've asked that in a previous episode, but i've
Speaker 1: I've clearly forgotten again. Anyway, I'm gonna give you a
Speaker 1: summary of what I talked about in that previous episode.
Speaker 1: A research institution in Germany formed a group that dedicated
Speaker 1: itself to developing compression 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. So
Speaker 1: it 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 gonna have more information packed into it
Speaker 1: than say a minute of quiet room tone. So you've
Speaker 1: got this fairly large amount of data. Especially for the
Speaker 1: time that we're talking about, which was late nineteen seventies
Speaker 1: early nineties, there was a need to find a way
Speaker 1: to compress that data down so it didn't take up
Speaker 1: as much space, and that then you could transmit it
Speaker 1: over various media like telephone lines. And that's what this
Speaker 1: group in Germany was trying to do. They wanted to
Speaker 1: be able to transmit digital audio over telephone lines, but
Speaker 1: in order to make it efficient, they needed to find
Speaker 1: a compression strategy or else the files were just gonna
Speaker 1: be too large. Now these days, while the file sizes
Speaker 1: haven't really changed, I mean, the raw audio is still
Speaker 1: what it is, we definitely have much faster throughput, Like
Speaker 1: we're able to send a lot more information in a
Speaker 1: shorter amount of time than what we used to be
Speaker 1: able to do. So it's not as big a deal
Speaker 1: today unless you're talking about just trying to store a
Speaker 1: ton of audio on a relatively small storage device. But
Speaker 1: back in the nineteen seventies, and eighties. This was a
Speaker 1: pretty tough challenge. Now. Whether they were successful or not
Speaker 1: in creating a compression strategy that makes the file sizes
Speaker 1: smaller without affecting the audio quality depends upon a couple
Speaker 1: of things. For one, it depends upon your sense of hearing,
Speaker 1: because some people are more sensitive to it than others,
Speaker 1: and for one person it may sound perfectly fine, and
Speaker 1: another person may say, no, I can hear all sorts
Speaker 1: 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 rates, 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 and attempt to remove straineous 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 so that you
Speaker 1: can compress everything together and make smaller file sizes. So
Speaker 1: really the goal was just to keep only the data
Speaker 1: that humans would really be able to perceive. And it
Speaker 1: took some time for them to tweak this and make
Speaker 1: sure that they could come up with an algorithm that
Speaker 1: worked and didn't result in a really choppy, unpleasant audio experience. So,
Speaker 1: depending upon how you set your compression rates, you might
Speaker 1: manage to reduce a file size and not notice a
Speaker 1: huge difference in quality, or you might end up with
Speaker 1: something that is truly unlistenable. If you remember, the people
Speaker 1: working on the MP three standard back in the day
Speaker 1: would use Tom's Diner as a way of measuring their success,
Speaker 1: and they said that the first few times they tried
Speaker 1: to make a compression formula, it turned Tom's Diner into
Speaker 1: an unlistenable mess. Some of the uncharitable among us might
Speaker 1: claim that the completely uncompressed version of Tom's Diner is
Speaker 1: an unlistenable mess, but that's that's just being mean spirited.
Speaker 1: I would say the MP three would later make podcasting practical,
Speaker 1: but it was not a quick leap from MP three's
Speaker 1: too podcasts. There was a good amount of time between
Speaker 1: the development of the MP three and the rise of
Speaker 1: the podcas cast. But the MP three development sort of
Speaker 1: leads us into other things that will eventually allow podcast
Speaker 1: to become a reality. Now, let's skip ahead to the
Speaker 1: early nine nineties. The development of the MP three largely
Speaker 1: happened in the eighties, but didn't really start making a
Speaker 1: debut until the nineties. Anyway, the mainstream world was scratching
Speaker 1: its head over something called the Internet in those early nineties.
Speaker 1: Before then, the only people who really had access to
Speaker 1: the Internet were academics, government officials, and scientists who had
Speaker 1: been using it for quite some time. But the rest
Speaker 1: of us really didn't have any exposure to it. It
Speaker 1: was not something that your average person had any access to.
Speaker 1: Your average Joe hadn't really had any contact with it
Speaker 1: at all. Computer hobbyists had been cutting their teeth on
Speaker 1: bulletin board systems or bbs s. Now, these were message
Speaker 1: boards and file repositories that typically sat on someone's spare computer.
Speaker 1: So with your very basic bolletin board system, the way
Speaker 1: it would work is you would have a phone number
Speaker 1: and that phone number would go to the modem connected
Speaker 1: to this other computer, the computer that houses the BBS.
Speaker 1: You would use your computer to dial into that number
Speaker 1: that would connect you to this other BBS, and you
Speaker 1: would then be able to browse the files that have
Speaker 1: been uploaded to that particular directory for the BBS, play games,
Speaker 1: leave messages, that kind of thing, because you're dialing in.
Speaker 1: Typically a lot of those smaller BBS has had maybe
Speaker 1: one phone line, sometimes up to three, where that's how
Speaker 1: many people could connect at any one time. So there
Speaker 1: are various ways to discourage people from spending too much
Speaker 1: time on the BBS and thus keeping it busy for
Speaker 1: everybody else. For example, UH, some of them would charge
Speaker 1: for a certain amount of time, like after a certain
Speaker 1: number of minutes had passed, you would have to pay
Speaker 1: two keep access to the BBS. UH. Some would just
Speaker 1: have a time limit and after at the when you
Speaker 1: hit your time limit, it would just kick you off
Speaker 1: and you would have to wait another day to be
Speaker 1: able to log back into your BBS. Eventually you had
Speaker 1: some bbs is on what was called Fido net. This
Speaker 1: was a network that allowed bbs is to exchange information
Speaker 1: with each other. So it's almost like post offices. Think
Speaker 1: about going to a post office and you would drop
Speaker 1: a letter off, and that letter would then be sent
Speaker 1: to another post office, someone else's BBS and they could
Speaker 1: receive it. That was kind of the world before the
Speaker 1: Internet had really taken off, and the Internet really is
Speaker 1: a different beast altogether. Instead of dialing into a single
Speaker 1: machine and browsing what was on that machine, you could
Speaker 1: suddenly connect to a network of networked machines. In something
Speaker 1: very important happened in the United States, the Federal Communications
Speaker 1: Commission the c C made an important decision that encouraged
Speaker 1: explosive growth on the Internet. That that decision was they're
Speaker 1: gonna lift some restrictions. Up until there was a restriction
Speaker 1: on commercial uses for the Internet. You you weren't allowed
Speaker 1: to use it for commercial purposes. It was meant for research,
Speaker 1: it was meant for government use, and that was it.
Speaker 1: But in ninety one, the f C c said we're
Speaker 1: lifting those restrictions, and it became the wild West for
Speaker 1: a while, where lots of companies said, I'm not sure
Speaker 1: how we can use this to our advantage, but I'm
Speaker 1: sure it's huge and we have to use it to
Speaker 1: our advantage. So there are a lot of different parties
Speaker 1: rushing into the space because now it was possible to
Speaker 1: make a commercial use of it, but no one had
Speaker 1: really figured out how to actually do that yet. There
Speaker 1: was a lot of competition to try and figure out
Speaker 1: how can we dominate this space, and no one really
Speaker 1: had the answer yet. So how to this affect Internet use? Well,
Speaker 1: before the FCC lifted restrictions, there were around one thousand
Speaker 1: Internet hosts connected to this network of networks. By there
Speaker 1: were more than a million Internet hosts. But for our story,
Speaker 1: the important bit is that people and companies could launch
Speaker 1: commercial interests in the Internet, including radio stations. Now, Carl
Speaker 1: Malamud gets the credit for being the first person to
Speaker 1: launch an Internet radio site, and this was called Internet
Speaker 1: Talk Radio. Malamud launched this show in and he launched
Speaker 1: it with a program called Geek of the Week. You
Speaker 1: can actually find recordings of some of those old episodes
Speaker 1: online and they typically feature various important people in the
Speaker 1: computer and text spheres, and Malamoud would just interview them
Speaker 1: about whatever subject they wanted to talk about. And those
Speaker 1: 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. That'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 house
Speaker 1: stuffworks dot com, and just for the sake of this example,
Speaker 1: we're just gonna use a nice round, simple number of
Speaker 1: one hundred packets. It takes one d packets to to
Speaker 1: load up the homepage 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: That'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 in 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 divi riding it up into packets, you can
Speaker 1: actually make a better case for that information, making it
Speaker 1: to where you wanted to go. If you're sending it
Speaker 1: all out as one big file, one thing that can
Speaker 1: happen is it can slow everything down because, depending on
Speaker 1: the size of the file, it might start to tax
Speaker 1: certain parts of the system, and if it fails, you're
Speaker 1: you've got to send it all over again. It just
Speaker 1: becomes a big nightmare. So the founders of the Internet,
Speaker 1: who as we all know, put the Internet on top
Speaker 1: of 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. So redundancy
Speaker 1: means that a server is sending out multiple copies of
Speaker 1: the same packet to make sure that one of them
Speaker 1: gets to their destination. So this is kind of like
Speaker 1: if you had critical message and you've got you make
Speaker 1: three copies of it and you send a copy each
Speaker 1: with a different messenger and they all rush out. Well,
Speaker 1: that means that you're more likely to get your message
Speaker 1: to where it needs to go, because even if one
Speaker 1: of 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 riders
Speaker 1: off to gone door to let them know that Rowand
Speaker 1: is coming out to help them or something. Packet switching
Speaker 1: is the method of sending the packets themselves, and this
Speaker 1: involves each packet taking its own path. Typically it's whichever
Speaker 1: path is the most efficient for that packet at that
Speaker 1: time for it to get to its destination. And packets
Speaker 1: that all belong to the same document or file can
Speaker 1: travel very different pathways. So if you go and you're
Speaker 1: trying to pull up house supports dot com, the packets
Speaker 1: that represent that web page could be taking very different
Speaker 1: paths in order to get to your computer. Remember, the
Speaker 1: network is this network of networks. It can be bouncing
Speaker 1: from all sorts of different machines before it finally gets
Speaker 1: to you. The destination computer then assembles all those packets
Speaker 1: back into the document or file or whatever it may be.
Speaker 1: And this is really cool because it means that the
Speaker 1: Internet is really robust. If nodes on the Internet go
Speaker 1: offline for whatever reason, if if certain computers between you
Speaker 1: and the computer you're trying to get information from go down,
Speaker 1: well the packets can route around that. They don't come
Speaker 1: up to like a sinkhole in the middle of the
Speaker 1: road and say, well, we wanted to get there, but
Speaker 1: we can't. No, they can take a different pathway and
Speaker 1: you just have to make sure that you are you know,
Speaker 1: having that redundancy there, which, by the way, you don't
Speaker 1: have to do. T c P I P does it
Speaker 1: for you. But as long as that's in place, with
Speaker 1: the redundancy, you don't even have to worry. If some
Speaker 1: of those packets somehow lose their way for whatever reason,
Speaker 1: whatever it may be, you'll likely end up getting the
Speaker 1: information you asked for, may not be as fast as
Speaker 1: you wanted, depending upon the problems, but you'll get it.
Speaker 1: So back to inbone, it's a little different from the
Speaker 1: approach I just mentioned. The basic packet switching strategy works
Speaker 1: great for static files and pages. So if I have
Speaker 1: a photograph and I want to send that information across
Speaker 1: to some other computer, it works great for that. Photographs
Speaker 1: don't change. It's gonna be the same photograph no matter what,
Speaker 1: so it's very easy to send that. And I'm not
Speaker 1: talking about photo editing software here, obviously, I'm just talking
Speaker 1: about sending an image. But if you want to send
Speaker 1: something like a video where you have stuff constantly changing
Speaker 1: both the image and the audio, or even more so
Speaker 1: live video which is persistently changing and you're not sure
Speaker 1: when it's gonna end, another approach was pretty important so
Speaker 1: broadcast represents this ongoing creation of information, and how do
Speaker 1: you disseminate that across the network? Inbone would keep all
Speaker 1: the packets together like packed together like a like a convoy,
Speaker 1: as I said earlier, until the last possible moment before
Speaker 1: they would split up and move through different routers and
Speaker 1: go through the rest of its journey. So it's more
Speaker 1: like a fire hose approach in the first half until
Speaker 1: you get to a point where you absolutely have to
Speaker 1: split things up because they will not get to their
Speaker 1: destination otherwise. This allows for a more efficient transmission of
Speaker 1: live content, and it helped make sure that those packets
Speaker 1: would arrive at their destinations at more or less the
Speaker 1: same time. Because you want it to be like a broadcast,
Speaker 1: You want the people who are watching it to all
Speaker 1: have the same experience that are around the same time.
Speaker 1: Otherwise you could end up in a situation where one
Speaker 1: person is watching the concert on a slight delay and
Speaker 1: someone else might be more than a minute or two behind.
Speaker 1: And this does still happen. By the way, I can't
Speaker 1: tell you how many times I've watched the w w
Speaker 1: E network and have been in a Facebook chat about
Speaker 1: what was going on with a pay per view only
Speaker 1: to have someone's boil something for me because I was
Speaker 1: lagging a bit behind the rest of the live feed
Speaker 1: for everybody else. But that's the price we pay for
Speaker 1: this amazing technology. Xerox Park was the group that created
Speaker 1: the inbone extension and the Internet Engineering Task Force adopted
Speaker 1: it in nineteen nine two, so it was all well
Speaker 1: in place for the Internet radio days of nineteen and
Speaker 1: Severe Tire Damage performed at Xerox Park. You remember, Xerox
Speaker 1: Park is also the research and development area where we
Speaker 1: got things like the graphic user interface and the computer mouse,
Speaker 1: as well as a ton of other stuff. A lot
Speaker 1: of interesting research and development came out of Xerox. So
Speaker 1: their audience Severe Tire Damage for this initial concert in
Speaker 1: pretty much consisted of a dude in Australia, which is
Speaker 1: really true. There was a researcher in Australia who was
Speaker 1: helping along with this project and he was the intended
Speaker 1: audience for the Severe Tire Damage concert of n In
Speaker 1: nineteen nine four, a slightly more famous band called The
Speaker 1: Rollings 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: now They first started off with their off air signals
Speaker 1: 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 Quirks Hit the Internet.
Speaker 1: The radio show had been airing on terrestrial radio since nineteen.
Speaker 1: Each show lasts about an hour and consists of segments
Speaker 1: about science, news and interesting facts. The Internet versions were
Speaker 1: recorded episodes stored in MP three format of 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 for and been
Speaker 1: awarded several patents dealing with digital audio distribution on the Internet.
Speaker 1: And this would be around the mid nineties six and later.
Speaker 1: And this also becomes incredibly important. That's a lot of
Speaker 1: foreshadowing right there. Some of you are way ahead of
Speaker 1: me on this, I'm sure of it. But let's get
Speaker 1: back to the nineties. Over the next few years, the
Speaker 1: MP three file format began to gain popularity, and in
Speaker 1: nine Napster became perhaps the best known of the peer
Speaker 1: to peer networks that made sharing MP three's across computers
Speaker 1: incredibly easy. And while I would never say that Napster
Speaker 1: caused piracy, it definitely made it a lot easier to do.
Speaker 1: You could rip tracks off of a disk with one
Speaker 1: of a dozen different programs. So you buy a CD
Speaker 1: or you get a CD, you put it in your computer,
Speaker 1: you pull the music off of it, convert those files
Speaker 1: into MP three format, store them on a drive on
Speaker 1: your computer, download the Napster interface, and then you could
Speaker 1: authorize Napster to use that particular drive to share all
Speaker 1: those files, and the music industry got really scared. So
Speaker 1: in short, the way peer to peer works is that
Speaker 1: you have some software that allows your computer to direct
Speaker 1: directly connect in to a network of other computers running
Speaker 1: that same software. And this network is constantly changing, with
Speaker 1: some computers being connected and some computers going offline. It
Speaker 1: all depends on who's using their computer for what. And
Speaker 1: you can search that network to see if there are
Speaker 1: any copies of a particular type of file you want,
Speaker 1: and when you download you can actually download from multiple
Speaker 1: sources at the same time. So if there's one source
Speaker 1: that is particularly slow because of whatever reason, maybe there's
Speaker 1: some problems like there's congestion and the internet between you
Speaker 1: and that particular server, then you can start getting packets
Speaker 1: from other servers that also have that same file. And
Speaker 1: it's all decentralized and it was a very quick way
Speaker 1: to spread files across and there's nothing illegal about that,
Speaker 1: right you can you can spread any sort of file
Speaker 1: you like, and if you have the legal authorization to
Speaker 1: distribute that file, then peer to peer networks are completely valid.
Speaker 1: The problem was a lot of people were using them
Speaker 1: to spread had MP three's that did not technically belong
Speaker 1: to them. Maybe they had bought an album and then
Speaker 1: they uploaded or they rather made available all of the
Speaker 1: tracks off that album and so people could get it
Speaker 1: for free. Well that's not great. It's kind of violating
Speaker 1: copyright law, and it it helped precipitate an era in
Speaker 1: which we saw crazy amounts of work in digital rights management,
Speaker 1: and it was not a bright and shining moment in
Speaker 1: Internet history. That being said, there are so many valid
Speaker 1: reasons to use peer to peer. It's a real shame
Speaker 1: that Napster and other peer to peer platforms are forever
Speaker 1: associated with this concept of piracy, just because that was
Speaker 1: a pretty big use for a lot of these networks
Speaker 1: and it got a lot of press. Around this same time,
Speaker 1: we also started seeing MP three players popping up. Now,
Speaker 1: the earliest players were pieces of software runing on your computer,
Speaker 1: not exactly convenient for on the go listening. I did
Speaker 1: a couple of episodes about the history of MP three players,
Speaker 1: including the rise of the iPod. So again I'm not
Speaker 1: going to go into it too much, but Apple's iPod
Speaker 1: really helped push MP three's even further into the mainstream,
Speaker 1: and the iPod became the device most associated with this
Speaker 1: relatively new form of consuming audio simultaneously. So much is
Speaker 1: happening that's important to podcasting. We got the birth of
Speaker 1: the RSS feed. Now RSS stands for well, it depends
Speaker 1: upon whom you ask. It could stand for rich site summary,
Speaker 1: or maybe it stands for really simple syndication. It just
Speaker 1: depends upon the authority you're asking at the time. But
Speaker 1: whatever it stands for, what it does is pretty cool.
Speaker 1: It is a format for delivering updated content to people.
Speaker 1: So in the old days, you go on the web,
Speaker 1: and web pages were pretty darn static. If you went
Speaker 1: to a web page one day and you looked at it,
Speaker 1: chances are the next day it was gonna 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 would give you kind of like headlines
Speaker 1: of the latest changes that had happened in the pages
Speaker 1: that you are subscribed to. So once you were able
Speaker 1: to do that, it really transformed the browsing experience. You
Speaker 1: no longer had to do all this legwork yourself and
Speaker 1: just have your laundry list of websites that you visit
Speaker 1: every single day. You could actually take a quick look
Speaker 1: at your RSS aggregator and see if there's any reason
Speaker 1: to go to that website. Well, that RSS model would
Speaker 1: later become helpful to podcasts. It could alert podcatching services
Speaker 1: 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: developer named Dave Winer found himself in an unlikely partnership
Speaker 1: with Adam Curry that former MTV VJ I mentioned earlier,
Speaker 1: and they were trying to adapt the RSS feed so
Speaker 1: that it could include audio. So Weiner was the guy
Speaker 1: who created that modification for RSS, and he demonstrated it
Speaker 1: in early by using it to enclose a song by
Speaker 1: The Grateful Dead, and he put it in a blog
Speaker 1: he was writing, so people who were following his blog
Speaker 1: were subscribed to it could immediately get access to that song.
Speaker 1: And while This provided the skeletal structure upon which podcasts
Speaker 1: would be built. Very few people were actually using it
Speaker 1: back then. In September two thousand three, Winer adapted his
Speaker 1: approach on behalf of a colleague named Christopher Leiden over
Speaker 1: at the Harvard Brookman Center, and Leighton really wanted to
Speaker 1: create an interview show with audio tracks saved in the
Speaker 1: MP three format. He was thinking of as like an
Speaker 1: audio blog, so he's regularly interviewing people and uploading those files,
Speaker 1: and he wanted there to be a way for people
Speaker 1: to subscribe to it. He was interviewing bloggers, futurists, and
Speaker 1: political figures, and this would eventually become a show called
Speaker 1: Radio Open Source and is, by most accounts, the first
Speaker 1: actual podcast, though at the time it wasn't called a podcast.
Speaker 1: So if you hear the Adam Curry had the very
Speaker 1: first podcast and it launched in two thousand four, just
Speaker 1: know that two thousand three saw Christopher Lyden's show Radio
Speaker 1: Open Source, and by all measures, that really was a podcast,
Speaker 1: it just didn't have the name yet. Later in two
Speaker 1: thousand three, and influential jet named Kevin Marks whipped up
Speaker 1: some interesting technological wizardry in connection with the two thousand
Speaker 1: three Blogger Cohn event, he showed off a program that
Speaker 1: could take the audio files housed in an RSS enclosure
Speaker 1: and transfer them automatically over to Apple's iTunes, and then
Speaker 1: you can use the iTunes management software to synchronize to
Speaker 1: an iPod. Now, remember in these days, you had to
Speaker 1: physically connect an iPod to a computer and use iTunes
Speaker 1: to transfer music across the cable to your iPod. There's
Speaker 1: no wireless way of doing this yet. The iPod had
Speaker 1: no access to the iTunes store directly. You had to
Speaker 1: download things or rip things from your music collection directly
Speaker 1: to iTunes and then port those things from iTunes over
Speaker 1: to your iPod or other m P three player. I
Speaker 1: had a creative zen back then and I used it
Speaker 1: with iTunes and it was a headache, but it would
Speaker 1: kind of work. But this was huge, This approach to
Speaker 1: having this automatic conversion and something that I don't think
Speaker 1: Apple necessarily anticipated when it built in the synchronization capability
Speaker 1: and iTunes. The purpose for the feature was convenience. So
Speaker 1: let's say you've got a decent music collection and you
Speaker 1: put all your songs over on iTunes and you want
Speaker 1: them to transfer those songs to your brain brand spanking
Speaker 1: new iPod. That's not so difficult to do the first time,
Speaker 1: though it can take a while. You just connect your
Speaker 1: iPod to iTunes and say, all right, I want all
Speaker 1: these files to be moved over. But then later on,
Speaker 1: let's say you add more music to your library. So
Speaker 1: how do you add that to your iPod. You've already
Speaker 1: got a music library on your iPod, You've got new
Speaker 1: songs in your iTunes library on your computer. How do
Speaker 1: you get those two to match up again. Well, one
Speaker 1: 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? Anyway? How about pode or SEWED
Speaker 1: for short that no longer appear on the RSS feed
Speaker 1: right now? If, for example, someone wanted to listen to
Speaker 1: 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 sleds not auto magically received, somewhat defeating the
Speaker 1: purpose of an I potter. Not too much of a
Speaker 1: problem now, But I guess one could argue that this
Speaker 1: is simply an RSS slash server side issue, and that
Speaker 1: the podcaster, yes, I like making up new words, should
Speaker 1: be responsible enough to offer a page of separate feeds
Speaker 1: of old sods by month slash, year, slash, season, slash, etcetera.
Speaker 1: End quote, so he also used the word podcaster. Two
Speaker 1: days later, in the Evil Genius Chronicles podcast, Dave Slusher
Speaker 1: had this to say, somebody has registered podcasting dot net
Speaker 1: and I saw a podcaster or podcaster dot net and
Speaker 1: I saw a podcaster hitting as a user against hitting
Speaker 1: my RSS feed, and I went and looked at it.
Speaker 1: And right now it's just a coming soon page. But
Speaker 1: I'm going to pay attention to that. I want to
Speaker 1: see who's got that and what they're going, what they're
Speaker 1: doing with that term. I think they've coined the term,
Speaker 1: so iPod platform just doesn't spring from the tongue. But
Speaker 1: what I'm doing right here, and what Adams doing, meaning
Speaker 1: Adam Curry, and what Dave Winer is doing, and what
Speaker 1: I T Conversations are doing, that's podcasting. I think that
Speaker 1: is the term. I'm using that from here on out.
Speaker 1: You know, So I am a podcaster and they are podcasters,
Speaker 1: and I am podcasting right now, and you listen to
Speaker 1: my podcast. The name stuck. That's an understatement and it's
Speaker 1: something that we all know because you wouldn't be listening
Speaker 1: to this if it didn't. In November two thousand four,
Speaker 1: Libson launched l I b S. White and this was
Speaker 1: the first podcast service provider and it still exists to
Speaker 1: this day. I've actually used it. It's pretty pretty useful,
Speaker 1: pretty easy to use. Not totally intuitive, but not difficult.
Speaker 1: And these services make it easier for podcasters to get
Speaker 1: their content up online. They handle all the RSS feeds
Speaker 1: and all the technical side of things. All you have
Speaker 1: to do is fill out if you feel and then
Speaker 1: you can start uploading your content to the service, where
Speaker 1: it will host your files and make them available for
Speaker 1: various podcatching services. Later on, in February two thousand five,
Speaker 1: Public Radio International launched The World, which was the first
Speaker 1: daily public radio news podcast. The next month, March two
Speaker 1: thousand five, the Public Radio show on the Media would
Speaker 1: become the first to also be distributed as a podcast
Speaker 1: in full. In April two thousand five, Leo Laporte, who
Speaker 1: had worked in traditional media for years as a technology
Speaker 1: news communicator, a reviewer, and an educator, formed This Week
Speaker 1: in Tech, a network also known as twit. This would
Speaker 1: become one of the first podcast networks in the world.
Speaker 1: In other words, it became the umbrella to multiple shows
Speaker 1: in podcast format. On June six, two thousand five, iTunes
Speaker 1: four point nine launched with a podcast directory added to
Speaker 1: the iTunes music store, and this made it much easier
Speaker 1: for iTunes users to find and download episodes, and it
Speaker 1: became really important to podcasters that they get their shows
Speaker 1: onto Apples directory because that was the place to be.
Speaker 1: That's where most people were getting their podcasts from in
Speaker 1: those days, so if you weren't showing up an Apple's directory,
Speaker 1: it felt like you were missing out on the people
Speaker 1: who would otherwise be able to subscribe to your show.
Speaker 1: This move also forced a different company to change its course,
Speaker 1: and that company was called Odeo O d e O.
Speaker 1: Odeo's purpose originally was to create a podcasting directory as
Speaker 1: well as a suite of tools for creating podcasts. It
Speaker 1: was poised to launch in the summer of two thousand five,
Speaker 1: but then Apple got into the game with podcasting and
Speaker 1: the people at Odeo saw the writing on the wall.
Speaker 1: There just was no way they were going to compete
Speaker 1: against Apple in that space, So rather than abandoned ship entirely,
Speaker 1: they decided to change what their company was going to do,
Speaker 1: and they also ditched the name. Instead, Odeo would become
Speaker 1: a company that would allow people to send out little
Speaker 1: messages 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 thousand five, NPR
Speaker 1: officially got into the podcast game, making show segments available
Speaker 1: as podcast downloads. So while their rise in popularity a
Speaker 1: few years later makes it seem like they were late
Speaker 1: comers to podcasting, the fact is they were around in
Speaker 1: some of those earliest days. The New Oxford American Dictionary
Speaker 1: would name podcast as their word of the year on
Speaker 1: December third, two thousand five, and the following year, podcast
Speaker 1: would become a new word in the dictionary. We've got
Speaker 1: a lot more to talk about to wrap up, and
Speaker 1: actually to talk about some of the other influential podcasts
Speaker 1: that came out in those early years, But before we
Speaker 1: do that, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor.
Speaker 1: So in two thousand six, Edison Research held a survey
Speaker 1: to find out how many people were aware of podcasting
Speaker 1: in general. So two thousand six is still early days
Speaker 1: for podcasting, and the survey bears it out. According to
Speaker 1: their report, twenty two of Americans who responded to this
Speaker 1: survey said they had heard about podcasting, but only half
Speaker 1: as many, only eleven percent had ever actually listened to
Speaker 1: a podcast. And this is why, in those early days
Speaker 1: of doing tech stuff just a couple of years later,
Speaker 1: I found it really challenging to explain to people what
Speaker 1: it was I was doing. I'd say things like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's an 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 don't. You don't stream it,
Speaker 1: you download it and then you then you listen to
Speaker 1: it on an iPod or like an MP three player.
Speaker 1: I've had that kind of conversation so many times. Well,
Speaker 1: in February two thousand and six, Wait Wait Don't Tell
Speaker 1: Me becomes nbr's first full program podcast, which means I've
Speaker 1: been 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: Guinness Book of World Records as the most downloaded podcast
Speaker 1: in history. Though come on, be fair, two thousand and
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 these 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 pro graham. So there are a few different ways
Speaker 1: to make money from podcasting, though I'd say the vast
Speaker 1: majority of podcasters out there aren't really making a big
Speaker 1: profit from it. On April two thousand eight, Josh Clark
Speaker 1: and Chris Palette became Internet superstars forever and ever when
Speaker 1: the very first episode of Stuff You Should Know published.
Speaker 1: That is our most popular podcast here at how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com and Stuff you Should Know. The very
Speaker 1: first episode April two thousand eight, Chuck was not a
Speaker 1: co host yet, it was my former editor Chris Palette.
Speaker 1: The topic they covered was how grass aline works, and
Speaker 1: the show was just nine minutes long. Those early 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, was originally called Factor fiction. Chuck Bryant
Speaker 1: would join Josh for the episod owed 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 could 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 nineteen nineties, the company Personal Audio LLC.
Speaker 1: Was what some people called a patent holding company, being
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 design 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'll 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 appear to be using your patented 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 patent 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 it's not my place to say, but
Speaker 1: the courts did ultimately find in favor of the podcasters.
Speaker 1: This was after Personal Audio had already started to back
Speaker 1: off from the lawsuits, not because the company was saying
Speaker 1: they didn't have a case. They said, no, we've got
Speaker 1: a case. There's just no money in podcasting, so no
Speaker 1: one could pay us, which was kind of like a
Speaker 1: back end its slap against podcasters. I mean, I can't
Speaker 1: necessarily disagree with him. There's not a whole lot of
Speaker 1: money in podcasting for for the vast majority of podcasters
Speaker 1: out there. You gotta do it because you love it,
Speaker 1: and maybe you wind up finding a profitable approach to it.
Speaker 1: It does happen, but it's hard to do. Now. It
Speaker 1: turns out that all of that was moot because there
Speaker 1: have been further UH lawsuits. The e f F pursued
Speaker 1: a claim that the patents that Personal Audio was depending
Speaker 1: upon are invalid, and that has gone to court and
Speaker 1: that ended up being decided in the favor of e
Speaker 1: f F and against Personal Audio. So there's you know,
Speaker 1: some of those examples I was talking about earlier, like
Speaker 1: quirks and quirks and Malamud's Internet talk radio platform. We're
Speaker 1: exhibiting features that were described in the Personal Audio patent. Now,
Speaker 1: that patent that they were really relying upon in this
Speaker 1: particular case was filed in two thousand nine, but it
Speaker 1: was given a priority date of nine. And this does
Speaker 1: happen in patent law. If you have filed for certain
Speaker 1: patents and you have a later patent that you feel
Speaker 1: is derivative of a previous one, and you want that
Speaker 1: effective date to be early earlier than what you're filing
Speaker 1: it for, you can appeal for a priority date, and
Speaker 1: they did and they got it. It was in but
Speaker 1: the examples of Quirks and Quirks and Internet Talk Radio
Speaker 1: pre dated nine, and that led the court to rule
Speaker 1: that the patent was invalid as it was describing something
Speaker 1: that had already existed. So the case went to the
Speaker 1: Court of Appeals and the Court of Appeals upheld that ruling.
Speaker 1: So as of the recording of this podcast, there's been
Speaker 1: no word if Personal Audio will pursue this to the
Speaker 1: Supreme Court, because they could it could go that next step,
Speaker 1: But two courts so far have said, you know, there's
Speaker 1: evidence here that this stuff existed before you described it
Speaker 1: in your patent, and you can't patent an idea that
Speaker 1: already exists. Today, you can find podcasts about practically every
Speaker 1: topic you can imagine, from news to commentary to fiction
Speaker 1: and all things in between. I've listened to lots of
Speaker 1: different podcasts, and I contribute to a few of my
Speaker 1: own outside of How Stuff Works. But I'm curious to
Speaker 1: hear from you guys. What are some of your favorite podcasts?
Speaker 1: What's worth checking out. I'm always looking for something that's
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Speaker 1: my walks to and from the office. So let me know.
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Speaker 1: here's a great podcast you should check out. My handle
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Speaker 1: record these episodes. Just like a bunch of really smart
Speaker 1: people are doing right now, and they're talking about all
Speaker 1: sorts of tech related things that are pretty cool, and
Speaker 1: I can't wait to get back to chatting with them,
Speaker 1: so you know what, I think. I'm gonna do that
Speaker 1: right now, and I'll talk to you guys again really
Speaker 1: soon for more on this and thousands of other topics,
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