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).