Nine months ago, nobody had heard of podcasting, a handy flavor of RSS that allows users to download media files from so-enabled feeds. When Wired did a story on podcasting in March, the arcane little corner of RSS exploded, at least in the chic-geek crowd. (That’s French for “My iPod has more capacity than your iPod”)

I doubt Peter Jennings will report on it tonight, but podcasting, and RSS by proxy, just got another huge media boost: Rush Limbaugh is now podcasting.

Whether or not you agree with his politics, millions of people just heard the term “podcasting” from Rush for the first time today, and that is good news for all RSS users and producers out there.

An interesting twist is that Rush is making the podcasts only available to his subscribers. The way he described it on today’s show (I heard this bit in the car on the way to lunch) was that his site has a proprietary podder download that will grab the latest show an hour after he goes off the air each day. This is certainly a valid short-term solution to the problem of authenticating RSS feeds — use a proprietary client — but this solution won’t cut it for long. Will users want to download a new podder for every paid feed they have in the months and years to come? I doubt it. And yet providers of “paid content”, like Rush, want to protect their assets as well.

This just illustrates that Podcasting has landed squarely in the fight over media piracy. How it will play out is anybody’s guess.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 6th, 2005 at 14:25 and is filed under syndication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.