A Podcast RSS feed is what allows the entire system to function. To begin at the beginning, a podcast is a regular distribution of audio or visual files, called episodes, to a users podcast client. The people who use a podcast are called subscribers, and the podcast client is what allows them to subscribe to a feed. The podcast client is a program that connects to the internet, looking for a specific file the user has subscribed to, or told it to look for. That file is an RSS feed, a machine readable piece of coding that sends information back to the podcast client. RSS feeds can be used to distribute many kinds of information, and were originally used for blogging and distributing blog posts to subscribers. As time went on, however, a few people had the idea of enclosing information about media files within the RSS feed so that software could be written to find that information and download the files described.
The Podcast RSS feeds became a hit, and podcast clients were quickly written to allow people to use the new encoding. Podcasting became a means of quickly and cheaply sharing episodes with subscribers. Rather than requiring subscribers to visit the site that...