BBC Podcasts

A couple of months ago the BBC Trust approved the iPlayer and with it Podcasting which meant the BBC had a pretty much free reign over launching new podcasts.

OK so they’d launched a few up until that point, including some very good radio 4 shows, but they were restricted to only re-broadcasting what had gone out on radio and it was a VERY limited trial.

Some of the shows that were on the trial have dissapeared – some because they didn’t work and others because of rights reasons (The Now Show) but most are still there and have new album art.

In addition to the ones from the trial there are a wealth of new BBC Podcasts with the promise of more on the horizon – in fact the iTunes store showed 88 Podcasts from the BBC.

There is also a new look BBC Podcast page (bbc.co.uk/radio/podcasts) along with pages for each of the shows – which means not having to search through every radio station to find the shows they podcast.

I started writing this post with a bit of a scathing review of the Podcast page directory – when I clicked publish it was the same as during the podcast trial with none of the new shows on it – so I started creating a BBC Podcast directory.

When, 10 minutes later, I went back to find the BBC Podcasts I missed from my list there was a very pretty, easy to use, band new podcast directory that lists all the BBC Podcasts by station or genre and has links to their ‘podcast’ page and not just the show page.

Here are two of the best new podcasts (in my opinion)

Russell Howard and Jon Richardson
BBC 6 Music

Heroes The Official Radio Show
BBC 7

As well as the shows above there are likely to be many more to come and some will be available (with DRM) when the iPlayer comes out of Beta at the end of the year – although you’ll probably have to piss about to get it to work on an iPod.

Ideally the iPlayer will allow me to put all the radio shows on my iPod – maybe by using Apple DRM – and listen to them wherever I like.

As for Video Podcasts – they aren’t available anymore as they need to go through the same trial as the audio podcasts did. Yet another case of the BBC Trust holding back the corporation and stopping it being as innovative as it could/should be.