Prior Art, Anyone?

One of the elements to ATH (which I can't get into in great detail right now) is the web delivery mechanism. It boils down to an RSS enclosure feed (a podcast) serving out video files on a weekly basis. There's a free feed that anyone can access on day 3 of the cycle, but on day 1 any subscribers can download their copies. As a subscriber, you log in and enter your credit card information, and every month you get billed a set fee. You get assigned a unique RSS feed URI, and when you visit that URI, the server associates the ID with your account, sees if you're all paid up, and then either sends you the for-fee RSS, or the free version. Easy as pie.

I'm writing this here because the tech is horribly un-interesting and I'm sure it should have been dreamed up a thousand times before... and yet at the same time I'm pretty certain that some moron somewhere is going to try and patent it and put a big roadblock in the development of vidcasting on the web. So I'm writing this partly to put out that, yes, I thought of this roughly 6 months ago, and partly to see if anyone else thought of it too. Just for the record.

I hope to start writing more about ATH sometime soon. Gonna be some fun times ahead.