RSS Feeds
Podcasts rely on a technology called RSS, or Really Simple Syndication.
An RSS feed is a text document that contains details about
- the podcast:
- title
- description
- owner's email address
- …
- and its episodes:
- titles
- descriptions
- URLs of audio files
- …
Podcast listening applications—podcatchers—regularly check these RSS feeds for updates. Whenever a new episode is uploaded, RSS feed is updated; after this, podcatcher downloads the audio file and extracts relevant metadata to display to the user (e.g. episode title, duration, cover art, and so on).