Discovering Podcasts

Sunday, February 07 2010

By: chrisb

Free content audio and video content

Podcast description
Click to see a larger image

Podcasts are audio or video content that you can subscribe to in the iTunes Store. They are created by individuals or media companies and are most often free. Some publish daily, some weekly and others publish irregularly.

You can watch or listen to podcasts in iTunes or you can download them to watch on your iPod, iPad or iPhone.

To explore Podcast content in the iTunes Store:

Open iTunes.
Choose "iTunes Store" from the left pane.
Across the top if the iTunes Store page is a menu of content types. One these choices is Podcasts. If you click on the word Podcasts you will go to a page of the most popular podcasts of all types. If you hover over the word Podcasts, a downward arrow will appear. Click the downward arrow and you will see categories of podcasts. Choosing a category will target the results page to podcasts of that category.
Browse the podcasts section and choose a podcast that interests you. (The right side of the iTunes window shows the top rated podcasts.)
You will see a description of the podcast you have chosen and a list of recent episodes.
At this point you have three options to receive the podcast content:
- Click the Subscribe button. If you subscribe to a podcast, new episodes are downloaded to your Mac as they are released.
- Click on the Free button of an episode. That single episode will download to your Mac.
- Hover over an episode. To the left of the episode title a Play button will appear. Click the Play button to listen to or watch that episode immediately in iTunes. This is a good choice is you want to get a feel for the content of a podcast before you subscribe.

You can see your downloaded podcast episodes in the Podcasts section in the left pane of iTunes. The number after the word Podcasts indicates how many new episodes you have ready to listen to. In the Podcast listing, a blue dot in the left column indicates podcasts that you have not yet listened to/watched.

Note: Though "iPod" and "podcast" are similar terms, they aren't necessarily related. You can listen to/watch podcasts on an iPod, but you can also listen to/watch podcasts in iTunes, the iPad and the iPhone.

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