'Serial' pushes podcasting into prime time

It seems lately there's a glut of great new podcasts being released every day. This season the American true-crime series "Serial" was a breakout hit, attracting millions of listeners from around the world. So are we living in podcasting's golden age or will the audiences shuffle off?

The podcast format has been around for at least a decade and it hasn't changed much: It allows you to download or stream what's essentially a radio show, but on your own schedule... like an audio Netflix.

But something's happened this year.

The podcast is no longer the province of audio geeks... It's gone mainstream. And there's one show in particular that can take a lot of the credit for that.

"Serial" is a twelve-part, serialized true-crime story about a 1999 murder in Baltimore... By the end of its run earlier this month, an unprecedented 3-million listeners were checking out each episode.

Another popular new podcast called "Startup" shows just how much excitement there is around the format right now -- It follows host Alex Blumberg as he launches a new podcast startup company which has already managed to raise 1.5 million dollars in venture funds.

The recent successes have us wondering if the golden age of podcasting is dawning, and whether audiences -- and advertising dollars -- will continue to climb.

• Johanna Zorn is the founder and executive director of the Third Coast International Audio festival a non-profit organization that supports audio storytelling. She was in Pittsburgh.

• Roman Mars is the host and creator of the podcast "99 percent Invisible" about design and architecture and the co-founder of Radiotopia a collective of story-driven podcasts. He was in Berkeley California.

• Jesse Hirsh is CBC's Technology columnist and co-founder of The Academy of the Impossible. He joined us in our Toronto Studio.

Do you listen to podcasts? Which one? And will they ever overtake traditional radio listening?

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This segment was produced by The Current's Josh Bloch and Marc Apollonio.