Password Protecting a Podcast
A click is worth a thousand words.
Surprised? I was too when I discovered that iTunes lets you access password protected podcasts.
Oh, by the way, you can use the username guest with the password guest to access that podcast.
Why?
At first, password protecting a podcast might sound counterintuitive, but there are actually many reasons why you might want to do such a thing. You might be a teacher or professor who wants the podcast to be available only to your students. You might want to share the podcast with just your friends. I know some people who share their music this way. You might want to podcast your work to clients so that they are automatically updated as you publish changes. You might have a podcast that you want only your department to have access to. Or you might want to do a “closed beta” of your podcast.
How?
The feed you clicked on is protected through the standard HTTP authentication schemes. iTunes supports both the “basic” and “digest” flavors of HTTP authentication. Combined with SSL this will provide robust security for your podcast.
Basically, you put a .htaccess file into the directory that contains your podcast feed with content that looks like this:
AuthType Digest
AuthName “Potion Factory”
AuthDigestFile /usr/local/apache/conf/digest_passwd
Require valid-user
You also have to use the following shell command to make the digest_password file:
htdigest -c /usr/local/apache/conf/digest_passwd "Potion Factory" user1
I suggest you don’t try this yourself unless you really understand what is written above. There are many reasons why the above will not work. Ask your webmaster to do it for you if you are not comfortable.
If you really want to try, here is a site with more detailed instructions:
Comprehensive guide to .htaccess - Password Protection
Credit goes to Mr. Mark B. Priddy of Affiliated Media Group for letting us know about this iTunes feature. We actually learned something answering a support email!
UPDATE (2/27/2006): You can password protect your podcast easily if you use FeedBurner. FeedBurner has an option to password protect your feed, which does exactly what I describe here. The only downside to the FeedBurner way is that it only allows one username and password, but it is still tremendously useful for something that only takes a few clicks.
Main Feed
March 22nd, 2006 at 11:29 am
[...] I get asked how to password protect feeds in general every few months and Potion Factory’s Andy Kim has written how to password protect a podcast for use in iTunes. The same method can be used to password protect any feed. In a nutshell, you can have your web server require HTTP authentication for the directory where the feed and any enclosure files reside. Here are some instructions on how to set up this authentication: Comprehensive guide to .htaccess [...]
April 19th, 2006 at 8:32 pm
[...] Ideally in step 4 it would be nice to wrap some authentication around this whole thing. Authentication seems to be supported in a handful of RSS readers and podcast clients, mainly for standard HTTP authentication. Potion Factory walks through the steps of setting up a password protected podcast. Bottom line is that some form of restriction should be available should the instructor wish to restrict access to students only. [...]
September 14th, 2006 at 10:26 am
[...] * Just found out about another blogger who did a write up here [...]