Online material streams can be published using RSS using a common XML structure. New stories, blog entries, videos, and other material are immediately distributed to anyone who subscribes to a website's RSS stream when it is updated. To read stories in feed reading software and download audio in a podcast device, people can subscribe to RSS feeds.

Readers, which can be independent programs or computer extensions, are where RSS file subscribers can view stories and blog entries. The viewer application, which instantly downloads articles and sorts them sequentially as they arrive, only requires a user to add the RSS file Address.

Podcasts also use RSS to disseminate segments to listeners. By adding a podcast's RSS file, users of podcast viewer applications can subscribe to it and have new segments of the podcast downloaded immediately as soon as they are available. Episode names, artwork, and show notes are just a few examples of the content found in the XML that RSS uses to store information about each program.