As far as I know (and please correct me if I'm wrong), but Michael Hyatt seems to be the first to bring batch releasing a “Season” of his podcast. When he got to episode 100 he decided to change the format of his “This is your life” podcast from a monologue to having a co-host. The topics will be the same, but a different format. Now he is adding that his delivery will be different. Michael Hyatt is showing that leaders are not afraid to try new things.
The other thing I see about this is the PLANNING that has gone into this. He had to pick ALL of his topics, plan them out ahead. It appears based on the video that they went into a professional recording studio to record all the shows (and video tape them). The interesting thing is this will free him up to promote the shows once they are launched (he won't – at first – have to worry about the “next season).
Without knowing the details, I would assume this will be a batch release on youtube, “normal – dripping of content” on iTunes. If you published all of your season at once, this would force your audience to go and manually get the back catalog (while it would download the latest automatically). Hence you last show would get huge numbers while the others would not. I have a client of mine who does a daily radio show. In some cases, I've been given a weeks worth of episodes to publish. I see the results. The last episode is hit hard, the previous episodes are more or less ignored. It will be interesting to see how he published the audio.
If you've not read Michael's Book Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World I strongly urge you to read it.