Curated by: Luigi Canali De Rossi
 


Monday, November 22, 2004

RSS Newsfeeds, MP3 And Podcasting: Will The BBC Take Them All Mainstream?

The recent news that the BBC is experimenting at the bleeding edge of the new media technology world, with podcasting, probably shouldn't come as too much of a surprise. They have been experimenting with the newest of new media technologies for some time.

BBC_RSS_feeds.gif

The BBC was one of the first major (state-owned) media organizations to offer RSS feeds for its top news sites last year and they are now available for all the major news categories (World, UK, Business, Politics, Health, Education, Science/Nature, Technology, Entertainment and Sport), as well as a few other feature categories.

 

 

BBC Radio, through the BBC Radio Player, makes nearly all of its radio shows available to listen to again for up to 7 days after broadcast.

Furthermore, BBC Radio has recently started a trial whereby they make broadcasts available as downloadable MP3 files, enabling listeners to play back shows on MP3 players, such as iPods. The first two programs in the trial, which runs until the end of the year, are a documentary called Get A Life and a Sports program called Fighting Talk.

Now we hear news of a podcast trial. The show in question is called In Our Time and is hosted by the distinguished broadcaster Melvyn Bragg. It appears that this is all down to a guy called Matt Webb, who works in the BBC's Radio & Music Interactive group. Matt made the semi-official announcement on his blog, saying that:


"The MP3 trial runs till the end of the year (I didn't have anything to do with that, it's one of several MP3 download trials the department is running, and it's an enormous achievement for such a huge broadcaster. Very proud to be working here at the moment). But there are these folks writing software to make the whole audio-online experience much smoother, the Podcast folks, could we give that a go too? And that's what today is about..."

You tell 'em Matt!

You can subscribe to the podcast at iPodder, where it is currently one of the 'Most Popular' shows.

As Steve Rubel has just said in his Micro Persuasion blog:


" it's another sign that citizen's media and professional media are merging and the impact bottom-up technologies are having on the larger players."

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posted by on Monday, November 22 2004, updated on Tuesday, May 5 2015

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