THIS POST IS HISTORICAL — See instead https://openpodcastdirectory.org/

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When you want to visit a web site, you do not need to search for it in a central directory of web sites. Your web browser simply goes into the DNS system and finds the address to connect to.

Today, podcasts are managed inside a huge directory. But they do not need to be in a directory!

Meet the Open Podcast Directory

If you want to find the podcast for example.com why doesn’t your podcast player simply go find that podcast by looking it up in DNS?

All that needs to happen is for people to put information into DNS—a record that says, “the podcast RSS feed is at this URL”—and then podcast players can simply make a DNS query.

• create a DNS record for host “_opd” in your domain
• record type TXT
• record data is the URL of a podcast feed
• multiple TXT records are permitted, to enable auto-discovery of multiple podcasts within a given domain

In this way, each podcast’s content creator uses the existing, global DNS system to publish the location of the podcast’s feed URL.

Moving your podcast

Want to change where your podcast is hosted? Simply update your DNS.

Why?

Content creators are currently dependent on directories. Apple’s iTunes directory is the de facto standard. We are already seeing a splintering of the podcast space…

Not all shows are podcasts, by John Gruber
The podcast monetization problem…, by Tanner Campbell

$ dig txt _opd.moversmindset.com
 ; <<>> DiG 9.10.6 <<>> txt _opd.moversmindset.com
 ;; global options: +cmd
 ;; Got answer:
 ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 15816
 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0
 ;; QUESTION SECTION:
 ;_opd.moversmindset.com.        IN  TXT
 ;; ANSWER SECTION:
 _opd.moversmindset.com.    86101   IN  TXT "https://moversmindset.com/feed/podcast"
 ;; Query time: 1 msec
 ;; SERVER: 10.0.1.1#53(10.0.1.1)
 ;; WHEN: Fri Apr 26 09:34:04 EDT 2019
 ;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 91

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