The Podcast EPG

I’m a big fan of podcasting, podcasts and the whole concept of on-demand anywhere media. When big media companies started podcasting, instead of just making shows available on-demand, it took things to the next level.

Instead of being able to listen to a show at my computer in my own time, I could now listen to it in my own time anywhere I like. This is why I want Apple to put WiFi into the iPod and let me automatically download podcasts while in a hotspot - iPod shuffle for the bog anyone?

I’ve had the same list of podcasts I’ve been subscribing to for sometime now. This means I haven’t needed to venture into iTunes music library for a while - most new podcasts I add are ones I’ve found from a radio stations website or from someone I trusts blog.

That was until last week. I got a new computer - in fact I found a tower in the bin sheds where I live and it had a motherboard, 2.4ghz AMD processor, 1gb RAM and a 256mb graphics card in it - I added a hard drive, sound card and WiFi card and I had a really good working machine.

Unfortunatly this meant a re-install of Windows and all the software that goes with it. This included iTunes and with that I had to find all my podcasts again - this meant heading into the murky world of the iTunes Store Podcast Page.

It’s MUCH better and clearer than I remember with links down the side to the major podcast broadcasters and reasonably easy to navigate catagories. However I’m not here to review iTunes - many, many people have done that already and MUCH better than I could.

What I’m here to say is that it’s still an utter arse for finding content.

Not so much from the smaller producers like Xfm who only put out a handful of podcasts but when it comes to finding what you want from the BBC, Guardian, TWiT or the Podcast Network where they have pages of podcasts listed (and it’s only going to get bigger) it’s an ARSE.

It also doesn’t really tell you how often or when they’re published - this is something I would personally find useful both when first subscribing and to go back and check when the next is coming.

So I’ve come up with a rough concept for an EPG for the iTunes Podcast Library. Basically it would be in the colours and design of the producer you’ve selected (example shows BBC) and shows you day by day when a show is published.

A couple of flaws in this plan I haven’t worked out is show published daily (do you have a special section for them or just have them appear seven times) and for shows only every other week or every month (do you change the layout depending on what week you’re in - so have it live).

However, regardless of those minor issues that could be easily resolved if I thought about it more instead of just playing about in photoshop I think this is a winner of an idea that could actually work.

What do you think? If Apple let you browse certain websites through iTunes interface then it would be fairly easy to set this sort of thing up (for a selection of producers) as an iTunes add-on but in the meantime I guess I’ll have to live with the suprise factor.

Oh and YES I know those aren’t the right days the BBC podcasts are published on - it’s an example! Feel free to download the psd and play with it yourself. Post it to flickr and I’ll link to you.

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