Manually add a podcast to your iOS device

As you may know (if you've read some of my previous posts), that I like to listen to books, music and podcasts. Podcasts have been great for catching up on technology news, video games homebrewing, beer reviews and more recently, TV show news/recaps (A Cast of Kings for insight on the HBO series, Game of Thrones) for me for many, many years.

Did you know that you can listen to partial or even complete shows that are air on your favorite radio stations? For years, I have taken advantage of this with shows like Video Games Weekly which is aired on one of the local sports radio stations in town, KFAN. Its been great! With the "power of the podcast", I can listen to my favorite shows on my own time! HOWEVER, as with any technology, things aren't perfect, especially when it comes to the delivery of these podcasts to various electronic devices. I am writing this post in the case you run into a hiccup with one of your favorite podcasts and you simply can't 'subscribe' to it like you normally should say with an iTunes subscription link.

I ran into a situation with a great on-demand show based here in the Twin Cities called The Beer Show which is created by the local AM 1500 ESPN radio station. Well, back in February of this year, my perfectly functioning,automatic download subscription stopped all of a sudden... just for this show. All my other 10+ podcast subscriptions were just fine on my iOS mobile device. Now, I suspect that the tech guru behind the podcast feed at the radio station changed something and thus broke my original working subscription, but I was also unable to subscribe via their website (I believe that is broken as well, at least at the time of this posting).

My fix and alternate way to get this working again was easy:

1. I first needed to find out the RSS newsfeed link, I was able to get that by clicking on the Feedburner link listed on their On Demand page. From there, I was given the url address to the RSS feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/1500espn/podcast/beershow) which is what you need. 
2. Next, on my iOS device, I opened the Podcast app and entered in this same url address and clicked the Search button. 
3. I was then immediately prompted to see if I wanted to subscribe (which is what I did). The most recent podcast (and some of previous episodes) automatically showed up! BOOM!

I am now back to enjoying about a months' worth of Beer Show podcasts on my iOS device (iPhone)! As a crazed, doped up man once said, "Winning!"