“Wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement

Because what it represents is the triumph of exactly the kind of technology that's supposed to be impossible: open, empowering tech that's not owned by any one company

Contrast this to other media formats online, like YouTube or Tiktok or Twitch, which don't rely on open systems, and are wholly owned by individual tech companies.

This is a strange argument, unless I just misunderstand. Are they intending to point out that there are more podcast services than video services? Is “podcast technology” different from an mp3?

Podcast technology is RSS. RSS is distribution. An MP3 or MP4 (or whatever Google uses) is just a container. Without distribution, it sits there doing nothing.

Being able to look up almost any podcast in any podcast app and find its RSS feed and subscribe to it directly without requiring any intermediary is a huge thing in this era of proprietary silos. That's the point he's getting at.

Apple could go rogue tomorrow and start rehosting all podcasts in its directory, which most apps depend on, and I would still have my list in Overcast to go and get RSS feeds direct from the source.

You are not representative.

The vast majority of podcast listeners subscribe a channel on YouTube, Spotify or Apple.

The vast majority of podcasts are served from similar centralized media companies.

Which is why "JRE is moving from YouTube to Spotify for $200 mil" is a thing. If podcasts were decentralized you wouldn't "move" from one content company to another.

JRE used to be distributed on his personal website before Spotify. And it seems like they're now going back to hosting it on several platforms.

Because the deal will end (at the end of this year) and presumably they correctly sense it won't be renewed.

That's just a power rule, not an insight. The idea that you can choose between YouTube, Spotify, or Apple for the same product is good. The fact that you can still choose from a long tail of RSS providers for most shows is even better.

The long tail is really the important thing. Most things over the last 10 years ended up binary: either almost no one used it, or everyone used one thing. All efforts by centralized services to take it over have failed. And most of those efforts were only viable in the now fading overheated market driven by free money.

Which is why "Wherever you get your podcasts" is a radical statement.

99% of people read that as "Whichever you prefer from Spotify/YouTube/Apple"

Could you elaborate a bit further? I don’t see why this is necessarily true.

Someone is hosting the sound file that’s ultimately played when the podcast is listened to. A sibling comment to yours is saying that JRE is newly to be hosted with multiple hosts, which is the only real step away from centralization. RSS is just providing the means for an up-to-date URL for the podcast episodes.

At the end of the day, the podcast is served by one of these hosts, regardless of how it was discovered. It can be observed that they’re centralized when media companies make exclusive deals as Spotify attempted with JRE.

But you can get 99% of the same podcasts via Apple as you can via Spotify or many other podcasting apps. Just like you can visit websites on almost any web browser. This used to be how everything was expected to work online, but that has changed dramatically, and for the worse.

(Spotify is trying to break the openness of podcasting but they mostly haven’t managed to do so, yet.)

Which is why "JRE is moving from YouTube to Spotify for $200 mil" is a thing.

It's really not. They bought his regular anti-intellectual dribble not because podcasts aren't decentralised, but the opposite: because the inexplicable draw of his particular brand of common-sense-insulting prole-feed might convince people that podcasts are something only big services can do, and to compete with other big services trying to do the same things. They want to give the impression that big content is "locked up" by services, when it's not.

In my estimation it hasn't really succeeded (in his asinine, consistency-free, bloviating world or anywhere else).

All they really did is associated their brand with his twaddle.

If you make such statement you need to provide some numbers to back it up.

I mean, Android is still the largest platform in terms of users and it doesn't have a dominant podcast app. Spotify for a long time didn't offer podcasts and it still offers only very poor experience for podcasts.

RSS is distribution

It’s not content distribution.

get RSS feeds direct from the source.

But what is the source? Who is typically hosting these? Audio is easier to distribute than video, but aren’t most podcasts hosted on a handful of large services?

There is one centralised bottleneck - Apple's iTunes podcast index / search API - which seemingly everyone else in the company has forgotten about and runs pretty openly for anyone to submit to and use.

There are also a handful of essentially CDNs that host the .mp3 files themselves, but these are more or less completely interchangable. They're just infrastructure for hosting files.

https://podcastindex.org/ is a great.

I use https://podcastaddict.com/

But thanks for posting this! Occasionally, I can't find a particular podcast on my preferred site.

I'm a very (very, as in: too) avid podcast listener and the fact that apple run one of the biggest "phone books" has literally never stopped me from doing anything podcast related. I find new podcasts just fine, by word of mouth as well as in other directories.

The only player in town that seems to really make a dent in the openness is Spotify which have been aggressively buying out podcast teams and taking them off the open web, and that's one of the prime reasons I cancelled my subscriptions.

Then there's smaller losses like the BBC4 which made most of their podcasts have a 1 month delay vis-a-vis their own app. I have no interest in that. In effect, this just served to curb some of my compulsive newsy consumption. If something isn't important enough to still be heard a month later, maybe I didn't need to hear it in the first place.

Anyhow, I very much agree with the article and I'm happy someone made the point so much more eloquently than I've managed in my many debates about the matter.

It’s not content distribution.

Yeah, this is what I thought. RSS will give a URL to a sound file, which is hosted by someone, somewhere. It doesn’t sound like there’s anything inherent to podcasts -- not even RSS even though it’s so ubiquitous -- which prevents the content distribution to be more centralized.

If a podcast recording is exclusively hosted by Spotify, that is where everyone gets that podcast; even if they got the URL for it elsewhere. It’s a bit like saying I get my articles from HN (disregarding that I don’t use RSS for it).

Almost every podcast I listen to comes from a different site. It's as easy as setting up an RSS feed on your own website, which is very comparable to hosting your own blog. Sure, plenty of people use Medium, but lots and lots still self-host.

Being able to look up almost any podcast in any podcast app and find its RSS feed and subscribe to it directly without requiring any intermediary is a huge thing in this era of proprietary silos. That's the point he's getting at.

The sad part is this used to be completely normal. I remember browsing the web and most sites would show that little RSS icon in my browser indicating they have a feed available.

But people are happy to let companies like apple run their lives for them and decide what they are allowed to consume, so now we have to act like this perfectly normal and reasonable thing is special.

Yes, Siri. Thank you, Siri. May I watch another podcast, Siri?

The RSS header is often still present. It's browsers that stopped supporting it.

Not really, I have a browser extension that still shows it. Super rare now, which isn't surprising, because like you say the browsers don't show it by default anymore.

Right. Browsers stopped supporting it. Defaults matter. You can add a plugin for any obscure thing.

I'm not sure what your point is, but I think we're basically agreeing? RSS and decentralized hosting used to be normal until the bigcorps got greedy and started manipulating the masses (by removing features from browsers and such) into believing walled gardens are the only way.

I'd like a Really Simple Podcasts site where I can just log in with a username and a password, drag and drop an MP3 file from my computer, and have it get published as a new episode. Bliss.

That's how most podcasting platforms work. For example, that's exactly how https://transistor.fm/ works. You make an account, upload an MP3, get an RSS feed.

Yeah! This is exactly what I was looking for, thank you!

If I post a video on TikTok, you need to use the TikTok app to play it (with all the privacy implications of that).

If I give you a podcast URL, you can play it in pocketcast, overcast, or even write a few lines of Python to download it and play it in an mp3 player.

If I post a video on TikTok, you need to use the TikTok app to play it

You can play it using a web browser app by going to TikTok's website.

Can you play a TikTok video on, say, Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts?

That's the point. Feature-wise, they're all nearly identical. With podcasts, you can just choose your client or even create your own with the same catalogue as any of the big players.

With short-form videos, you can't.

Those apps embed a web view which allows those apps to load links to TikTok within the app.

...with all the privacy concerns that entails. The website is slightly better than the app but it's still a privacy nightmare

You don’t even need python, RSS is just plain old (plaintext) human-readable XML, just follow the link and find the .mp3 url directly

It’s not entirely clear, but I think it’s the fact you can simply 301 redirect to your new feed on a different platform.

Seems a bit misguided, because unless you’ve been pointing to your own domain the whole time, you still depend on the previous platform to 1) offer this feature at all, 2) keep serving that 301 forever or your old subscribers will be lost. Do podcast apps permanently change the feed URL when they see a 301? Am I missing something?

AFAIK most podcast platforms offer redirects.

That does not represent a “triumph of […] tech that's not owned by any one company, that can't be controlled by any one company” though.

It’s just companies being nice, because the incentives to not be nice haven’t showed up yet.

Podcasts are just a type of media like music or TV.

It's akin to saying "wherever you get your music".

Except that really, for music there's only 2-3 stores you can get any significant amounts of it. And all of them suck, and lock you into their own apps.

Even with physical media there's only so many big labels, and the rest is vanishingly small.

Who offers podcasts and operates them is so different from these in quantity that it makes a qualitative difference to the medium.

There are more places to get music now for most people than there were when I was a teen in the 80s.

Sure, the streaming services lock you in, but that's part of the deal you make -- small sub fee, all you can eat. I'll make that deal.

But Apple, at least, also offers online PURCHASE of DRM-free audio files. I dunno who else still does (Amazon?), but I don't think any of those vendors are still trying to do DRM or lock-in for purchased music. It's just that, by and large, the mass market has moved to the streaming model instead of the purchased-music model.

To put it simply, no one is able to say, “wherever you get your videos”.

Sort of, if a user has the same handle and post to all the major sites it works like that.

We very, very briefly had something like audio podcasts with video. I would fire up Miro (then Democracy Player) when I went to class, then come back to a bunch of videos downloaded via RSS's video containers from places like Revision3 and TWiT. All it lacked was a discovery platform like Apple Podcasts, though the player itself tried to provide discovery.

All the surviving shows have moved to YouTube. YouTube could provide the same sort of service, but it's not compatible with Google's dependence on ads.

Well, yes, of course it's different from an MP3. Part of what makes podcasting possible is RSS. If I upload an MP3 to my website, that isn't the same as uploading an MP3 and publishing an update for it to an RSS feed monitored by individual subscribers and podcast services.

Eh. If I make short documentaries in MP4 format and only distribute them in RSS are they podcasts? If I'm a musician and make music videos through RSS are those podcasts?

In other words, is any 1+ set of media files on RSS a podcast?

If you publish them to a podcast-compatible RSS feed, yes, of course, you are podcasting. There are plenty of video podcasts.

I know a lot of people conflate "podcast" with "show." Just publishing a podcast feed of your songs might not be something you consider a show per se, and that's fair, but if it's a podcast feed I can subscribe to in my podcast player, then you are podcasting.

If I follow a podcast, I follow that creator.

If I follow a YouTuber, I follow that person's channel on a particular, closed, privately-owned platform. If YouTube decides to kick them out, I no longer follow them.

Yesterday I actually learned about an app trying to solve that problem [1] through an absolutely bad-ass video response by one of its creators to a takedown notice from Google [2] (the mic-drop part starts at 3:29)

[1] https://grayjay.app/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJ42f-tV_3w

This quote got me because I think the author missed the goal of the podcast as originally set out. Apple didn't want to sell the medium, they wanted to sell players. They've had many chances to lock down iTunes for podcasts, but didn't, because that's not what they were after. They wanted to sell iPods, then iPhones. And they kinda won - we call them "podcasts" after all, despite people trying to change it to netcasts or other such terms.

The interesting thing about the distributed RSS nature of podcasts is that Apple let it happen. The entire podcast ecosystem rests upon the shoulders of Apple's podcast directory, which Apple has been freely hosting and allowing everyone to use rather than choosing to lock it down. For the longest time Apple's podcast client was by far the biggest player in the industry, so they had a lot of power to change this if they wanted to.

Given Apple's general money-grubbing ways (see: the App Store), this is somewhat surprising. Presumably the podcast directory product happens to be owned by someone in the org who has some idealistic commitment to it being open, and/or the overall podcast industry is too tiny for them to think it's worth the hassle to push monetizing it.

(Now Spotify's the biggest podcast platform, I gather, and I think we should all be glad that they don't have the power to just do unhindered monetization of podcasts because of Apple's counterbalancing them.)

Given Apple's general money-grubbing ways (see: the App Store), this is somewhat surprising.

The age of it is the why. Steve was far less focused on service revenue. Plus, podcasts sold iPods and iPhones.

Apps also sold iPhones. They built an entire marketing campaign around the idea (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szrsfeyLzyg). And yet they're trying to squeeze app developers for all they're worth.

>Apps also sold iPhones. [...] And yet they're trying to squeeze app developers for all they're worth.

It's because Apple was emboldened by the fact that the original June 2007 iPhone exceeded sales expectations of 10 million units without any 3rd-party apps. The App Store didn't exist until July 2008. In June 2007, consumers were getting in line to buy the so-called "Jesus phone" even though there were no 3rd-party apps ecosystem for it. (Look back at the hundreds waiting in line overnight for the first iPhone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iSE0bBgUsQ)

So, Apple rationally concludes that 3rd-party developers need access to Apple's customer base more than customers need access to outside developers. Back in 2008, the developers en masse could have revolted and said "fuck the Apple iOS SDK, fuck the App Store, and they can fuck off with their stupid rules and 30% fee" -- but they didn't.

Instead, developers grumbled and complained while they were submitting apps to the App Store. Developers -- via their actions -- keep signaling to Apple that Apple has the leverage and not the developers.

That's why you had 2008 articles and threads such as this:

- This Is Why iPhone Developers Put Up With All the Bullshit From Apple (daringfireball.net)

- 46 points by sant0sk1 on Sept 19, 2008 | hide | past | favorite | 23 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=308975

One of the most surprising things (from a modern perspective) about reading that daringfireball article is that a game could be successful on the App Store at a $5 price point ($7 in 2024 dollars).

Apps also sold iPhones

This seems apocryphal. Apple famously resisted apps and was dragged kicking in and screaming into supporting native applications.

The original iPhone didn't even launch with apps. A big part of the vision was that "apps" would be dynamic websites which you could create links to on your home screen. I think if the web tooling ecosystem was up to snuff at the time, we may not have an "App Store" as we know it today.

If podcasting is truly distributed, then by definition it should be able to survive Apple podcasts going away. It's an interesting thought experiment.

In what way does the ecosystem rely on Apple's infrastructure? Do listeners on Android, or even a third-party apps on iOS, use Apple's podcasts directory for search and discoverability?

The fact that Apple haven't attempted to squeeze podcasting is perhaps an indicator that the ecosystem doesn't really depend on Apple (and they know it).

It is distributed, but the problem comes in, what if everyone is using the same mechanism to distribute it. I guess a good, more clear example might be, using bitcoin as an example, Bitcoin is a distributed digital currency where anyone can run their own node. Cool. But what if everyone runs their bitcoin node on AWS's infrastructure. Sure, bitcoin itself is distributed, but it has a single point of failure of if Amazon's AWS goes to shit.

Or think about Cloudflare. When Cloudflare has an outage, it feels like half the internet goes down. There is no requirement for all these people use to Cloudflare specifically, but a sufficiently large portion of the market has converged on utilizing Cloudflare.

In what way does the ecosystem rely on Apple's infrastructure? Do listeners on Android, or even a third-party apps on iOS, use Apple's podcasts directory for search and discoverability?

Depends on which client you use. Google Podcasts has its own directory. However, it's approximately-true that any third party app on iOS / Android that aren't run by a big company (Spotify, Google, Amazon) use Apple's directory for their podcast-search. (Pocket Casts, Castbox, etc on Android all definitely use it.)

I use AntennaPod from F-Droid, and it has the following search options, in this order: Apple, fyyd, gpodder, Podcast Index.

I assumed overcast used something other than the Apple podcast directory, but nope:

https://overcast.fm/podcasterinfo

I’d definitely be interested in using an independent source for podcast search. (To help reduce the current single point of failure in Apple’s org chart).

I always thought podcasters signed up to some media service that threw their podcast on the platforms they wanted I never even considered Apple having the singular podcast directory in the world.

edit: Oh someone in thread po-inted to a secondary directory

Marco could theoretically bootstrap a directory based on user subscriptions (the RSS feeds are polled server-side, not on every client), but then you still have the problem of how new podcasts get added.

The iTunes API is poorly documented but completely public. No reason not to use it.

https://performance-partners.apple.com/search-api

Thanks for answering the question I had reading this article: how do podcasters manage to get listed on all these third party apps; with the answer being that apparently they don't, they are listed on a central directory which all the apps use. I'm curious if there is a way to achieve a similar result (open ecosystem that allows a huge amount of competition) without the central directory.

The Podcast Addict app on Android has it's own directory[0], but it also gives you the option to search Apples, and a third one called The Podcast Index[1].

[0]: https://podcastaddict.com/

[1]: https://podcastindex.org/

Also, there is a list for apps and services that supports The Podcast index [1].

[1] https://podcastindex.org/apps

Spotify is certainly monetizing their podcast platform. At least for the Spotify-produced shows, they’re injecting ads regardless of whether you pay for premium service or not.

There's a reason I said "unhindered monetization" -- imagine what Spotify would be doing if there wasn't a major podcast directory service outside of their control.

Apple is still the biggest. Spotify is still second. There's a big gap between them and and even bigger gap to third place.

More interestingly, Spotify rose to second by investing a gazillion dollars acquiring both a bevy of software tools (Megaphone, chartable, anchor), entire production studios like Gimlet and shelling out huge sums to take the biggest shows like Joe Rogan and Call Her Daddy private so they were Spotify exclusive and no longer available via RSS. In the past few weeks, Spotify has formally admitted defeat and announced Joe Rogan and Call Her Daddy will go back to the public market.

They would not have been able to change it, since the podcast client was reliant on the standard of distribution which was open. I wouldn't attribute this to Apple "letting" it happen. They would've had to invest millions to get the content onboarded and monetized.

Podcasts have been supported on the iPod from the mid-2000s, years before Serial took off and VCs descended upon the medium with dollar signs in their eyes.

Maybe Apple hosts it because it's a legacy thing that doesn't interfere with Apple-only podcasts.

You don't think Spotify would grub as much money as possible if they could? It's just that they can't because their business sucks.

Given Apple's general money-grubbing ways (see: the App Store), this is somewhat surprising.

Far be it from me to give Apple credit for altruism or openness, but this narrative isn't quite true. When the iPhone launched, Jobs and the execs at Apple envisioned that web apps would be the way the iPhone functionality could be extended. There was even a relatively straightforward way for web apps to be cached and saved on the Home Screen. The desire for compatability with open standards was even reflected in Jobs' open letter explaining why Flash would not be put in the iPhone.[0]

Public outcry for the native APIs along with prodding from other Apple execs led to the App Store becoming a thing.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20100501010616/https://www.apple...

Meanwhile if put a podcast URL into my Webbrowser I just get a bunch of raw XML. I never liked that RSS, while having some nice properties, exists as this awkward thing next to the Web, but isn't really part of the Web.

What RSS is doing feels like something that should be done with just a few extra HTML tags, not a completely new format. But the idea of HTML as markup language feels kind of lost these days.

if put a podcast URL into my Webbrowser I just get a bunch of raw XML

And if I put a web URL into my telnet client I just get a bunch of raw HTTP! Not everything on the internet is part of the web. There have always been other protocols: IMAP/SMTP for email, IRC for chat, NNTP for newsgroups, XMPP for instant messaging, and RSS for subscriptions.

The idea that everything has to be done over the web is what’s really undermined “the idea of HTML as a markup language”. If HTML is a markup language, why would you use it for all these other use cases, most of which were handled with much better performance on hardware from twenty years ago?

Not disagreeing entirely, but don't forget that you used to be able to type ftp://example.com and gopher://example.com into the url to access sites. I think there were others as well. Most browsers have removed those protocols.

As you point out, ftp and gopher were, at one point in time, also used to transfer websites, so the inclusion was supportive of the web directive.

But have browsers ever widely attempted to be anything other than web browsers? A couple of vendors tried including RSS support at one point, but I don't recall it catching on across the industry.

Media (images, audio, video) browsers, maybe. Technically that is not HTML, but still rendered by most browsers. However, as that content can also be embedded in HTML, requiring browser support to be present anyway, it is a bit grey area.

Late versions of Netscape and early versions of Mozilla included email clients. Mozilla later split the email client and web browser into two separate programs, Thunderbird and Firebird. Firebird became Firefox.

Didn’t they also include calendaring at some point?

Didn’t JZW once famously say all software grows until it eventually has an email client?

You're thinking of Mozilla Sunbird.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Sunbird

Netscape Communicator included a calendar at one point.

And Usenet! That never caught on either, though. We've had more web browsers with RSS support than web browsers with email support.

Opera was also a mail client and IRC client at one point.

The difference is that every computer comes with a app where you can copy-paste that URL and see the full website. With RSS, you first need to find and install a 3rd party software to view it and/or create an account on a website.

This was one feature I really liked about the old Opera. I seem to recall being able to look at an RSS feed and it applied a basic style to it from the get-go, as it had baked-in RSS support.

That’s mostly because tech companies have been trying to kill open protocols like RSS in order to lock people into their proprietary platforms.

Are they distributed with "http://" despite not following that protocol? I don't know what goes into making a new protocol specifier, but if podcast thingy is a protocol that we like then maybe we ought to do something like podcast:// so the right app can be summoned rather than having your browser do its best.

Despite the name, for over 95% of its existence, HTTP has served way more than just HTML

I'm aware, but maybe that should change. It's not really suited for much if what it is used for.

I have a vague recollection of putting rss urls into Netscape and it would style it in a readable form by default. It’s too bad that feature was lost.

Safari used to do that too. It was so nice being able to use Safari as my RSS reader—I would actually click on the original post link in each new story to read it on the original site which helped retain the personality of the blogs. It made me sad when Safari dropped that functionality.

Ye Firefox had a reasonable viewer too.

https://evertpot.com/firefox-rss/

While it’s not necessarily simple to do so, having a raw unstyled xml feed is a choice not a requirement. You _can_ style rss feeds: https://darekkay.com/blog/rss-styling/

Oh boy does that bring back memories. Yahoo’s “portal” used to compose itself based on a bunch of RSS (or was it ATOM) feeds, both user submitted and in-house. If you build your feed in just the right way, yahoo would transform it using your XSLT and display the output. Bam, now you could make your feed look all cool and custom inside Yahoo portal.

And boy does this bring back the memories of XSLT. I’m kinda glad I forgot about that abomination.

If someone adds a reference to XSLT template to their RSS feed's header, they can style the page however they want. I rarely see anyone doing that, but if consumers of podcast RSS feeds were asking for something different, it is fairly trivial for the producers to style it.

Having been involved in podcasting for almost a decade now, I take a generally pessimistic view of the future the RSS based distribution system of podcasts. It largely only exists because of decisions made by Apple many many years ago that they have not gone back on. They set their APIs to public which allows a podcaster to submit to Apple and then all of the various podcast distribution platforms can pull in that data to allow you to subscribe to the RSS on their platform. Apple's introduction of Podcast Subscriptions was their first move away from this model (with Apple hosting the audio) and I wouldn't be surprised if they moved to get more control in the future.

When Spotify entered the market they paid a lot of money for exclusive content, but for the 99% of podcasters their interaction with the space was the same as Apple, submit your RSS and it serves it from your hosting. However, Spotify also bought two podcast hosting platforms: Anchor and Megaphone which ends up blurring that line a bit. As far as I know the Anchor/Megaphone hosted podcasts are not treated differently by Spotify, but that could change at any time.

The recent change from Google with the retiring of Google Podcasts in favor of Youtube Music is a tremendous step in the opposite direction. Youtube Music does NOT use the RSS based distribution method, with podcasters uploading their files directly to Youtube. Google even offers an RSS import.

From all of the metrics I have seen the above three platforms make up 80%+ or so of the podcast user base. So if they made changes to make things less open podcast creators would be forced to follow. Making it feel like the openness of podcasts is, at least in 2023, more of an illusion or an act of charity than anything else.

Im running a very small podcast hosting company, and spotify is NOT a good player in this space. They are not respecting the standard in any way. As an example, instead of linking to the source url, they make their own copy and serve that instead in the app, so the hoster does not see any downloads, cannot do statistics, etc. It also add copy protection... They also do not refresh the original URL regularly or the content, so if a change was made to the file , description or image it will not show up on spotify unless you do some custom stuff (breaking other players).

So the break is already happening in this world...

Interesting...in a bad way.

I guess I am not shocked that they would do something like that. I'm sure they claim that they do it for user experience or some such nonsense.

Security and performance come to mind.

If they just served podcasts directly from third parties, third parties would be able at least in theory to push potentially malicious data to the Spotify app (and Spotify users' devices).

As for performance, if the third party has an outage, then it would make Spotify look broken. And who knows if the third party site can serve the traffic well enough for a good experience.

All their posturing about Apple and open ecosystems is transparently hypocritical.

The BBC is another bad actor in this space (although increasingly irrelevant). Their decision to "hide" most of their RSS feeds whilst still labeling their proprietary app subscribe links podcasts was unethical.

I see hope in the Patreon model. I don't mind paying a monthly subscription for a specific show if I get a locked down RSS link.

I support a few podcasts on patreon. They have regular open RSS feeds and then a locked down patreon feed, containing special episodes, extra material etc. One podcast only charges for each locked episode, so if they don't make any for a while I'm not charged. They are all pretty niche and I don't know how much they earn from it, but from a user perspective it's working fine.

The last time I checked, you can see publisher revenue on patreon.

I dropped the two BBC podcasts i'd been interested in (News Cast and In Our Time) for this reason, it's such a weird tack to take in order to chase views.

The recent change from Google with the retiring of Google Podcasts in favor of Youtube Music is a tremendous step in the opposite direction. Youtube Music does NOT use the RSS based distribution method, with podcasters uploading their files directly to Youtube. Google even offers an RSS import.

I already hated YT Music with a passion, but this makes me hate it even more.

In general, I agree with the sentiment here as well, I think podcast hosting and distribution will continue to increasingly be centralized. It makes me sad for the future of open protocols and an open web in general, but the factors are more economic than anything technical.

I do think Youtube Music especially in the context of forced bundling with ad-free YouTube is a bit of a throwback to the bad old days of 'you WILL use Google+ and you WILL like it no matter how many times you say you don't want it'.

It's almost as if a strong hegemony can make things radically better for everyone, and we need to keep that hegemony going.

Roman empire, Pax Americana, Apple Podcast Directory. Birds of a feather :P

Ironically (I know the etymology, ironic in this sense) the word for Apple and evil is the same. Pax malum hits a little different.

I think one big difference is that Youtube Music allows users to add RSS feeds, keeping that option open for podcasters. While Spotify would rather not add this feature because it wants all podcasts to go through their platform.

Apple Podcasts and Overcast (iOS) also support this. So does AntennaPod (Android).

So to shorten this: A popular distribution vector for media is popular and works very well because it's based on open protocols and software, and now the various tech giants are looking at it like, "Is anyone gonna fuck that?"

Sounds right on the nail head to me.

I agree and I'd like podcasts to remain open. Compared to video, the comparatively low cost of recording, production, and serving of audio has led to the flourishment of podcasts, without centralisation.

But centralisation has a way of creeping in, so I wouldn't be surprised if a platform came about to attract podcast creators with convenient revenue streams, in the same way Substack has for blogs. There's opportunity on the table.

I dropped my Spotify subscription when it started getting exclusive rights on podcasts. A worrying trend.

Or maybe the open podcast world has enough momentum to remain decentralised? What would lead to the practical decentralisation of video? Peertube has not made a dent yet.

I dropped my Spotify subscription when it started getting exclusive rights on podcasts

To me, these no longer are podcasts, but are now shows hosted on Spotify. It's not different than any other talk show like Stern or some sportsball talking heads that are exclusive to XM/Sirius/ESPN/etc. It's just their shows don't have a "broadcast schedule". Maybe I'm just being too pedantic

No, you are absolutely right. Episodic shows that call themselves “podcasts” are trying to capitalize on the popularity of podcasts as an open system while shirking the openness that makes them popular. We should refuse to call them podcasts, because they are not.

I find this sort of hard-line opinion funny in the context that the pod in podcasts comes from iPod, device which was notoriously locked down. 1st gen iPods required a Mac to upload audio to the device; iTunes was not even available on other platforms!

'pod' comes from Play on Demand and pre-dates the iPod (iPod being an apple branded Play on Demand device).

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2022/03/03/the-pod-in-podc...

If I'm not mistaken, 'play on demand' in this context is a backronym[1]. The iPod name is apparently a reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey:

The name came from a freelance copyrighter who, after seeing the prototype, thought of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey and the phrase "Open the pod bay door, Hal!"[2]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backronym

2: https://www.pcmag.com/news/a-visual-history-of-apple-ipods

It's unfortunate that the name is derived from a locked-down device, but that was never a limitation of the technology (which had nothing to do with Apple); I used to listen to podcasts before I ever owned an iPod.

Not to be an apologist for Apple’s closed platforms, but my understanding was that the original iPod’s Mac-only limitation was significantly influenced by the fact it used Firewire, which was available on every Mac but very few PCs. Firewire was a critical piece of why the iPod was actually good, because it provided fast transfer rates for syncing lots of audio, and higher power for faster charging. USB 2 was comparable, but still quite new and not present on most computers that people already owned at the time.

While iTunes was required, it was free and there was no subscription or limitation on what you could sync to the device. Apple actually seemed to be generally anti-DRM at the time, launching the music store with DRM as an industry concession, but eventually removing it and even allowing users to download DRM-free copies of songs that were originally purchased with it.

I've been listening to podcasts since the 2000s, and have never owned an iPod. I used one app or another to download them, and listened on various non-Apple portable music players.

I've never owned an iPod, so no podcasts for me. I have thousands of MP3s (none purchased from iTunes) I listen to on a small portable device (not a smartphone).

I think the mp3 is responsible for much of the positive momentum of podcasts and audio in general. (That's pretty obvious.) But there is not a widely accepted analog in video. Video encoding is complicated. And since we are at a particular juncture where video is large enough relative to internet speed, compression and encoding are still very important.

So the complexity of that is what makes it hard to go totally open in my opinion, at least from the creator standpoint.

That and the fact that there is just too much momentum with YouTube's audience volume, if your goal is viewership.

Video also has the twist that, unlike audio, it has to support a bunch of different hardware configurations. You’ve got to support multiple video codecs, multiple resolutions and bitrates. And to be good you might even be serving several of those variants to the same client in one viewing—which means you have to intelligently chop up the video into smaller pieces. Plus the supporting client side tooling is more important—for example those little thumbnails that show up while seeking through a clip.

Audio is easy. Throw up an mp3 and you are done. The basic fundamentals of an audio client have remained largely unchanged since the invention of the tape deck. Video is a while different animal.

That being said, moving to an RSS based model for video would be pretty interesting. I just imagine there would be a lot of work on whatever system consumes those RSS files to make the video playable across the wide spectrum of video players.

Monetization is a problem, centralization is a flawed solution.

But centralisation has a way of creeping in, so I wouldn't be surprised if a platform came about to attract podcast creators with convenient revenue streams, in the same way Substack has for blogs.

Feed burner tried. Spotify tried. I think podcasting is like blogs or email newsletters. There may be value in centralization (dev.to, medium, etc for blogs, MailChimp, substack, etc for newsletters) but there'll always be a space for you to own and run it yourself.

Critically, you can port your subscribers in each of these cases, unlike subscribers to a YouTube channel or a Facebook group. I think thats a correlary of Anil's point. It isn't enough for discovery to be open, you, the creator, need to own the means of distribution.

I read other comments about 'forever redirects' of the RSS feed if you leave a podcast platform and they're a bit worrisome, but I wonder if a year or two of redirect service would be adequate. Probably depends on the growth of your podcast. I think I might have updated a feed URL once or twice in the decade or so I've been a podcast listener. Still safer to set up a reverse proxy under a domain you control.

These days you're lucky if you can actually get the podcast and not just stream it from some awful "cloud" service with widevine DRM thats also trying to push you to pay ten bucks a month for a premium account which only forces you to listen to the ads embedded in the podcast itself.

Those aren't podcasts, in my opinion. When things I subscribe to become not-podcasts (which has only really happened once - looking at you BBC), I spend a few minutes looking for something new to try out instead. I always have too much in my queue anyway.

My understanding (and I might be wrong here) is that the BBC not-podcasts are for folks within the UK, since the globally available ones have ads, right? I'm not in the UK, and am subscribed to several BBC podcasts, none of which have been not-podcasts.

Not sure to be honest. A couple of years ago someone at the BBC decided they wanted to push listeners to their app (which has live "radio" as well as shows on catch-up). They chose a few of their most popular podcasts, including The News Quiz, and made the appropriately surreal announcement that (great news!) this _topical_ comedy panel show would now be available six weeks sooner via their app.

The RSS feed still doesn't have ads last time I checked (at least for me, accessing from the UK), but now aggregates six-week-old political satire. I do have BBC sounds on my phone, but I never remember to listen to it. I always just go to my podcatcher out of habit, and end up listening to something else.

You get ads outside the UK, which is always weird for me when i get back from holiday and have a bunch of shows i downloaded while I was in another country and haven't listened to yet. Actually, I say bunch - but I've deleted everything except In Our Time. Australian Broadcast Company does more better podcasts than BBC these days.

The distinction won't matter to end-users because they most of the distribution pipeline is hidden from them already.

The distribution pipeline is invisible because of the open, distributed ecosystem.

As soon as a podcast announces it is going platform-exclusive, the pipeline becomes extremely visible for everyone except those already subscribing via that platform.

Clouds are not per se awful if you compare it to manually managing mp3 files and not all podcasts contain ads. I’m not saying your statement is completely wrong, I’m saying it could use some more nuance.

Who is "manually managing mp3" files?

My software reads RSS feeds and downloads the podcasts.

I never see a file on my phone.

I do, because I'm ... well, I do a last minute scramble to download that one or two episodes before the flight takes off, and haven't ever thought about setting up an app for it, because it's just mp3 files I can download from a webpage, duh!

I guess it's time to accept that I'm a regular listener and I'd be much better off with some semi-sane system.

15 years ago I downloaded podcastaddict, it keeps my RSS feeds and updates them all every morning at 7am, or at the press of a button.

Maybe I'm not "that into" podcasts but I've never had to pay to listen to the podcasts I like. I can't even remember being prompted like you describe. I don't even pay for the software that plays the podcasts... (well one time a LONG time ago I paid for a player that was really nice).

What situations are you encountering this?

I'm pretty sure the GP was referring to Spotify exclusive podcasts, that were only accessible from the Spotify app, thus encumbered in DRM.

What podcasts do you listen to that are like this? I've subscribed to countless podcasts over the years using PocketCasts on my phone and I've never once encountered anything like what you're describing.

Relating to keeping podcasts open and decentralized: podcasting 2.0 and the podcast index are projects to prevent large players dominating distribution and discovery of podcasts.

https://podcastindex.org/ https://blubrry.com/support/podcasting-2-0-introduction/

I think there's a lot of good ideas in the Podcasting 2.0 set of specs, but the insistence on stapling crypto shit into it (even for quote-unquote good reasons) has meant that I've got no interest in recommending it as a thing. The podcast tooling I'm building incorporates some parts of what they recommend, but digging into it is sufficiently radioactive that I'm not putting that brand name anywhere near my stuff.

As well-intentioned as some in the crypto space are, it's telling that not one implementation besides the big 2 (which are used for speculation rather than transactions) has managed to pick up a following in terms of actual usage.

As fragmented as open source efforts usually are, there's usually some network effect that lowers the risk for someone else to try it. Linux, LibreOffice, Lightttpd etc. With crypto it's winner-take-all.

For this sort of thing, you could always use git (optionally with signed commits).

It’s strictly a generalization of a block chain, since the chain is a tree. Also, instead of remaining anonymous and trying to scam pension funds, its creator named it after himself.

It’s also at least a million times more energy efficient, and has better support for federation (i.e., forks).

It honestly doesn't seem that bad. Is there something less-obvious going on because it just looks like it's just "tip us with BTC" but better integrated than a QR code?

Yes, and this was co-created by one of the "creators" of podcasting, Adam Curry -

https://soundcloud.com/user-773474262-525813292/the-history-...

#itm

This openness and simplicity is a major reason podcasts are such a great medium. They haven’t been “platformified” and ruined.

Yet. Spotify and others are certainly trying. I'm happy to see resistance and continued growth of the open ecosystem but we shouldn't take it for granted.

If you subscribe, always do it via Patreon or some other system outside the major streaming platforms. Apple at least will let you add outside RSS podcasts to its podcast app and there are third party apps too.

Don’t subscribe inside a major integrated streamer since that’s helping them own the entire ecosystem. If they can kill Patreon they can close podcasts.

Exactly, let’s make Patreon as big as the other platforms and everything should work out great. I hope I don’t get danged for sarcasm here, but I am so not a fan of this sentiment. All the major platforms started as upstart competitors. Google to Yahoo. YouTube to all media. Facebook to MySpace. Look at them now.

The thing saving podcasts is that they are free. They continue to be ad supported or not monetized at all. But there is a path forward where they can be monetized in other ways and still maintain the openness they enjoy today.

For now, advertising seems to be able to support at least some podcasts that are serious about being professional operations. In fact, while I'm sure no one is buying big yachts, I'm often a bit surprised by how large the staffs of some podcasts are. Of course, many podcasts are also just one or two people doing them part-time.

Patreon doesn't own the app and/or OS the way Spotify and Apple do, so there is less immediate risk of them capturing podcasts.

I don't think they're trying to get exclusives to attract people to their platform, but I don't think that means anything beyond that. When you're buying consoles if you can only buy one, you get the console with better games. But almost all podcast platforms are free to join and get podcasts from, so if someone listens to Joe Rogan or some other show (for free) on spotify it doesn't create a barrier for participation on any other podcast. The platforms are just buying audience with exclusivity deals, but nobody is locked in.

Mini Ask HN: How do you get your podcast on every platform? I'd like to start one soon.

RSS of course. I don't care what platform you use just make sure there is an RSS feed.

Of course. Can it be the RSS feed for the podcast website if that is the only thing on the feed?

Podcast apps that only support audio containers should just ignore other kinds of containers in the RSS like the one blogs use for posts.

Generally you only need to submit them to three platforms:

* Youtube Music (replacement for Google Podcasts) * Spotify * Apple

Every other podcast platform uses Apple APIs to get your podcast info, and it will be available on, for example Pocketcasts, as soon as it shows up on Apple Podcasts.

There might be a few other smaller players that you still have to specifically submit to, some of them have died off. The ones above will get you to the vast majority of listeners.

Excellent, thank you!

I get this message:

"Waking up... To keep Glitch projects fast for everyone inactive projects go to sleep and wake up on request."

Ok so this website appears to be hosted by microservice. "to keep ... fast for everyone." Is anyone else bothered by this line that we're conditioned to accept that microservices are always faster? In my experience, even without the cold starts, they are often slower than traditional VPS hosted apps.

Well then there's scalability... But looks like this still got the hug of death.

12 minutes later and it loaded fine for me. Whatever they're doing seems to be keeping the site from dying outright.

It's saying that to keep it fast for everyone, it will remove resources from you when you are not using them.

It's not really about microservices, and it's not implying they are fast. You could have this message about any kind of resource, it only means the service is trying to keep it cheap.

I don't disagree with your last sentence.

But I do assume they mean scalability as far as the content service goes.

The term microservice is a bit of a vague general term that just means "we thought about scalability" to me. It doesn't mean anything more than that to me without discussing it in detail.

I think the idea of a server being overloaded at the moment there's something positive like high demand is something deeply ingrained in folks psyche. Accordingly it gets brought up on every sales call (once we're talking to the technical folks) and executives love to say "micro services".

It currently loading just fine while sitting on top of HN as the west coast wakes up. We’ll see, but that’s already better than a lot of platforms.

I do wonder why a static site like this couldn’t just be put somewhere always-on, like github pages.

He's the CEO of the company that provides the microservice. I assume he has some reason for not paying the upgrade price to make it always-on. Glitch is hosting + a development community.

You might have seen an app hosted there: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=glitch.me

Or heard of its old name, Fog Creek, if you've been around long enough.

https://glitch.com/@glitch/fediverse-of-madness

Some fun stuff in here: https://glitch.com/@community/community-roundup + https://glitch.com/@community/

I tried a bunch of podcast hosts recently and was disappointed that even the ones that allowed a custom domain typically served the RSS feed itself off of their own domain. Many do say they will serve a redirect from that domain in perpetuity for free if you do leave to another platform, but it is a bummer that you can’t permissionlessly migrate your own podcast from most hosts.

I ended up just setting up an endpoint that reverse-proxies the RSS feed served by the platform on my own domain.

Anil also mentions migrating from Mastodon, which has a similar problem: migration is a form of redirect, so the platform you’re migrating from has to continue to exist and not block your migration.

maybe not the 'simplest', but I guess there's a wordpress/ghost plugin for this

Anil also mentions migrating from Mastodon, which has a similar problem: migration is a form of redirect, so the platform you’re migrating from has to continue to exist and not block your migration.

FWIW, when migrating from Mastodon instance to another, as long as both instances are online and in agreement during the migration, the ActivityPub protocol will automatically update any followers to use your new instance. The old instance could go down the next day and you wouldn't loose anyone.

However, the posts remain at the old platform - so they disappear if the old instance goes down.

And, of course, any hyperlinks pointing to the old instance will stop working when it goes down.

I ended up just setting up an endpoint that reverse-proxies the RSS feed served by the platform on my own domain.

I did the same thing and eventually felt like it was too complicated to maintain a service just for that, so I switched to Bunny CDN and use a custom domain on Bunny to sit in front of the podcast host's RSS feed (just the RSS, not the actual episodes).

It works pretty well, but sometimes the caching does things I don't expect and new episodes don't appear in my player until I manually flush the cache on Bunny. I suspect I could do it more smoothly if I experimented more with Bunny's settings.

I've thought about this boilerplate sentence that almost all the podcasters use, too. But to me it's not a statement on openness but rather a description on how bad the podcast UX still is for the Average Joe.

I mean, advertisers don't need to say "You can visit advertiser.com with whatever browser you use" but they can just say "advertiser.com". They don't need to say "You can visit us at Unnamed Road 23 by whatever means of transportation you use", but they can just say "Unnamed Road 23".

My mom wouldn't know what is a podcast nor could she fathom what is this "wherever" she usually gets them.

I don't think I know what is a podcast, really. Conan has a new podcast that I'd be interested but I noticed that I need a 10$ monthly subscription to get it. I listen to Conan's other podcast on Spotify, so it's not really available on "wherever I get my podcasts". Finnish Public Broadcasting company is so much into podcasts that they call all their radio shows "podcasts". They are not available on any 3rd party podcasting software and their own services do not offer any 3rd party podcasts.

To listen to "my podcasts", I in fact need several applications and some would require a subscription.

Podcast is still, after all these years a bit like multimedia CD was in 1997. You kind of know it's one after starting to use it, but it's mostly impossible to define it in a meaningful way.

Finnish Public Broadcasting company is so much into podcasts that they call all their radio shows "podcasts".

Presumably they don't use the phrase "wherever you get your podcasts" then? Because theirs is not available "wherever you get your podcasts".

My mom wouldn't know what is a podcast nor could she fathom what is this "wherever" she usually gets them.

But this phrase usually used in a podcast. So I assume she wouldn't come across it then?

But this phrase usually used in a podcast. So I assume she wouldn't come across it then?

Not the case. I have never listened to a podcast (to my knowledge) and yet I hear this phrase all the time when podcasts are advertised, e.g. on the radio or TV.

My mom wouldn't know what is a podcast nor could she fathom what is this "wherever" she usually gets them.

If that's the case, then she cannot operate a TV or a radio either. If you have a Podcast app on your device, it's incredibly easy to find and subscribe to podcasts.

And before anybody says "She doesn't know how to install an app!" – she didn't know how to install cable either, a guy from the company did. And most people know how to install apps.

... "is a radical statement". For some reason radical was removed from the title, but this is a case where it matters.

If you submit to HN and the title is automatically edited (presumably to make it less sensational), but you feel it was improperly done, you can edit the title.

If I'd submitted this piece, I would have made sure the "radical" adjective was present.

I notice that HN automatically removes some words from titles when they're pasted in. I've never been clear on what words are removed, and it often feels random. I don't think this is the actual reason, but it almost feels like it's done to see if the poster is paying attention? Either way, I've always been able to edit the title to bring the words back if they're key to the post's meaning.

I think they try to edit words that don't have much value out. I haven't kept precise notes, but if the first word is "how", that is often removed. And I've noticed hyperbolic adjectives like "greatest" are removed too.

I completely agree with you, but knowing how Anil talks “___ is a statement” made me wonder if this would be a spicy political take, so I was _more_ surprised to see that on the HN front page. I’m happy to see this take on decentralization, and Roman Mars’ joke embedded in the middle, instead.

YouTube is the only platform that has sponsor block plugin which allows you skip all ads, self promotions etc.. Hard to compete with that.

Hitting “+30s” for free in Apple Podcasts competes pretty well in my experience.

Need someone to create a platform agnostic sponsorblock for any podcast app, just for the convenience of automatic skipping. Perhaps like a proxy for the RSS feed that spits out edited audio files? Edit: looks like someone has thought of this, if the podcast is hosted on YouTube: https://github.com/ericmedina024/podcast-sponsor-block

But yeah, I'm fine with using the skip x seconds in my podcast app as well for now.

The challenge with that is that unlike those things that sponsorblock is skipping, most podcast ads these days are dynamically inserted at time of stream/download. This means that some listeners get them and some listeners don't.

They are also dynamic based on geographic location from which you download, which results in drastically different ad loads based on where you live. This is probably one of the reasons that a sponsorblock-for-podcasts has not yet happened.

Isn't “Wherever you get your podcasts” really only possible because a podcast is only an audio file, with possible extras added?

A blog post is only a text file, with possible extras added. Nearly any piece of writing you see online is.

Everything is only something. The question is more how much it costs to produce and distribute that thing, and who is paying for it, and whether they negotiated for exclusive hosting rights as part of their financing deal. Joe Rogan’s podcast is just an audio file, but Spotify pays to make it so only they can host it.

Podcasts originated on iTunes. Because they were for your iPod. Which required iTunes. Why revise history?

This isn’t true. Podcasts were originally for your iPod, but iTunes was late to the distribution story. Most podcasts used RSS feeds and there were a lot of apps for subscribing to these feeds and automatically downloading the MP3 files.

Back in the day I had an app that downloaded my podcasts to my iPhone 3S every morning over wifi before I listened to them on my way into work. Then Apple added podcatcher support to iTunes, which at the time was a program you ran on your Mac or Window PC to use to get music onto iPods or iPhones. Sadly, I'd just started using Ubuntu so that wasn't an option for me, besides the inconvenience of having to do that manually every morning. I put together a hacky solution in the short term, then moved to Android.

We have the same thing with music. What went wrong with television and movies?

Music is already more constrained to platforms and labels than podcasts and yes movies is even more constrained. The reason for this seems obvious, it costs a lot more to produce. If I want to create a podcast I just need to buy myself a mic and sure it costs some personnal investment but it's much less than music and nothing compared to movies. So it's a lot easier for platforms like netflix to fund a lot of projects in exchange of exclusivity.

The music industry went first (because it was technically feasible first), took all the blowback, got beaten into submission, and the TV, movie and ebook industries had that as a case they needed to head off with their PR from the beginning.

What these advertisting ineffiencies lead to in practice is that podcasts start with some FUD ad for a VPN. The reason that you can't buy Google Ads for podcasts is simply that podcasts compete with YouTube, and so Google doesn't care to support that ecosystem, and it doesn't have to because the "immense scale" of podcasts is nothing compared to YouTube.

I’m listening to some podcasts published through Acast and 95% of the time, my injected ads are about how I don’t have to listen to said ads if I buy Amazon prime.

Didn't feed burner offer ads, way back when?

If it doesn't use RSS (or similar) and I can't download it and play it through any player I choose, it's not really a podcast to me.

I agree 100%. The defining characteristic of a podcast is how it is distributed. Otherwise it's just an audio program. However, we are losing the word already. The least technical people I know think "podcast" means any kind of audio program with talking.

As in, "Hey I just started a podcast on youtube!" but literally it's just a yt channel.

As in, "Hey I just started a podcast on youtube!" but literally it's just a yt channel.

That's always worth a laugh. But I have seen actual podcasts that did this, too. They have a real audio podcast, but also put up a YouTube video of them making the podcast.

Why did the word 'radical' get stripped from the submission title?

On the page, the post title is "'Wherever you get your podcasts' is a radical statement"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39287610

In that way, podcasts have reintroduced the wonderful kind of advertising inefficiencies that we saw in the heyday of print magazines

But also, the ads sometimes have a human component to them. On networks like TWiT, the ads are all live reads. There’s variability to them, occasionally guests offer their opinion of them, etc. Sure, it’s still an ad, but it’s not as jarring as the one-size-fits-all creatives that get blasted into your ears and eyes until you’re sick of them.

This is a phrase that consistently bugs me-everyone just copying one another and repeating it.

No, this is a mirage. There are a tiny handful of major companies podcasters submit to. One of them provides a public API that all the smaller apps rely on.

A donation from Apple is not an open ecosystem.

We do get most of our podcast data from Apple. We even use the same podcast ID as Apple Podcasts.

-- Podcast Republic

The open podcast ecosystem is what enabled me to easily build PodcastSaver[0].

Of course that, and the PodcastIndex[1] which saved me a TON of time not having to go find RSS feeds... But also gave me lots of podcasts that no one is necessarily looking for which I have to weed through at some point.

[0]: https://podcastsaver.com

[1]: https://podcastindex.org

Nobody likes to admit that Apple still has a stronghold on the podcast ecosystem by way of their podcast directory, which is piggybacked by several “indie” clients.

It's really absurd to automangle "radical statement" to "statement". That isn't stripping hyperbole, it is stripping semantics.

Wherever you get your podcast moves the power from the company hosting the content to the company indexing the content. These days that means a voice assistant that you use while driving. Any pretention otherwise is a tired case of technoutopianism.

Try saying "play breaking points podcast" to Google voice assistant. It worked a few times. Now it's broken beyond recognition

- goes to spotify, plays music

- "with Google podcast" plays an unrelated podcast called "breaking point" (singular)

- add "with Krystal and Saagar", plays an old episode of Joe Rogan

I have to pull over, find it manually and play.

Somewhat tangential - is there any good OSS podcatchers out there?

Dave Winer[0] would probably be so pleased to see this discussion.

Winer has been given "credit for the invention of the podcasting model."

Winer's advocacy of web syndication in general and RSS 2.0 in particular convinced many news organizations to syndicate their news content in that format.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Winer