> 'Serial' was the podcast that launched all podcasts.
It feels like we were listening to This American Life in podcast form in the car for at least five years before Serial even existed. And Serial was being marketed on TAL during what I'd describe as TAL's slow decline from popularity, with Ira personally shilling for Serial and teasing the first entire episode on TAL, IIRC.
If either of these were responsible for launching the modern podcast era, I'd point at TAL, not Serial.
Sure, except I never listened to TAL on the radio. We would download a bunch of the episodes into someone's mp3 player (later a phone) and listen to them in the car through a tape deck headphone adapter.
That's the era I lived through, the transition to mp3s and ipods becoming commonplace, and TLA was right there with us. They are called podcasts after all, this is pre-streaming parlance.
I don't think it's fair to be discredit TAL's role in the shift to podcasting just because they were a radio show first.
Serial basically arrived when everyone was streaming everything, that's pretty late in terms of podcasts. Serial didn't even exist in the era of iPods and Zens...
It feels like we were listening to This American Life in podcast form in the car for at least five years before Serial even existed. And Serial was being marketed on TAL during what I'd describe as TAL's slow decline from popularity, with Ira personally shilling for Serial and teasing the first entire episode on TAL, IIRC.
If either of these were responsible for launching the modern podcast era, I'd point at TAL, not Serial.