Apple poises itself to personalize future podcasts

A patent filing filed last January and published on the US Patent Office Web site Thursday indicates the company is looking for ways to give users more control over the content inside their podcasts.

Traditionally, the subscriber of a podcast has no control over the content within. Simply put, they subscribe to the content via a feed, and then the content owner sends them the content.

Under the system proposed by Apple, things would be a bit different. Positing that users may desire podcasts with both content and structure that is different from the standard ones available, it proposes a system where listeners pick and choose the content within.

"Users are able to influence or control content within a media item being personalized. In one embodiment, personalized media items are podcasts. Users are able to influence or control the content in or with a podcast," the filing states. "In other words, a podcast can be created in accordance with a user's needs or specifications so that the content within a podcast is customized or personalized for the user."

Essentially, a back-end content delivery system would take care of the aggregation of the various content clips, from which the user would then be able to assemble into a personalized podcast. From there, a listener would use an interface -- probably built into iTunes -- to set various options for what media types they desire, and when and where the content should be delivered.

After those steps to set up the podcast, the system takes care of the rest, assembling the information into a single file, which would then be delivered to an RSS server. From there, the assembled, customized content would make its way to the device via the traditional podcast delivery method.

As is typical with its patent filings, Apple has so far not commented publicly on the system or whether it has eventual plans to implement it. The full filing can be found on the USPTO's Web site.