Are you LIT? Live radio meets podcasting

One for the techies, this: but something I bet you can spin up really quickly.

100% Retro - “feel young again” - is an (English-language) oldies station from the Netherlands, with some big names and a mix of oldies from the 60s to the 90s. As a station on digital platforms, yes, it’s got a website and apps and all that, blah, blah, but it’s also got a podcast RSS feed.

Push that RSS feed into a podcast app, though, and you’ll see just one podcast: a promo for the station. But if you view the RSS feed, you’ll discover that it’s got a lot of entries in it, all marked as a podcast:liveItem.

If you listen to 100% Retro in a compatible podcast app, like Podverse, you’ll also see a live stream. Click it, and you’ll be listening to the station.

But - “subscribe” to the station, as you would a regular podcast, and on your phone you’ll get notifications when your favourite show is about to start on the radio. (And a link to the stream).

So, if you produce podcasts of your shows via RSS, the podcast:liveItem tag could also notify those listeners that the show is going out right now, live on the radio. It’s supported by a handful of apps at the moment, but is entirely backwards-compatible with every other RSS podcast app.

Here’s the documentation if you want to dive in. It would be excellent to see stations use this.