unable to submit a podcast feed- "we had difficulty downloading episodes from your feed"

Please when you have a question post the URL of the feed, not its contents. Judging by what I see here you have a number of missing opening tags - '<' - such as in 'itunes:owner' which has no closing tag either, and 'item'.

The missing opening tags problem was caused by your pasting the contents into the forum and is not present in the actual feed. However you have two serious and two minor faults.

Your media file URL is

http://phmedia.mediaimages.net:1935/vod/_definst_/mp4:0165/12061_13536.mp4/playl ist.m3u8

This isn't a media file, it's a m3u playlist at 4kB. You need to provide a direct link to your media file and the URL must end with an extension, e.g. mp4

Your 'itunes:image' is a png which appears to be a screenshot: it should be 1400 x 1400 px or the feed won't be accepted, and it must be less the 500kB. You should choose a logo which will work when reduced to the size on the Store page.

You are missing what should be the first line of your feed:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

Your 'pubdate' tag reads

<pubDate>Thu Feb 20 02:39:12 EST 2014</pubDate>

There should be a comma after the 'Thu' and the '2014' should be after 'Feb', not at the end.

Your 'itunes:duration' tag reads

<itunes:duration>0:0:29</itunes:duration>

It should read

<itunes:duration>0:00:29</itunes:duration>

These last three are not fatal but should be addressed.

Finally, your title is 'iTunes1' which is valid but not a good title. You should choose something which gives an idea of the content.

Your feed is OK and can be subscribed to manually in iTunes where the video plays OK. One minor point - keywords must be separated by commas, and you can't have keyphrases, so 'last year' won't work as such. This won't have any effect on your submission, and in any case keyword search doesn't work reliably (if at all ) in the Store, so it's academic.

You now have a title - personally, I would have thought that ch2 wasn't particularly informative, but that's your decision.

The message suggests that there is actually a technical problem at the Store end - it wouldn't be the first time - so all you can do is try again from time to time.