Paramount Studios is entering the podosphere with its Star Trek Enterprise series that boldly goes where no podcast has gone before.

The Star Trek Enterprise podcast is an audio commentary from an April 22 Star Trek Enterprise episode. Episode writer Mike Sussman and Tim Gaskill, the site's ediorial director, recorded the podcast prior to the show, publicizing it on the web site on April 21.

What they are doing looks to take podcasting beyond just doing an audio recording. Instead, they are taking a page from the remix culture. They are using podcasts to comment on Star Trek Enterprise episodes that they ask people to tape or record with TiVo. The idea is for people to listen to commentary (mp3 or stream) from the writer while they are watching the television programming that the viewer has taped.

Now, think of the implications. We can all do recordings of our favorite TV shows, providing our own commentary. We can then ask people to tape the shows and listen to what we have to say about the show. We could do the same thing for films or better yet, presidential press conferences, local television news, etc.

And what if each TV show episode had its own podcast, featuring running commentary of the weekly show?

Here's how they describe it at the Star Trek web site:

How it Works
To get the maximum benefit out of your podcast experience, we suggest you take the following steps:

1. Tape or TiVo the episode on UPN this Friday night (please check your local listings for time). We encourage you to watch the episode first...
2. Then download the commentary in either MP3, QuickTime or Windows Media format. Click here for the audio commentary.
3. Replay the episode and simultaneously listen to the commentary, either on your computer or digital media player. We provide cues for the ad breaks, so you should be able to follow along with the episode.

If you have a podcast application, use the following address to subscribe to our podcast feed:

http://www.startrek.com/custom/headlines/podcast.xml