Broadcatching

Broadcatching is the downloading of digital content that has been made available over the Internet using RSS. The general idea is to use an automated mechanism to aggregate various web feeds and download content for viewing or presentation purposes. A broadcatcher was originally a term created in the 1920s for someone who listened in to radio broadcasts, as the winner in a competition run by The Daily News paper in Britain, published on 16th February 1923. Fen Labalme describes coining the term 'broadcatch' in 1983. It refers to an automated agent that aggregates and filters content from multiple sources for presentation to an individual user. Stewart Brand later used the term independently in his 1987 book The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT to describe artificial-intelligence technology (in one application) to assist content selection ('hunting') and viewing ('grazing' or 'browsing'). In December 2003 Steve Gillmor described combining and BitTorrent as a method for subscribing to an ongoing series of media files, in an article for Ziff-Davis. Scott Raymond described its specific application for gathering scheduled programming in an article entitled Broadcatching with BitTorrent. The combination of these technologies allows a computer connected to the Internet to act like a digital video recorder (DVR) such as TiVo connected to cable. One of the first practical implementations was released in 2004. Programmer Andrew Grumet announced the release of a beta version of an RSS and BitTorrent integration tool for the Radio Userland news aggregator here. Today, content can be delivered to large groups at low cost through RSS-and-BitTorrent-based broadcatching. Large groups can be notified of new content through RSS, and bulky content can be distributed inexpensively through BitTorrent. Recipients subscribe to an RSS feed through which a content provider notifies recipients' software of new content, and that software uses BitTorrent to retrieve the content. Tags, be they applied by one user or many users, are also used to topically drive syndication of torrents.