From blog feeds to streaming infrastructure - content syndication didn’t start with social media. It started with RSS.

A quietly revolutionary technology that shaped how information moves across the internet. While the tech world has largely moved on to flashier distribution methods, the foundations laid by RSS—and later, MRSS—still power some of the most important media infrastructure today.

Let’s rewind to where it all began.

The Origin of RSS: Building the Pipes of the Early Internet

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, wasn’t always called that. It began in 1999 as RDF Site Summary, a metadata framework developed by Netscape to help websites syndicate content to users via portals like My.Netscape.

After Netscape’s withdrawal from the project, independent developers—including Dave Winer—revived it, simplifying the spec into what became known as RSS 2.0. This new version made it easier for publishers to share headlines, links, and summaries across platforms.

Recognizing the need for consistency in the evolving landscape, the RSS Advisory Board was formed in 2003 to steward the specification. Its work helped ensure that publishers, developers, and platforms around the world had a reliable standard for syndication.

By the mid-2000s, RSS had gone mainstream. It powered blog updates, news alerts from outlets like The New York Times and BBC, and even formed the backbone of Apple’s iTunes Podcast Directory—a structure that still drives podcast distribution today.

Introducing MRSS: Meeting the Demands of a Media-Rich Web

As the web became increasingly visual and video-heavy, RSS needed to evolve.

Media RSS (MRSS) emerged as an extension of RSS, pioneered by Yahoo! to support video, audio, thumbnails, and metadata. This new format allowed media companies to syndicate entire video libraries, not just headlines or articles.

Yahoo!’s Video Search platform was one of the first large-scale adopters, followed by major media players like NBC Universal and Reuters, who used MRSS to power content partnerships across a growing ecosystem of aggregators and platforms.

What MRSS Powers Today

While social media platforms now dominate consumer attention, MRSS continues to operate as the underlying infrastructure for open media syndication. It powers:

• Smart TV apps that pull in dynamic video feeds
• News aggregators ingesting real-time multimedia updates
• Video podcasts on platforms like Spotify and Apple‍
• Syndication networks like VideoNest’s distribution platform, helping content owners reach additional viewers across premium viewing environments.
  

What an MRSS Feed Looks Like

Here’s a simple example of how an MRSS feed might appear in XML/HTML:

_{<rss version="2.0" xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/">}

  <channel>

    <title>Sample Video Feed</title>

    <link>https://example.com/videos</link>

    <description>Latest videos from Example.com</description>

    <item>

      <title>Exploring the Future of Tech</title>

      <link>https://example.com/videos/future-tech</link>

      <description>A deep dive into emerging technologies.</description>

      <media:content url="https://cdn.example.com/videos/future-tech.mp4" type="video/mp4" />

      <media:thumbnail url="https://cdn.example.com/thumbnails/future-tech.jpg" />

    </item>

  </channel>

_</rss>

This feed allows partner platforms to automatically ingest video content, complete with metadata like title, description, and thumbnail.

The New Opportunity: Making MRSS Accessible Again

For too long, MRSS has been treated as a technical hurdle—something only accessible to large media companies with dedicated development teams.

At VideoNest, it’s time to change that.

Our platform makes enterprise-grade MRSS feeds available to any creator, publisher, or business—no coding or developers required. Whether you're managing 50 videos or 50,000, VideoNest makes it simple to generate ready-to-deploy MRSS feeds in minutes.

In a media landscape where owning your distribution channels is more important than ever, RSS and MRSS stand as proven, open, and scalable solutions—ready to power the next generation of video syndication.