This post is from from my other blog here

Wearing an untucked black t-shirt, jeans, and a pair of Ugg Boots, Adam Curry adjusted his hair as he walked from underneath the downwash of the helicopter’s rotors. He was hamming up his appearance for an interview with the BBC Culture Show, who paid him a visit because he was riding high on a publicity storm that was brewing around a technology he’d help develop. That day, as they chatted about podcasting, the term was less than two months old.

The house, that he called Curry Castle, was as grand as the nickname suggested; a beautiful home in Belgium that he shared with his wife, Patricia Paay, a famous Dutch pop star, and daughter Christina. The Culture Show reporter described Curry, an ex-MTV video jockey from the eighties, as a “web millionaire and podcasting daddy”; an appropriate description with his wild blonde hair and rose colored glasses.
Curry was accustomed to the attention of the press. He’d just finished a one-year stint as a disk jockey at the Netherland’s Radio Veronica, and he and his wife were local celebrities. They’d returned to the Netherlands in the late nineties after Curry had sold OnRamp, his web design and hosting company.

The move hadn’t abated his passion for the online world, and he’d spent years preaching about its possibilities as a platform for broadcasting. Over time his discussions had only led to small progressions toward his goal, so in frustration he applied his hand to computer programming and it led to the birth of podcasting.

It seems ironic that one of Music Television’s VJs would be the catalyst for the next progression in radio. After all, it was The Buggles song, Video Killed The Radio Star, which launched the television network in the eighties. Many predict that podcasting might just be the technology that brings radio more life.

Podcasting

Podcasting, in its simplest description, is downloadable Internet audio. The purists of the format will point out that it’s a little more complicated than that; there is an element of automation that really gives the technology its power. With some technical tricks, that listeners don’t need to worry about, anyone can subscribe and automatically receive audio to a computer and an MP3 player, like an iPod.

Note: The word podcasting is simply the combination of the word pod, as in iPod, and casting, from broadcasting. However, you don’t need an iPod to listen to shows, simply any device that plays an MP3 audio file.

It’s this automation that caused such a buzz and had the BBC knocking on Adam Curry’s castle door. Making audio so easy and transparent to receive means that listeners can be more concerned with what they want to hear and not how they receive it.

Another simple way of describing podcasting is Internet radio shows that can be taken anywhere and listened to at anytime. Some people don’t like the association with radio, because the main theme always includes the convenience of listening to the show in your own time instead of a broadcaster’s schedule. To clarify this element, people call it a TiVo for your iPod.

In fact the longer description adds one extra element. The real value of podcasting is that anyone with a computer, microphone, and access to the Internet can make an audio show. This, coupled with the listener’s ease-of-use, caused a chain reaction and now there are literally thousands of different types of content.

There are podcasts about music, technology, movies, business, words, camels, coffee, politics, and parenthood. The range of podcasters is just as diverse: professional DJs, truckers, lawyers, counselors, journalists, camel herders, actors and the girl next door. Anyone and everyone can create their own radio show about whatever the heck they please. It might mean that only their wife and mom listen, or perhaps 50,000 people tune in, but the beauty of the show is that it can be whatever they want.

A Brief History of Radio

To really understand the impact of podcasting, it’s helpful to study a snippet of nineteenth and twentieth century history. Although many would argue that podcasting is very different to today’s radio, there are some very interesting similarities.

Radio’s invention is commonly credited to Guglielmo Marconi in 1896. Like many inventions, there’s always some contention on the credit given, and in 1943 the Supreme Court overturned Marconi’s patent for radio because it added nothing to an earlier patent by another inventor called Nikola Tesla.

A Canadian, Professor Reginald Aubrey Fessenden, was the first to get radio really rocking. On Christmas Eve, 1906, he was the first to broadcast audio by transmitting to ships along the Atlantic coast. He played O Holy Night on the violin and read a passage from the Bible. Morse code operators, known as sparks, received the signal; the first voice they’d ever heard broadcast to their headphones.

In the preceding years several organizations created radio stations. Large companies began to litter the landscape with radio as their business, focusing on activities like personal communications, news, and stock promotion schemes. Eventually, fraudulent promotions saw executives and associates from some of the companies arrested and jailed.

In 1912 the RMS Titanic set sail with wireless equipment built by the Marconi Company (the whole ship was state of the art). It didn’t save the proud ship, or many of its passengers. So to ensure the quality of the future operation of equipment the U.S. government created the Federal Radio Act of 1912, the first government regulation requiring radio stations to be licensed. It was hoped that licenses would lead to higher quality operations, and in turn, help avoid similar disasters.

When the U.S. entered World War I, the government halted the use of broadcasting for none military purposes. Its use in the war was deemed so important that they couldn’t have the radio systems compromised by other broadcasts. It was even illegal for civilians to own a receiver.

After the war the ban was lifted and the use of radio boomed. Hundreds of thousands of amateur licenses were in use in the U.S. and Britain. Likewise, corporate radio advanced in both countries, and lead to mass adoption of the medium for information and entertainment.

With so many people using radio technology in the twenties, interference between broadcasts became a large factor. The result was similar to a room full of people talking. With enough people chatting at the same time, all the conversations become unintelligible. So the U.S. government created a law that regulated the use of the radio spectrum (the range of frequencies) to reduce the amount of interference. They allocated slices of spectrum for different uses (like military, aviation, commercial radio, etc.), and sold broadcast licenses. This is like dividing the room and sending people to different sections with instructions on how long, loud, and the topic they can speak about.

Note: There is a consensus today that with advances in technology we don’t need to regulate spectrum. The concept, known as an open spectrum, is to use technology to tune into individual conversations in a clustered frequency, ignoring the irrelevant chatter. Slowly the world’s governments are deregulating some parts of the spectrum; like those used by cordless phones, garage door openers, and Wi-Fi.

In stark contrast to the First World War, the Second World War saw radio used for international news, entertainment, and encouragement. Roosevelt used the medium as a fireside chat to bolster U.S. confidence.

Music, news, drama, comedy, sports, and talk shows provided the public with an amazing array of choices. Radio was abounding with innovation, which today we call Old Times Radio. Even today we recognize many of the names from the era: Abbott & Costello, The Saint, The Shadow, Burns and Allen, Sherlock Holmes, Flash Gordon, Dragnet, Father Knows Best, and Charlie Chan.

In 1938 Orson Welles managed to stand out from the crowd when the War of the Worlds radio drama fooled many into believing the news of an alien innovation was true, and panic ensued. Radio’s golden age had come.

In the fifties, television stole the limelight. Radio couldn’t differentiate from the new medium and new formats had to be found. One such format was the Top 40. Todd Storz, a the director of the radio station KOWH-AM in Omaha, Nebraska, realized that certain songs in a jukebox at a local bar were played over and over again. He surveyed record stores and began playing the most popular tunes on a higher rotation on his stations. The format was a hit, and radio stations around the country adopted the model.

In 1981 MTV (Music Television) was launched. Television’s first 24-hour music station changed the way we consume music and radio. It’s often seen as causing a significant shift in how musicians are deemed to have potential—their looks often mattering more than musical talent.

Today broadcasting is the domain of major corporations. Their usual mandate is to provide entertainment for the masses (excluding some public and pirate radio stations that offer niche content). After all, they generate revenue by offering advertisers a large audience. Creating a radio station that focuses on a niche is far too expensive to warrant.

Over the years broadcasting has become a complicated and expensive business, with government restrictions, industry politics, large license fees, and expensive broadcasting equipment. Podcasting on the other hand is cheap; comparatively the cost is minuscule. There are no legislations that govern a podcaster, other than copyright, and for these reasons alone podcasting is a fascinating and fast paced medium.