Podcast Generator Story

Podcast Generator (PG) was originally developed for the academic environment, where teachers and instructors often lack the technical skills or the time to manage dealing with technicalities of publishing a podcast. The idea came from Marco Lazzari in 2005, who at the time was an associate professor of computer science at the University of Bergamo in Italy. Alberto Betella, who at that time was a student of prof. Lazzari, started the development of a web-based application that would allow teachers and educators to easily create a podcast by simply uploading multimedia content “as if it was a webmail attachment”. With this in mind, PG was conceived to be extremely simple to use and easy to customize.

The results of these efforts gave birth to Pluriversiradio, one of the first educational podcasts in Italy and Europe which preceded major initiatives such as iTunes U, a service by Apple to distribute educational content in podcasting that was launched one year later.

In April 2006, Alberto decided to share PG with the community under an open source license.

After the launch of PG as an open source app for anyone to use freely, PG started to gain increasing traction and wider adoption. On top of being available on Sourceforge (once the biggest open source community), PG was included as a preinstalled app by Softaculous and it was offered out-of-the-box in the control panels of thousands hosting, cloud and NAS service providers globally. Being available as a preinstalled package along with major web apps such as WordPress, PG popularity increased. PG was downloaded over 1 million times and it powered an estimated 30,000 original podcasts worldwide.

Over the years, PG also gathered a broad and diverse community of content creators and volunteers from all over the world, who also translated and localized it into 56 languages.

Since the launch of PG in 2006, Alberto invested his spare time in maintaining and improving this free podcasting tool. He released new versions of PG to the community for 11 years, until 2017 circa.

In 2017, Alberto met Ben Richardson. Grounded in over a decade of experience in building PG, Ben and Alberto decided partner and launch a brand-new podcast hosting company and call it RSS.com, that quickly became one of the most popular and fastest-growing podcast hosting and distribution companies worldwide.

PG is the historic tool for self-hosting of podcast. It was arguably the first of its kind and it is factually the most popular and longer-lasting web app to self-host a podcast, collecting over the years dozes of citations in scientific articles and books on Web 2.0, New Media, Podcasting published by major international editors.

Today, PG is still actively maintained released by the community.