12 Steps of Podcasting

Here are 12 facts I have been able to dig up on podcasting. As far as I can tell these are as close to the truth when it comes to how it happened as anybody can confirm and may surprise you a little.

1. Early 1970s: Prof. Dieter Seitzer of Erlangen-Nuremberg University in Germany begins wrestling with the problem of compressing music over phone lines. Initially refused research money to pursue the goal, he establishes a group of technicians and scientists interested in audio coding research to tackle the problem. Over the next ten years the team works toward a digital signal processor capable of audio compression.
2. 1979: Prof. Seitzer’s team develops a first digital signal processor capable of audio compression. Seitzer’s student Karlheinz Brandenburg, developed and enhanced basic principles for perceptual audio coding exploiting the hearing properties of the human ear. Under Seitzer’s guidance, Brandenburg and the team continuously developed a number of coding algorithms.
3. 1987: A research alliance is formed between Erlangen-Nuremberg University and the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits within the EUREKA project for Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB). The important next step is to begin building a working real-time codec using multiple digital signal processors (DSPs). Where the hardware system was developed from scratch by a team of scientists that included Harald Popp and Ernst Eberlein, which allowed for significant additional algorithmic optimizations.
4. 1989: Karlheinz Brandenburg finishes his doctoral thesis on the OCF (Optimum Coding in (the) Frequency Domain) algorithm, exhibiting many of the characteristics of the eventual MP3 coder. The OCF coder is considered a breakthrough at that time and is a precursor of MP3. OCF scanned and removed the sound, therefore the accompanying data, below or above the threshold for human hearing which meant that much less data was required to reproduce the same quality of sound.
5. 1992: With contributions from others Karlheinz Brandenburg and the team improve the OCF algorithm which yields a powerful new audio codec called ASPEC. The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), the ISO (International Organization of Standardization) working group created in 1988 charged with developing compressed digital audio and video standards. Which sets the first compression standard called MPEG-1 for use in video CDs (CD-I) . In its audio section are three codec formats (Layer-1, -2, -3). Layer 3 (ASPEC) is the most efficient codec and leads to its widespread adoption as a way to store music on disk drives and transfer music files over the Internet through very slow 28.8kbps modems.
6. 1995: MPEG-1 Audio Layer-3 gets its name as MP3. In an internal poll, the researchers unanimously vote for .mp3 as the file-name extension. MPEG Layer-3 is also selected as the audio format for the WorldSpace satellite digital audio broadcasting system.
7. 1998: The era of MP3 portability began with the introduction of Saehan Information Systems MPMAN in Korea and Diamond Multimedia’s Rio PMP300 in the US. They are the first headphone stereos that used solid-state flash memory to store and play compressed MP3 music files, either downloaded from the Internet or “ripped” from a music CD. The ensuing popularity of MP3 portables led dozens of companies to offer compressed-music portables, and it led to the development of additional audio codecs for use in PCs and in portable devices.
8. 1998: Compaq’s engineers made the first hard drive-based MP3 player called the Personal Jukebox (also known as PJB-100 or Music Compressor) and licensed it to a Korean company, HanGo Electronics Co., Ltd. of South Korea, that didn’t do much with it. Introduced late in 1999, it preceded the Apple iPod and similar players.
9. 2000: In the US, suppliers launch the first headphone stereos equipped with hard drives and the first headphone CD players that play MP3-encoded 5-inch CDs. Since that time, mp3 has become a cultural phenomenon, with hundreds of millions of computers and consumer electronic devices sold that include mp3 capability. mp3 is more than a technology. It is a sensational development that has reconnected musicians to music lovers, speakers to their listeners, creators to their audience. In fact, inexpensive 40GB mp3 players can hold over 16,000 CD quality songs, ready for immediate play, wherever you are – at home, at the beach, in your car, in the train, on the plane.
10. 1990s: Tony Fadell started a company called Fuse, one of the ideas he had in mind was a small hard disk-based music player coupled with a content delivery system. Funding dried up and Fuse failed, but not the idea so Fadell then approached RealNetworks in 2000 to a lacklustre response. The second company he approached was Apple. He proved himself as a contractor designing the iPod and was hired in early 2001 and given a development team of around thirty people and a deadline of one year to release a successful product. Apple’s iPod was released late in 2001.
11. 2003: Dave Winer is a creative genius and architect of several Web standards like XML-RPC, and RSS, Winer involved a friend Christopher Lydon a television and radio personality in the great debates between journalists and bloggers. Winer urged Lydon to write a blog, but Lydon said his gift was his radio voice, so Winer suggested that he go to Bob Doyles sound lab in Cambridge to see if they could create an audio blog. The first podcast was an interview Winer recorded with Lydon in July, 2003 and posted on Bob Doyle’s server.
12. Adam Curry a top host during MTV’s early years also visited Bob Doyle’s lab. It was the stream of subsequent RSS-fed interviews that landed in Adam Curry’s iPod in Europe that that launched iPodder.” On his daily commutes, Curry lamented his inability to listen to his favourite talk shows (like Lydon’s), and wrote some software to automatically download shows into his iPod. He, Winer, and others extended RSS feeds to include audio attachments. Thus began the explosive phenomenon of Podcasting.