Goodbye iPodder, Hello iTunes!

This is big news.

iTunes 4.9 is available and it supports podcasting.

I've moved all of my podcast feeds from iPodder into iTunes and the files are being downloaded as I write this.

I am removing iPodder from my system and now podcasting has become one step easier.

But this is a really important step, because everyone who has an iPod has iTunes. That's more than 6 million people. All of them will have a podcasting client once they upgrade to 4.9. That won't happen overnight, but this is a big positive development for podcasting.

Here are a few other interesting things about podcasting in iTunes:

You can publish your podcasts to the Apple Music Store in iTunes. They will review it and if it passes their smell test you get distribution in iTunes. I did that for Positively 10th Street already and hopefully we'll get a few more listeners via Apple.
iTunes automatically downloads the most recent podcast and you get the option to "Get" any of the old ones. Very nice.
You can subscribe to RSS feeds of video content (videocasts?) and iTunes will apparently play the video in full screen mode. So iTunes can also be a videocast client. I couldn't make this work but I have heard that others have. I've added a del.icio.us tag called fred'svideocast if you want to tag some videos for me. I put the Tom Cruise kills Oprah video in it to start it off.
When you synch an iPod with iTunes, the podcasts all show up on the iPod as a single playlist called Podcasts. That's not good. I liked the iPodder approach better where each podcast showed up as a separate playlist. I need to figure out how to fix that. If you listen to a lot of podcasts, that is not going to work very well.

I am really excited by this development. It should make podcasting easier for everyone. Just yesterday I sent four CDs of Jason Chervokas' Down In The Flood shows to a friend of mine. Had I known that iTunes would support podcasting this week, I might not have done that. I might have just sent him the URL and told him to download them in iTunes.

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Posted June 28, 2005 in Venture Capital and Technology

Comments

Okay, so this is cool. In order to get itunes 4.9 do you have to have OSX 4.something or other. I'm still on 3.5.

Posted by: jackson | Jun 28, 2005 12:18:55 PM

Fred-

The thing to remember is that iTunes will almost certainly not approve your podcasts if you include copyrighted material (i.e. music tracks) that you are not paying royalties on. You'll notice that all there is no music content on the podcast page for iTunes. Of course, that said, this is indeed big.
-David

Posted by: David Niederman | Jun 28, 2005 4:29:32 PM

Fred-
With the new iTunes, it's my understanding I can only subscribe to Podcasts that are available via the iTunes music store...how have you copied your ipodder feeds to iTunes? I've tried to do just that with your Positively 10th Street, but with no successs (and can't wait to dump Ipodder!).
Also, you can subscribe to Nic Harcourt's "KCRW's Music Exchange" via iTunes...it's not Morning Becomes Eclectic...but it'll still give you a weekly dose of Nic and his BBC colleague.
-Scott
SoCal

Posted by: Scott Anderson | Jun 29, 2005 12:35:46 AM

Scott,

You can subscribe to any podcast through iTunes, whether or not the podcast is listed in the iTunes Podcast Directory. One way is just to drag the RSS feed's link into iTunes. Or while you are in the Podcast section of iTunes, go to the Advanced menu and choose Subscribe to Podcast.

I hope this helps.

->Paul Burchfield

Posted by: Paul Burchfield | Jun 30, 2005 5:43:07 PM

Finally a podcast client in iTunes, but hold on .. whats this? Only selected content, no playlist and cannot add extra feeds.

I dont like it!

Ipodder 2.1 is the best client ever. I t will be so easy for iTunes to beat it ($) and instead developes a "pretty" client that doesnt do much.

One thing I like of iTunes podcast is the proper tagging.

I m going back to ipodder, will be back to check iTunes improvements.

Posted by: Renato | Jul 2, 2005 5:24:47 AM

To get full use of the Podcast changes to iTunes 4.9, update your iPod with "iPod Updater 2005-06-26", you'll be glad you did! That said, don't throw away iPodder just yet...

Posted by: Kenward | Jul 5, 2005 8:03:47 PM

A VC

Musings of a VC in NYC