Open Podcast was born out of a personal need. Wolfgang, one of the maintainers, runs a podcast named Engineering Kiosk. While setting up the hosting he realized that there are no great open tools for hosting podcast. What he wanted was a way to get basic podcast analytics on a self-hosted platform. The idea for Open Podcast was born.
Wolfgang teamed up with Matthias and received public funding from Media Tech Lab by Media Lab Bayern to build a specification and a reference implementation of the project.