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!
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 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).
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.
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]
Thanks for article - possibly it's 'retcon nonsense' but the explanation of 'pod' preceding 'iPod' was told to me in the very early days of iPods so if it was made up then it was made up nearly 20 years ago.
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.
This is genuinely wild to me, I've been listening to audio content on the web since since early 00s I can't recall if it predates ipod (01) or not. There must have been another term prior?
There was earlier downloadable audio content but it was really early 2000s with RSS/Winer/Curry/etc. when 1st gen podcasting got its name and really took on something like it's current form. You can identify various other points like Serial/money flowing in/cellular connections/etc.
As locked down as the devices are, they have always, and continue to support RSS feeds from outside apple’s walled garden.
It’s like it came from some bizarro universe where only apple allows side-loading of content, but Spotify and YouTube do not (so they can take a chunk of your revenue, and censor/shut out competitors).
> 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.
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.
Basic video is good enough for a lot of purposes. But with minimal gear and software, I can clean up most speakers with very little work in audio (and there are better AI cleansing tools these days as well). For a given quality level, the bar is much lower for audio only.
This really isn't true. Mixing/mastering if you want to target:
* in ear devices
* vehicle audio systems
* phone speakers
* laptops
* mid-range home stereo systems
* high end home stereo/studio monitoring
is quite complex to get right, and generally you can't optimize for more than one at a time. That's even more so if you actually buy into the "immersive audio" hype, where playback is not even stereo anymore.
Audio can certainly get complex. But per the upthread query I'd argue that it's still easier to get understandable audio in an interview in a quiet location than it is to shoot video, especially outside of a studio setting.
and yet ... if the video quality is sub-par people care <--- this much --->, whereas if the audio is sub-par people care <----------- this much ------------->
Arn’t video podcast still a thing? I mean I don’t watch any myself, but the technology has been there for at least a decade. If people aren’t using it, it’s probably more of a user experience or discoverability or other issue.
critically, even Substack still exposes their RSS feeds publicly. view it as a two-sided marketplace: Substack would need to control both a majority of feed sources and a majority of feed consumption (i.e. the install base of feed readers) to escape RSS. ditto with the podcasting space.
or at least, so is the theory. but i see that most of the shows i listen to aren't available when i search them in Spotify. so i'm not sure how Spotify users interact with podcasts: do they use multiple podcast apps? does Spotify win only those users who previously weren't listening to podcasts (and so don't lose access to anything they valued when moving to Spotify for podcasts)?
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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?
The fact is that I don't think it is well specified.
My feed reader will update the URL if the ending feed has a self URL that points at itself. But I don't think that is very common. In theory a permanent redirect should also be a signal to update the URL.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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?
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.
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.)
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.
Apologies, I’m probably missing some nuance but I don’t see anything in your reply that is meaningfully different from the comment above. The existence of major platforms does not necessarily challenge the notion that podcasting is open by design. The advent of exclusivity deals seems to confirm the standing assumption that podcasters are in control of distribution.
I wouldn’t disagree that podcasters are in control of distribution; that’s not actually exclusive with the distribution being centralized. The point I was making about the exclusivity deals is just that these platforms have started to try -- and likely will continue to try -- to entice some of the more popular productions into such deals, which would necessarily increase centralization if they go through.
It’s a cynical perspective so maybe best kept to myself but I see all the right pieces for a UX bait-and-switch. I suspect the parent commenter (to whom you asked the initial question) sees the same thing. I think it’s seemingly intentionally misleading to call this decentralized; like “that’s what they want you to think” as a paranoid way of putting it. Regardless of any motives, it seems to serve certain interests that this is seen as decentralized, and I don’t think they’re the interests of podcast fans. Food for thought, I guess.
Yeah that’s a fair point. The protocol may be open but much of the discovery/hosting is siloed in maybe 2-3 services. It doesn’t take much imagination to see where that could lead.
Idiotic if you ask me. He’s just like any dimwitted everyman: every single pub in the UK has at least two Joe Rogans. I was sat with my back to one in a coffee shop the other day.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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 think your point is that RSS used to be a norm on the consumption side, and is no longer; and GP's point is that it still is a norm on the publishing side, such that for the users who care -- like yourself -- the practical difference is not that large.
beeboobaa is saying basically the opposite: that they have RSS detection enabled, but many fewer sites/publishers have RSS or have the autodiscovery tag for it, and they're saying that's an understandable effect of the browsers no longer supporting it.
maybe it's a matter of degree then. enough publishers still support RSS that i can still use it exclusively and not miss much. maybe my reader is doing more magic to find the feeds than it used to?
there's the weird email newsletter format (say, Matt Levine's column) which completely ignores RSS, but that's probably tangential to the argument. the biggest offenders i see are less $BIGCO and more individual developers who roll their own blog and overlook RSS. but in that latter camp, every off-the-shelf publishing system or static site generator gets RSS support by the time i'm liable to encounter it in the wild, whether the operator knows it's there or not.
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.
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.
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.
Amazon still does, there's Bandcamp, and you still see individual bands and some labels just selling downloads directly. I don't know of anybody who's selling anything DRM-encumbered for download.
Google was still selling MP3s not that long ago but they no longer do since they killed Google Play Music. Amazon also sometimes really nudges you to their subscription and you have to do some clicking around to find a way to buy instead.
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.
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)
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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
... "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 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.
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'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.
> 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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
"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.
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.
Thanks for mentioning this, the reason was.... I was messing around with my site. Hah! But should be okay now, apologies for tinkering while not knowing everyone was going to come by to visit.
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'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.
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.
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.
> 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'.
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?"
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...
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.
They really do need to do that in order for Podcasts to be supported on very old devices (that only support Spotify's APIs and DRM-ed Vorbis files), which I appreciate as a user of such an old device myself.
That said, they allow distributors to opt into "Passthrough" MP3 delivery to all modern devices (including browsers – just check the network tab in developer tools!), although it's not the default.
You can apparently opt into something called "Passthrough" that makes (most) Spotify clients download MP3s directly from your CDN, but it's not the default and has certain requirements on your format and uptime.
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 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.
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.
Though, podcasters on Patreon are getting high on their own supply, asking for way, waaaay too much. "Just" 5 bucks a month? For one show??? Completely out of touch. Come back when it's ad-free @ 50c, or less.
I'm trying to understand what you mean by this. Their podcasts still show up in e.g. Apple Podcasts and Pocketcasts. If you look at the 'podcasts' page for e.g. '13 Minutes to the Moon'[1] (which I hadn't realized there was a third season of), there is a (small) link to the rss[2]
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.
As an RSS fan, I don't think this is a bad development. Too many podcasts are hosted on personal servers that disappear without a trace. Google is no archival saint but producers tend not to wipe their channel vs forget to pay hosting fees.
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.
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?
I don’t understand how you can be so fundamentally against crypto. Even when btc lightning solves most reasons why you probably hate it (ok perhaps not the hodl thing).
I really enjoy Podverse and real time transcripts and live shows and chapters, etc…
> I don’t understand how you can be so fundamentally against crypto.
There are a lot of different reasons people can be fundamentally against crypto, and those reasons have been talked about in great depth over the last few years. Even if you don't agree with them, the various "anti" positions aren't that difficult to understand.
Sure, if the crypto scene is something that you don't have a problem with, then it's something you don't have a problem with. Different people have different stances about this.
Lightning is nice but it's an unrelated project. Bitcoin itself is still fundamentally flawed and Lightning is basically syntactic sugar on the same decaying infrastructure. It "solves" the same problems Bitcoin did with a loosely agnostic framework around ... the exact same blockchain. It's the equivalent of getting a second-try on a test you failed just to write the same answer down.
And Lighting is one of the good ones. Other L2 chains range from "marginally exploitative" to "broken" to "outright literal scam" depending on the developer.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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?
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.
I don’t think Firefox continuing to support RSS would have made a difference. It makes sense for Mozilla to prioritize features that users actually want over trying to maintain some idealistic vision that was already dead.
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.
Last time I looked at RSS the transfer was bound to happen over HTTP. RSS is more like a web alternative. You can link from RSS to web pages, sure, but you can also link to web pages from Word documents. Perhaps browsers should all natively support .docx too?
Although you ultimately raise a good point. Most browsers do support PDF. That's the wide attempt to be something other than a web browser that I was forgetting about earlier. So, there you go, there is precedence.
Although there is still that pesky problem of most people not wanting to use RSS. Apple had good in-browser support for RSS there for a while but they found nobody used it. If Apple can't convince Average Joe to use something, it isn't likely anyone can. RSS has remained relevant for podcasts only because it has found a place in server-to-server syndication. Average Joe isn't visiting Harmony Harold's personal website to subscribe to his podcast either.
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.
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.
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.
The Indieweb called "sidefiles" an antipattern, mostly because a strong allergy to DRY. I find it a little bit overblown and sometimes suspect it is a result of Tantek Çelik’s CMS.
And more formal side you could use RFDa/Microdata and the schema.org vocabulary to annotate the HTML with the logical properties of a feed and podcast episodes:
Of course there aren’t any podcatchers with understand these vocabularies.
...
I’m a little bit torn. I love good minimal markup and have a soft spot for the idea of RDFa. An early 2000s idealist. But the real world is different.
Netscape’s original RSS came out of a clear need: the markup for table layout of the late 90s was shit and not generally parsable. Which is the same thing today: Today’s markup a wastelands of nested divs which are not generally parsable and often generated by tools nobody really has control over. Just today I had to wade through a Wordpress site builder plugin and its crappy visually generated HTML. That’s the majority of the web, sadly.
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.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 270 ms ] threadBut 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.
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
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.
> 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 like it came from some bizarro universe where only apple allows side-loading of content, but Spotify and YouTube do not (so they can take a chunk of your revenue, and censor/shut out competitors).
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.
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.
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.
or at least, so is the theory. but i see that most of the shows i listen to aren't available when i search them in Spotify. so i'm not sure how Spotify users interact with podcasts: do they use multiple podcast apps? does Spotify win only those users who previously weren't listening to podcasts (and so don't lose access to anything they valued when moving to Spotify for podcasts)?
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.
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.
> 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?
In other words, is any 1+ set of media files on RSS a podcast?
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.
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?
It’s just companies being nice, because the incentives to not be nice haven’t showed up yet.
My feed reader will update the URL if the ending feed has a self URL that points at itself. But I don't think that is very common. In theory a permanent redirect should also be a signal to update the URL.
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.
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 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.
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.
But thanks for posting this! Occasionally, I can't find a particular podcast on my preferred site.
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).
Top Podcast Hosting Companies by Episode Share: https://livewire.io/podcast-hosts-by-episode-share/
Top Podcast CDNs by Episode Share: https://livewire.io/podcast-cdns-by-episode-share/
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.
(Spotify is trying to break the openness of podcasting but they mostly haven’t managed to do so, yet.)
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.
I wouldn’t disagree that podcasters are in control of distribution; that’s not actually exclusive with the distribution being centralized. The point I was making about the exclusivity deals is just that these platforms have started to try -- and likely will continue to try -- to entice some of the more popular productions into such deals, which would necessarily increase centralization if they go through.
It’s a cynical perspective so maybe best kept to myself but I see all the right pieces for a UX bait-and-switch. I suspect the parent commenter (to whom you asked the initial question) sees the same thing. I think it’s seemingly intentionally misleading to call this decentralized; like “that’s what they want you to think” as a paranoid way of putting it. Regardless of any motives, it seems to serve certain interests that this is seen as decentralized, and I don’t think they’re the interests of podcast fans. Food for thought, I guess.
Spotify signs new deal with Joe Rogan reportedly worth up to $250m
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/feb/02/spotify-j...
Sounds like they got a deal.
Idiotic if you ask me. He’s just like any dimwitted everyman: every single pub in the UK has at least two Joe Rogans. I was sat with my back to one in a coffee shop the other day.
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.
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.
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?
there's the weird email newsletter format (say, Matt Levine's column) which completely ignores RSS, but that's probably tangential to the argument. the biggest offenders i see are less $BIGCO and more individual developers who roll their own blog and overlook RSS. but in that latter camp, every off-the-shelf publishing system or static site generator gets RSS support by the time i'm liable to encounter it in the wild, whether the operator knows it's there or not.
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.
You can play it using a web browser app by going to TikTok's website.
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.
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.
It's akin to saying "wherever you get your music".
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.
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.
Google was still selling MP3s not that long ago but they no longer do since they killed Google Play Music. Amazon also sometimes really nudges you to their subscription and you have to do some clicking around to find a way to buy instead.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
But yeah, I'm fine with using the skip x seconds in my podcast app as well for now.
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.
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
On the page, the post title is "'Wherever you get your podcasts' is a radical statement"
My software reads RSS feeds and downloads the podcasts.
I never see a file on my phone.
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.
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.
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.
What situations are you encountering this?
"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.
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/
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'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 do wonder why a static site like this couldn’t just be put somewhere always-on, like github pages.
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.
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.
Sounds right on the nail head to me.
Roman empire, Pax Americana, Apple Podcast Directory. Birds of a feather :P
So the break is already happening in this world...
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.
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.
That said, they allow distributors to opt into "Passthrough" MP3 delivery to all modern devices (including browsers – just check the network tab in developer tools!), although it's not the default.
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.
Though, podcasters on Patreon are getting high on their own supply, asking for way, waaaay too much. "Just" 5 bucks a month? For one show??? Completely out of touch. Come back when it's ad-free @ 50c, or less.
[1]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w13xttx2/episodes/downloads [2]: https://podcasts.files.bbci.co.uk/w13xttx2.rss
https://podcastindex.org/ https://blubrry.com/support/podcasting-2-0-introduction/
https://soundcloud.com/user-773474262-525813292/the-history-...
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.
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).
I really enjoy Podverse and real time transcripts and live shows and chapters, etc…
There are a lot of different reasons people can be fundamentally against crypto, and those reasons have been talked about in great depth over the last few years. Even if you don't agree with them, the various "anti" positions aren't that difficult to understand.
Lightning is nice but it's an unrelated project. Bitcoin itself is still fundamentally flawed and Lightning is basically syntactic sugar on the same decaying infrastructure. It "solves" the same problems Bitcoin did with a loosely agnostic framework around ... the exact same blockchain. It's the equivalent of getting a second-try on a test you failed just to write the same answer down.
And Lighting is one of the good ones. Other L2 chains range from "marginally exploitative" to "broken" to "outright literal scam" depending on the developer.
It "solves" that it is a predatory minefield of grifters, jangling keys of hope in front of people with little to lose?
Since when?
>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
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.
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.
And boy does this bring back the memories of XSLT. I’m kinda glad I forgot about that abomination.
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?
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.
Didn’t JZW once famously say all software grows until it eventually has an email client?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Sunbird
for blogging, RSS is a mechanism to transfer webpages. so shouldn't this apply?
Although you ultimately raise a good point. Most browsers do support PDF. That's the wide attempt to be something other than a web browser that I was forgetting about earlier. So, there you go, there is precedence.
Although there is still that pesky problem of most people not wanting to use RSS. Apple had good in-browser support for RSS there for a while but they found nobody used it. If Apple can't convince Average Joe to use something, it isn't likely anyone can. RSS has remained relevant for podcasts only because it has found a place in server-to-server syndication. Average Joe isn't visiting Harmony Harold's personal website to subscribe to his podcast either.
https://evertpot.com/firefox-rss/
https://indieweb.org/sidefile-antipattern
But of course there were ideas to embed the feed data structure directly in HTML as attributes.
In the indieweb/microformats corner there is h-feed which could simply be extended with rel=enclosure links for an embedded podcast feed.
https://indieweb.org/h-feed
And more formal side you could use RFDa/Microdata and the schema.org vocabulary to annotate the HTML with the logical properties of a feed and podcast episodes:
https://schema.org/PodcastEpisode
Of course there aren’t any podcatchers with understand these vocabularies.
...
I’m a little bit torn. I love good minimal markup and have a soft spot for the idea of RDFa. An early 2000s idealist. But the real world is different.
Netscape’s original RSS came out of a clear need: the markup for table layout of the late 90s was shit and not generally parsable. Which is the same thing today: Today’s markup a wastelands of nested divs which are not generally parsable and often generated by tools nobody really has control over. Just today I had to wade through a Wordpress site builder plugin and its crappy visually generated HTML. That’s the majority of the web, sadly.