“Wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement

https://www.anildash.com//2024/02/06/wherever-you-get-podcasts/

by Tomte • 2 years ago

507 312 2 years ago

jamesear• 2 years ago

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.

postepowanieadm• 2 years ago

Monetization is a problem, centralization is a flawed solution.

dylan604• 2 years ago

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

paulgb4• 2 years ago

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.

mooreds4• 2 years ago

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.

jcutrell• 2 years ago

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.

cruffle_duffle3• 2 years ago

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.

colinsane11• 2 years ago

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)?

api3• 2 years ago

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

progbits• 2 years ago

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.

api3• 2 years ago

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.

LegitShady• 2 years ago

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.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF4• 2 years ago

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?

FroshKiller2• 2 years ago

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.

Solvency• 2 years ago

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?

ricardobeat2• 2 years ago

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?

Kye8• 2 years ago

AFAIK most podcast platforms offer redirects.

kevincox• 2 years ago

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.

Kye8• 2 years ago

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.

epcoa• 2 years ago

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?

dist-epoch2• 2 years ago

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.

hiAndrewQuinn2• 2 years ago

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.

beeboobaa3• 2 years ago

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?

paulgb4• 2 years ago

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.

mock-possum• 2 years ago

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

charcircuit2• 2 years ago

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.

adriand• 2 years ago

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

Kye8• 2 years ago

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.

hattmall• 2 years ago

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

antihero• 2 years ago

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

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

black_puppydog2• 2 years ago

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.

eddieroger• 2 years ago

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.

oli-g• 2 years ago

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

amadeuspagel• 2 years ago

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.

pgorczak• 2 years ago

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.

mooreds4• 2 years ago

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

paulgb4• 2 years ago

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.

mtlynch• 2 years ago

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.

pas2• 2 years ago

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

nfriedly2• 2 years ago

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.

mooreds4• 2 years ago

... "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.

krallja• 2 years ago

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.

GavinAnderegg• 2 years ago

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.

mooreds4• 2 years ago

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.

ottomatias• 2 years ago

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.

carlosjobim• 2 years ago

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.

krisoft• 2 years ago

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?

PopAlongKid3• 2 years ago

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.

cqqxo4zV46cp• 2 years ago

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.

Paul_S• 2 years ago

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

ilikehurdles• 2 years ago

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

sphars2• 2 years ago

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.

iudqnolq• 2 years ago

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

everly• 2 years ago

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"

hoppyhoppy2• 2 years ago

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

snickerbockers• 2 years ago

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.

huijzer• 2 years ago

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.

tempest_2• 2 years ago

Who is "manually managing mp3" files?

My software reads RSS feeds and downloads the podcasts.

I never see a file on my phone.

anonymous_sorry4• 2 years ago

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.

vulcan01• 2 years ago

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.

rchaud3• 2 years ago

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

duxup2• 2 years ago

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?

sphars2• 2 years ago

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

arrowsmith• 2 years ago

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.

bemusedthrow754• 2 years ago

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

adamddev1• 2 years ago

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.

Kye8• 2 years ago

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/

anildash• 2 years ago

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.

duxup2• 2 years ago

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".

rideontime• 2 years ago

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

marcosdumay• 2 years ago

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.

basil-rash2• 2 years ago

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.

zubairq• 2 years ago

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

pavel_lishin• 2 years ago

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

basil-rash2• 2 years ago

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.

jwmoz• 2 years ago

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

WesleyLivesay4• 2 years ago

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.

packetlost• 2 years ago

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.

BoxOfRain• 2 years ago

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'.

ToucanLoucan• 2 years ago

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.

boxed• 2 years ago

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

selectodude• 2 years ago

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

neurotixz• 2 years ago

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...

WesleyLivesay4• 2 years ago

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.

lxgr5• 2 years ago

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.

caoilte2• 2 years ago

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.

OwlsParlay• 2 years ago

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.

nurbl• 2 years ago

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.

jijijijij• 2 years ago

I see hope in the Patreon model.

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.

maxldn• 2 years ago

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]

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w13xttx2/episodes/downloads [2]: https://podcasts.files.bbci.co.uk/w13xttx2.rss

anderber• 2 years ago

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.

hedora5• 2 years ago

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

maxglute3• 2 years ago

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.

tyen_• 2 years ago

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/

tcpip• 2 years ago

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

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

flybrand• 2 years ago

#itm

eropple3• 2 years ago

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.

rchaud3• 2 years ago

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.

hedora5• 2 years ago

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).

Spivak• 2 years ago

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?

teekert3• 2 years ago

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…

PopAlongKid3• 2 years ago

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

tantalor• 2 years ago

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

philwelch5• 2 years ago

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.

Symmetry• 2 years ago

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.

dpedu4• 2 years ago

Podcasts predate the iPod by a couple months.

teeray• 2 years ago

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.

grumbel• 2 years ago

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.

adregan• 2 years ago

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/

cruffle_duffle3• 2 years ago

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.

philwelch5• 2 years ago

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?

max51• 2 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.

troupe2• 2 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.

Tagbert• 2 years ago

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.

dhosek• 2 years ago

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.

chedabob• 2 years ago

Ye Firefox had a reasonable viewer too.

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

troupe2• 2 years ago

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.

__MatrixMan__2• 2 years ago

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.

Macha3• 2 years ago

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

ttepasse2• 2 years ago

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.

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.

cush• 2 years ago

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

Miraltar• 2 years ago

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.

Macha3• 2 years ago

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.

kemayo3• 2 years ago

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.)

rchaud3• 2 years ago

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.

internet_hugs• 2 years ago

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.

kemayo3• 2 years ago

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.

jmopp• 2 years ago

I did wonder why the podcasts I listened to on Spotify had ads in them which were clearly targeted to my region.

anonymous_sorry4• 2 years ago

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).

kemayo3• 2 years ago

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.)

tcmart14• 2 years ago

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.

boring_twenties• 2 years ago

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

madeofpalk4• 2 years ago

Do listeners on Android, or even a third-party apps on iOS, use Apple's podcasts directory for search and discoverability?

Yes, many third party apps use Apple's podcast directory. Probably many on Android.

The other option is https://podcastindex.org/

tootie• 2 years ago

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.

hedora5• 2 years ago

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).

swozey• 2 years ago

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

TillE• 2 years ago

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

bombcar3• 2 years ago

Since Overcast is a one-person company that can’t possibly review and monitor all known podcasts for spam, adult content, hate speech, and other problematic, controversial, or illegal material, Overcast uses the human-reviewed Apple Podcasts directory as its filter for what should be included in search results and recommendations.

There's basically why. You can manually add RSS feeds to various podcast apps, but Apple just slurps up those same feeds unless not submitted for some reason.

baryphonic• 2 years ago

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...

FireBeyond3• 2 years ago

When the iPhone launched, Jobs and the execs at Apple envisioned that web apps would be the way the iPhone functionality could be extended.

Doesn't pass the sniff test, because

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

Apple's vision of web apps was as second class citizens to Apple apps. The outcry was because those web apps, despite caching and saving and other things could not and would not ever be able to do what an Apple app could.

Sherlocking/f.luxing/Dark Skying (maybe less so, the last) is bad enough as it is, but far worse when those as web apps could never do what an Apple app could (f.lux is a perfect example, there was, and I could never imagine a world where Apple would allow a web app to control color temperature on their phone).

MostlyStable• 2 years ago

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.

nfriedly2• 2 years ago

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/

agloe_dreams• 2 years ago

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.

Hamuko• 2 years ago

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.

hinkley3• 2 years ago

And iPhones and iPods were selling Macbooks. Pretty good loss leader really.

ttepasse2• 2 years ago

iTunes/iPod for a time was advertised with the slogan "Rip. Mix. Burn."

PaulHoule• 2 years ago

I always thought the use of the term "podcast" for podcasts was just another selfish meme.

I listen to podcasts all the time but: (1) never on an iPod or other portable listening device, (2) never find them on RSS feeds. I guess I could (YOShInOn looks at 3000 articles a day on my behalf, some of them are podcasts, I don't really have the right UI for queuing podcasts so I think about putting in a rule or some models for filtering them out) but I don't. In fact I was consuming and mastering "podcasts" before the iPod even existed and before there was RSS. It might well be that the median user has never "used as directed"

It's one of those cases where Apple makes up a word and it is like the way the priest transforms the bread and wine at Catholic Mass.

paulcole• 2 years ago

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.

sailfast• 2 years ago

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.

dpedu4• 2 years ago

The entire podcast ecosystem rests upon the shoulders of Apple's podcast directory

I find this surprising whenever I hear it. Ditto for spotify. I don't listen to a single podcast via either of these services. Some of the shows I listen to might publish on them too, but I'm subscribed elsewhere.

Most of the shows on spotify seem like the audio equivalent of shovelware anyways.

watson• 2 years ago

You most likely just don’t realize that your podcast app of choice actually gets its list of podcasts from Apple. That’s the authors point of Apple hosting it for free for everyone.

colinsane11• 2 years ago

i think it's a historical argument. i.e. from when the "pod" in podcast meant "iPod".

alberth• 2 years ago

The entire podcast ecosystem rests upon the shoulders of Apple's podcast directory

Check out:

https://www.listennotes.com

Listen Notes is an indie run service by a single person.

Not only does it host its own podcast directory, it has advanced search and many other nice capabilities.

The blog also talk about its tech stack.

https://www.listennotes.com/blog/how-i-accidentally-built-a-...

And you can even buy their Podcast Database

https://www.listennotes.com/podcast-datasets/solutions/

jayknight• 2 years ago

This is great and does a thing I've wished existed for a long time: The ability to build an rss feed by picking individual episodes from existing podcasts.

CharlesW• 2 years ago

And you can even buy their Podcast Database

Or you can get one with 4M podcasts for free: https://podcastindex.org/

Axien• 2 years ago

Apple was late to the game. In fact they tried to change the name away from podcast (in reference to the iPod). The TWiT team started calling them NetCast to appease Apple. In the end, Apple embraced the technology and dropped the name complaint.

By then the RSS feed tech was already well established along with a few podcast software aggregators.

Apple did not invent or even have a choice.

m463• 2 years ago

I think it was outside their ecosystem, and they let it happen probably in the same way they let HTML websites happen with modification (accept apple pay? install the app?) but not a lot.

apple's podcast directory is NOT required to listen to a podcast.

that said, most folks submit their RSS feeds to apple (and google play, etc)

gavinhoward3• 2 years ago

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

WesleyLivesay4• 2 years ago

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.

gavinhoward3• 2 years ago

Excellent, thank you!

donio• 2 years ago

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

gavinhoward3• 2 years ago

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

JohnFen4• 2 years ago

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.

getoffmyyawn2• 2 years ago

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.

JohnFen4• 2 years ago

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.

colinsane11• 2 years ago

every youtube channel has a RSS feed though. see it with: `curl --silent 'https://www.youtube.com/@Channel5YouTube' | grep -o 'href="https://www.youtube.com/feeds/[^"]*"'`

your podcast app should be able to subscribe to a Youtube channel. Youtube links that feed as a recognizable `<link rel=...>` tag, so even if your app doesn't index Youtube you should be able to just paste that 'youtube.com/@MyChannelName` URL into it and it'll figure out the actual feed URL from that.

lxgr5• 2 years ago

That's really what it is to me too, and I'd consider myself pretty technical: A podcast is what I can listen to in the gym or on my bike without missing anything important on the video.

The only difference to an audiobook is that Podcasts are usually free and often (but not always) in serial format, but these boundaries are blurring more and more.

That said, I do definitely prefer open RSS distribution than something like "Youtube for Audio", and I'm glad there isn't any such thing (yet), but I wouldn't not call a podcast exclusive to Spotify, Apple etc. "not a podcast", just an annoyingly-distributed podcast.

adsharma• 2 years ago

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.

hardwaresofton• 2 years ago

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

RajT882• 2 years ago

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

colinsane11• 2 years ago

gPodder's still alive and kicking. 'course, it's the type of old-school open source app for which the features which appeal to its existing userbase, like "uses your system's default media player instead of a builtin one", are likely to be viewed as anti-features by newcomers.

but yeah, gnome and kde both have their official podcatchers ("Podcasts" and "Kasts" respectively), and there's a bazillion floating around on Github; i'm sure some of them are distributed to fdroid or wherever. if you don't care about syncing between devices, getting notifications for new episodes, etc, and aren't opinionated about the UI, anything you find with a non-zero install base should do the job. otherwise you just gotta try em out and decide for yourself.

hombre_fatal• 2 years ago

On the other hand, "Wherever you get your podcasts" could already exist because there are "podcatcher" clients, not inherently due to centralization away from RSS. It exists even if all podcasts use RSS and all podcast clients are open source and only consume RSS.

As soon as podcatchers offer the UX of being able to search for podcasts in the application instead of hunting down and pasting RSS URLs, then it makes sense to say "Wherever you get your podcasts" which means "Just search for our title in your favorite podcast app" which is what 99% of people want to do including myself rather than manage URLs.

It's basically the same as how, in the hey day of RSS, websites would show a bunch of RSS client icons to indicate "Yes, consume our feed in any of these popular RSS apps".

(That said, the centralization of podcasting and the death trend of RSS are worth talking about.)

vonjuice• 2 years ago

am I the only one who just hates this phrase? It feels like everyone is contractually obligated to say it but I can't imagine that's actually the case, and it just became a meme (in the Dawkins sense of the word) that people spread voluntarily

FigurativeVoid• 2 years ago

This is the thing that irritates me most about the new NYT audio app.

Like no. I will not go to some application with ads I cannot skip.

maxglute3• 2 years ago

Maybe I'm not appreciating how big podcast has gotten, but audio size feels like something that could work unders distributed file sharing system. Everyone allocates a few gigs of storage to redunantly archive, which I find is the number1 killer of podcasts, lots of interesting small projects that die from link rot even if you can find them on listing.

ericra• 2 years ago

I have the same feeling as the author about podcasts, and i'm particularly interested in the podcast ad model. While i despise exposure to advertising, I find myself not minding podcast adverts quite as much. There is also a much greater chance that the podcaster will only accept ads that their audience would be plausibly interested in and that are not outright scams (contrasting greatly with big tech-controlled ads). On top of this, you can still simply just skip the ads if you want by fast-forwarding.

I think that the key to this model working is that the podcasters are not (necessarily) reliant on big tech. On twitch and youtube streams for instance, algorithmic ads are used mainly to reimburse amazon/google for their hosting services (+ a significant profit). Since a podcast is small in size and does not need to be streamed on-demand, hosting costs are negligible. It seems like this model could also be effective for websites, but it requires an actual human to find and vet advertisers. I'm not sure what the solution could be for sites like youtube where self-hosting content is a much higher barrier to most content creators.

teekert3• 2 years ago

I listen to many Linux podcasts, have been for 20 years, they continue to be very useful for my career. I even met some people from the associated Matrix channels at FOSDEM. I pay for an ad-free subscription and stream sats and boost in (podcasting 2.0 features) from time to time.

Podcasting has a special place in my heart.

cassidoo• 2 years ago

I wrote a somewhat related blog post a bit back: https://blog.cassidoo.co/post/open-standards-are-good/

1905• 2 years ago

I wish podcasting was a simple open source RSS reader that alerted me when someone uploaded a new MP3 file

lazzlazzlazz• 2 years ago

If you find this idea compelling, and want to really understand why it's so radical, the best modern treatment is Chris Dixon's book Read Write Own[1] which became a "best seller" today. I strongly recommend the book — it's at exactly the right level for many on Hacker News.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Read-Write-Own-Building-Internet/dp/B...

“Wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement

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