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.

This is from my international radio trends newsletter, which you can sign up to online or listen to as a podcast

• radio
• podcasting