Podcast Standards Project | Advocating for open podcasting

The Podcast Standards Project is a grassroots industry coalition dedicated to creating standards and practices that improve the open podcasting ecosystem for both listeners and creators.

Since the first podcast feed was created, podcasting has been a bit rebellious; a wild child. The simplicity of combining RSS with media files granted a worldwide broadcast license to anyone with basic recording gear and an Internet connection.

In June 2005, Apple created the iTunes namespace. In its time as an essential supporter of open podcasting, Apple has created some thoughtful vendor-specific extensions to the RSS standard, helping pave the road for open podcasting’s success.

More recently, additional big tech companies have stepped in to duplicate podcasting’s success with closed, proprietary platforms. They called shows distributed on their closed platforms “podcasts” to leverage podcasting’s popularity, but the cost was that the word “podcasting” lost its standards-based guarantee. These closed platforms remove choice — they lock audiences into one player, lock creators into a single vendor’s services, and take ownership of the relationship between creators and their audiences.

This is an open project and we’re calling upon all of the rebellious and wild children of podcasting for support.

The truth is that no one can kill open podcasting. Anyone with a microphone and an Internet connection will always be able to spin up a feed and broadcast to the world. But much in the same way that closed social feeds replaced open blogs, podcasting faces a similar assault today.

This is the landscape that has birthed The Podcast Standards Project, a grassroots coalition dedicated to creating standards and practices that improve the open podcasting ecosystem for both listeners and creators.

Check out our proposals and join the movement to keep podcasting open.