Background

Podcasts have existed for well over 20 years now, with Apple first officially supporting then in 2005 with the release of iTunes 4.9.

The idea of a Podcast, and of RSS in general is that it is an open system. Anyone can create an RSS feed, and then it can be played on any "podcatcher" or podcast player. This constrasts with something like YouTube, where you have to use the platform to play YouTube videos. Podcasts are not dependant on any one platform. That said, Apple and Spotify have been very dominant as podcast players in the past few years, as they captured an audience that was already listening to music on those platforms. Spotify, in an effort to encourage users to pay for subscription services, started to host "exclusive" podcasts, that were only available on that platform, and undermined the very openness that enabled them in the first place.

Enter Podcasting 2.0

In response to actions like this, and the lack of innovation in the podcast space, the Podcasting 2.0 movement was born with Adam Curry and Dave Jones leading the charge to bring back the open nature of podcasting as it was always intended to be, and at the same time, encourage new features and ideas in the podcasting space. Here is the goals of the idea, as stated on the Podcasting 2.0 github:

Podcasting 2.0 is a set of forward looking ideas combined with the technology to realize them. It's a vision for what the podcast listener experience can and should be. That experience has stagnated for over a decade, with almost all of the improvements coming in isolated sections of the ecosystem. There hasn't been a single, unified vision from the podcasting community acting together with one voice. So, we've ended up with fragments of innovation across the podcasting landscape with no central driving goal in mind. Podcasting 2.0 is the expression of what that goal could be.

Stated eloquently, the aim of Podcasting 2.0 is this:

"I think our focus should be 100% on improving the podcasting experience in an open-standard way that allows every player to innovate faster and better than any one company could do on their own. This is our best bet at avoiding one company emerging as the monopoly of podcasting."--Tom Rossi

Closed ecosystems can not innovate any better or faster than open systems. We should know this by now. The open world of RSS based podcasting can not only keep pace with closed systems, it can exceed them easily. Podcasting 2.0 is simply the technological expression of this idea. We can make a better podcasting experience for listeners than they can get behind any walled garden - no matter how high or expensive those walls are.

There are three parts to Podcasting 2.0:

  • The "podcast" namespace
  • Web app friendliness
  • Value for Value

The podcast namespace

The podcast namespace was created, with the first version released on 15 November, 2020.

The broad goal is to create a single, compact, efficient namespace that is easily extensible, community controlled/authored and addresses the needs of the independent podcast industry now and in the future. Our hope is that this namespace will become the framework that the independent podcast community needs to deliver new functionality to apps and aggregators.

The first five tags that were formalized in that initial release were:

  • <podcast:locked>
    • The purpose is to tell other podcast hosting platforms whether they are allowed to import this feed.
  • <podcast:transcript>
    • This tag is used to link to a transcript or closed captions file. Multiple tags can be present for multiple transcript formats.
  • <podcast:funding>
    • This tag lists possible donation/funding links for the podcast. (e.g. Patreon, Ko-fi, Paypal etc)
  • <podcast:chapters>
    • Links to an external file containing chapter data for the episode, including optional chapter artwork and urls.
  • <podcast:soundbite>
    • Points to one or more soundbites within a podcast episode. The intended use includes episodes previews, discoverability, audiogram generation, episode highlights, etc.

And many more tags have been added since then. See the namespace documentation for more details.

WIP: To be continued...