Because they are funded by the public and already offer their content as streaming audio on the Web, I have been wondering why Germany's non-commercial radio stations have not jumped onto the podcasting band waggon yet.

Well, two radio stations are already on their way: DeutschlandRadio and Deutschlandfunk, whose programs not only consist of the usual news, but also of diverse topics ranging from a study on birds killed by wind mills, to the Danish press coverage of the recent election in Germany's northern-most state.

Each of these 3-20 minute contributions is available as an MP3 file, with two different user interfaces:

• HTML, simple and easy to use, good for downloading the files and listing to them later, but no RSS feed.

• Flash, also nice, and best for immediate listening.

All this content is in German. The international broadcasting station Deutsche Welle has English Audio on Demand, but you need Real Player and judging from the list, it's only a collection of complete programs, without any information about the contents. Pretty disappointing compared to DeutschlandRadio, or the BBC, which offers RSS feeds and content summaries for two of their programs.

Update 2005-03-07: There's still no RSS feed, but Deutschlandradio Kultur had a nice piece about podcasting today. Unfortunately, the MP3 is no longer available as of 2005-09-15.