[HN Gopher] "Wherever you get your podcasts" is a radical statement
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"Wherever you get your podcasts" is a radical statement
Author : Tomte
Score : 443 points
Date : 2024-02-07 11:19 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.anildash.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.anildash.com)
| jamesear wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Monetization is a problem, centralization is a flawed solution.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > 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
| paulgb wrote:
| 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.
| zokier wrote:
| 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!
| macNchz wrote:
| 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.
| PopAlongKid wrote:
| 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).
| paulgb wrote:
| 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.
| AdamN wrote:
| 'pod' comes from Play on Demand and pre-dates the iPod
| (iPod being an apple branded Play on Demand device).
| DamnInteresting wrote:
| If I'm not mistaken, 'play on demand' in this context is
| a backronym[1]. The iPod name is apparently a reference
| to _2001: A Space Odyssey_ :
|
| > _The name came from a freelance copyrighter who, after
| seeing the prototype, thought of the movie 2001: A Space
| Odyssey and the phrase "Open the pod bay door, Hal!"_[2]
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backronym
|
| 2: https://www.pcmag.com/news/a-visual-history-of-apple-
| ipods
| zokier wrote:
| https://daringfireball.net/linked/2022/03/03/the-pod-in-
| podc...
| dublinben wrote:
| 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.
| maxglute wrote:
| 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?
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| mooreds wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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_duffle wrote:
| 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.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| You're suggesting that in 2024, I can't just throw up an
| mp4 or webm and "be done", in the same sense that an mp3
| covers "be done" for audio?
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| and yet ... if the video quality is sub-par people care
| <--- this much --->, whereas if the audio is sub-par
| people care <----------- this much ------------->
| OkGoDoIt wrote:
| 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.
| colinsane wrote:
| 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)?
| api wrote:
| This openness and simplicity is a major reason podcasts are such
| a great medium. They haven't been "platformified" and ruined.
| progbits wrote:
| 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.
| api wrote:
| 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.
| dumbfounder wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| api wrote:
| Patreon doesn't own the app and/or OS the way Spotify and
| Apple do, so there is less immediate risk of them
| capturing podcasts.
| LegitShady wrote:
| 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.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > 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?
| FroshKiller wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| FroshKiller wrote:
| 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.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| 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?
| Kye wrote:
| AFAIK most podcast platforms offer redirects.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| That does not represent a _"triumph of [...] tech that 's
| not owned by any one company, that can't be controlled by
| any one company"_ though.
|
| It's just companies being nice, because the incentives to
| not be nice haven't showed up yet.
| kevincox wrote:
| 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.
| Kye wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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?
| madeofpalk wrote:
| 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.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| 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.
| dabber wrote:
| https://podcastindex.org/ is a great.
| RajT88 wrote:
| I use https://podcastaddict.com/
|
| But thanks for posting this! Occasionally, I can't find a
| particular podcast on my preferred site.
| dabber wrote:
| So do I! Podcast Index is one of the built-in indexes in
| the Podcast Addict app's search feature; that's how I
| discovered it!
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| 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.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > It's not content distribution.
|
| Yeah, this is what I thought. RSS will give a URL to a
| sound file, which is hosted by someone, somewhere. It
| doesn't sound like there's anything inherent to podcasts --
| not even RSS even though it's so ubiquitous -- which
| prevents the content distribution to be more centralized.
|
| If a podcast recording is exclusively hosted by Spotify,
| that is where _everyone_ gets that podcast; even if they
| got the URL for it elsewhere. It's a bit like saying I get
| my articles from HN (disregarding that I don't use RSS for
| it).
| dist-epoch wrote:
| 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.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Which is why "Wherever you get your podcasts" is a radical
| statement.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| 99% of people read that as "Whichever you prefer from
| Spotify/YouTube/Apple"
| skywhopper wrote:
| 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.)
| jdauriemma wrote:
| Could you elaborate a bit further? I don't see why this is
| necessarily true.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| 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.
| jdauriemma wrote:
| 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.
| sva_ wrote:
| JRE used to be distributed on his personal website before
| Spotify. And it seems like they're now going back to
| hosting it on several platforms.
| bemusedthrow75 wrote:
| Because the deal will end (at the end of this year) and
| presumably they correctly sense it won't be renewed.
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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.
| Kye wrote:
| 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.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| 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.
| bemusedthrow75 wrote:
| > 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.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| 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.
| zrail wrote:
| 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.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| Yeah! This is exactly what I was looking for, thank you!
| beeboobaa wrote:
| > 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?
| Kye wrote:
| The RSS header is often still present. It's browsers that
| stopped supporting it.
| beeboobaa wrote:
| 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.
| Kye wrote:
| Right. Browsers stopped supporting it. Defaults matter.
| You can add a plugin for any obscure thing.
| beeboobaa wrote:
| 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.
| colinsane wrote:
| 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.
| zerocrates wrote:
| 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.
| colinsane wrote:
| 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.
| paulgb wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| charcircuit wrote:
| >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.
| input_sh wrote:
| Can you play a TikTok video on, say, Instagram Reels or
| YouTube Shorts?
|
| That's the point. Feature-wise, they're all nearly
| identical. With podcasts, you can just choose your client
| or even create your own with the same catalogue as any of
| the big players.
|
| With short-form videos, you can't.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Those apps embed a web view which allows those apps to
| load links to TikTok within the app.
| themoonisachees wrote:
| ...with all the privacy concerns that entails. The website
| is slightly better than the app but it's still a privacy
| nightmare
| adriand wrote:
| To put it simply, no one is able to say, "wherever you get your
| videos".
| Kye wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Sort of, if a user has the same handle and post to all the
| major sites it works like that.
| antihero wrote:
| Podcasts are just a type of media like music or TV.
|
| It's akin to saying "wherever you get your music".
| black_puppydog wrote:
| 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.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| 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.
| zerocrates wrote:
| 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.
| eddieroger wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| mooreds wrote:
| Didn't feed burner offer ads, way back when?
| paulgb wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > _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.
| pas wrote:
| maybe not the 'simplest', but I guess there's a wordpress/ghost
| plugin for this
| nfriedly wrote:
| > _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.
| mooreds wrote:
| ... "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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| mooreds wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > 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?
| PopAlongKid wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Hitting "+30s" for free in Apple Podcasts competes pretty well
| in my experience.
| sphars wrote:
| 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.
| WesleyLivesay wrote:
| 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.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39287610
| snickerbockers wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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_ wrote:
| Who is "manually managing mp3" files?
|
| My software reads RSS feeds and downloads the podcasts.
|
| I never see a file on my phone.
| pas wrote:
| 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.
| tempest_ wrote:
| 15 years ago I downloaded podcastaddict, it keeps my RSS
| feeds and updates them all every morning at 7am, or at
| the press of a button.
| anonymous_sorry wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| anonymous_sorry wrote:
| 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.
| caoilte wrote:
| 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.
| rchaud wrote:
| The distinction won't matter to end-users because they most
| of the distribution pipeline is hidden from them already.
| anonymous_sorry wrote:
| 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.
| duxup wrote:
| 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?
| sphars wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| bemusedthrow75 wrote:
| It's really absurd to automangle "radical statement" to
| "statement". That isn't stripping hyperbole, it is stripping
| semantics.
| adamddev1 wrote:
| 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.
| Kye wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| duxup wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 12 minutes later and it loaded fine for me. Whatever they're
| doing seems to be keeping the site from dying outright.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| 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-rash wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Isn't "Wherever you get your podcasts" really only possible
| because a podcast is only an audio file, with possible extras
| added?
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| A blog post is only a text file, with possible extras added.
| Nearly any piece of writing you see online is.
| basil-rash wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This is a phrase that consistently bugs me-everyone just copying
| one another and repeating it.
| WesleyLivesay wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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...
| WesleyLivesay wrote:
| 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.
| mostlysimilar wrote:
| All their posturing about Apple and open ecosystems is
| transparently hypocritical.
| thehappypm wrote:
| Security and performance come to mind.
|
| If they just served podcasts directly from third parties,
| third parties would be able at least in theory to push
| potentially malicious data to the Spotify app (and Spotify
| users' devices).
|
| As for performance, if the third party has an outage, then
| it would make Spotify look broken. And who knows if the
| third party site can serve the traffic well enough for a
| good experience.
| caoilte wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| hedora wrote:
| The last time I checked, you can see publisher revenue on
| patreon.
| OkGoDoIt wrote:
| Each publisher account can decide whether or not to show
| that.
| jijijijij wrote:
| > 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.
| anderber wrote:
| 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.
| hedora wrote:
| Apple Podcasts and Overcast (iOS) also support this. So does
| AntennaPod (Android).
| maxglute wrote:
| 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_ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Yes, and this was co-created by one of the "creators" of
| podcasting, Adam Curry -
|
| https://soundcloud.com/user-773474262-525813292/the-history-...
| flybrand wrote:
| #itm
| eropple wrote:
| 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.
| rchaud wrote:
| 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.
| hedora wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| teekert wrote:
| 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...
| JohnFen wrote:
| > 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.
| PopAlongKid wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Podcasts originated on iTunes. Because they were for your iPod.
| Which required iTunes. Why revise history?
| philwelch wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| dpedu wrote:
| Podcasts predate the iPod by a couple months.
| teeray wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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_duffle wrote:
| 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.
| philwelch wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| vel0city wrote:
| 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.
| philwelch wrote:
| That's mostly because tech companies have been trying to
| kill open protocols like RSS in order to lock people into
| their proprietary platforms.
| piperswe wrote:
| That doesn't answer why Firefox doesn't have RSS support
| anymore though (removed in 2018)
| troupe wrote:
| 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.
| randomdata wrote:
| 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.
| philwelch wrote:
| 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.
| randomdata wrote:
| And Usenet! That never caught on either, though. We've
| had more web browsers with RSS support than web browsers
| with email support.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| Didn't they also include calendaring at some point?
|
| Didn't JZW once famously say all software grows until it
| eventually has an email client?
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| You're thinking of Mozilla Sunbird.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Sunbird
| randomdata wrote:
| Netscape Communicator included a calendar at one point.
| Macha wrote:
| Opera was also a mail client and IRC client at one point.
| colinsane wrote:
| > 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.
|
| for blogging, RSS is a mechanism to transfer webpages. so
| shouldn't this apply?
| Tagbert wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Ye Firefox had a reasonable viewer too.
|
| https://evertpot.com/firefox-rss/
| troupe wrote:
| 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__ wrote:
| 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.
| Macha wrote:
| Despite the name, for over 95% of its existence, HTTP has
| served way more than just HTML
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I'm aware, but maybe that should change. It's not really
| suited for much if what it is used for.
| cush wrote:
| We have the same thing with music. What went wrong with
| television and movies?
| Miraltar wrote:
| 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.
| Macha wrote:
| 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.
| kemayo wrote:
| 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.)
| rchaud wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| kemayo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I did wonder why the podcasts I listened to on Spotify had
| ads in them which were clearly targeted to my region.
| anonymous_sorry wrote:
| 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).
| kemayo wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I use AntennaPod from F-Droid, and it has the following
| search options, in this order: Apple, fyyd, gpodder, Podcast
| Index.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| hedora wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| bombcar wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > 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...
| MostlyStable wrote:
| 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.
| nfriedly wrote:
| 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/
| bluish29 wrote:
| Also, there is a list for apps and services that supports
| The Podcast index [1].
|
| [1] https://podcastindex.org/apps
| agloe_dreams wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| moolcool wrote:
| The original iPhone didn't even launch with apps. A big
| part of the vision was that "apps" would be dynamic
| websites which you could create links to on your home
| screen. I think if the web tooling ecosystem was up to
| snuff at the time, we may not have an "App Store" as we
| know it today.
| bombcar wrote:
| Which is amusingly sad today, as so many "applications"
| on desktop and elsewhere are Electron which is ... a
| dynamic website.
| moolcool wrote:
| What's old is new again, for better or worse
| jasode wrote:
| _> Apps also sold iPhones. [...] And yet they're trying to
| squeeze app developers for all they're worth._
|
| It's because Apple was emboldened by the fact that the
| original June 2007 iPhone _exceeded sales expectations of
| 10 million units_ without any 3rd-party apps. The App Store
| didn 't exist until July 2008. In June 2007, consumers were
| getting in line to buy the so-called "Jesus phone" even
| though there were no 3rd-party apps ecosystem for it. (Look
| back at the hundreds waiting in line overnight to buy the
| first iPhone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iSE0bBgUsQ)
|
| So, Apple rationally concludes that _3rd-party developers
| need access to Apple 's customer base_ more than customers
| need access to outside developers. Back in 2008, the
| developers _en masse_ could have revolted and said _" fuck
| the Apple iOS SDK, fuck the App Store, and they can fuck
| off with their stupid rules and 30% fee"_ -- but they
| didn't.
|
| Instead, developers grumbled and complained while they were
| submitting apps to the App Store. Developers -- via their
| actions -- keep signaling to Apple that Apple has the
| leverage and not the developers.
|
| That's why you had 2008 articles and threads such as this:
|
| - This Is Why iPhone Developers Put Up With All the
| Bullshit From Apple (daringfireball.net)
|
| - 46 points by sant0sk1 on Sept 19, 2008 | hide | past |
| favorite | 23 comments
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=308975
| mhink wrote:
| One of the most surprising things (from a modern
| perspective) about reading that daringfireball article is
| that a game could be successful on the App Store at a $5
| price point ($7 in 2024 dollars).
| bombcar wrote:
| It still happens - most every app has gone to "free with
| in-app purchases", sadly.
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/stardew-valley/id1406710800
| $5
|
| Combined revenue over all platforms: $300m +
| mathgradthrow wrote:
| The reason for this is that Apple has managed to argue
| that its app store is not a monopoly. This is false (If
| developer accesss to apple and androids app stores were
| competing even the tiniest bit, then you should mainly
| see developers releasing apps on one platform and not the
| other).
|
| in essence, this means that in order for developers to
| achieve negotiating power parity, they would need to form
| a cartel, (an illegal anticompetitive practice they would
| not be able to defend). As a result, Apple's negotiating
| power advantage is a matter of law.
| hinkley wrote:
| And prior to the app store, app writers dealt with
| carriers who wanted 70% of revenue, not 30%. There was no
| money in phone apps prior to the App Store. I had left
| the mobile industry by then because I'd seen enough to
| know that mobile companies were just a funnel of VC money
| to goods and services for carriers who looked a hell of a
| lot like Ma Bell (employed some of the same people, in
| fact)
|
| While the iPhone was certainly interesting tech, that's
| not what made a bunch of devs learn Objective C. It was
| money.
|
| That Apple has only lowered their fees one, one and a
| half times in that period is how we end up with all the
| grumbling we have today. but at the time it was much much
| better than the status quo.
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _Apps also sold iPhones_
|
| This seems apocryphal. Apple famously resisted apps and was
| dragged kicking in and screaming into supporting native
| applications.
| hinkley wrote:
| And iPhones and iPods were selling Macbooks. Pretty good loss
| leader really.
| paulcole wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| dpedu wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| colinsane wrote:
| my feeds seem to all be: `<title>.libsyn.com/...`,
| `anchor.fm/.../rss`, `feeds.feedburner.com/<title>`,
| `feeds.megaphone.fm/<title>`,
| `feeds.simplecast.com/<title>`, `omny.fm/show/<title>`,
| `rss.acast.com/<title>`, `rss.art19.com/<title>`, and then
| a bunch of `<showname>.com/rss` for shows which host their
| own website and link a feed from there.
|
| i recognize art19 as an amazon thing, and megaphone as a
| Spotify thing (or a thing which Spotify acquired?). i have
| no idea what any of the others are associated with. is one
| of those websites run by Apple?
| Kwpolska wrote:
| The Apple thing is the podcast directory:
| https://podcasts.apple.com/us/genre/podcasts/id26
|
| Most (all?) feeds in there are not hosted by Apple. Many
| non-Apple podcast apps use this to power search and
| discovery features.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| The feeds - the actual rss files - are not hosted by
| Apple. But the index of those feeds (the podcast search
| engine essentially - how podcast apps turn 'Three Dudes
| Talking' into a libsyn feed url - is hosted by Apple.
| dpedu wrote:
| It's possible that is happening under the hood, but none of
| the feeds I'm subscribed to are on a URL clearly owned by
| apple.
| remh wrote:
| it's the list of feeds that is hosted by apple (think of
| it as a search engine for podcasts), not the actual feeds
| or media files.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| This would only matter in any way if you think that
| listening to podcasts is primarily a hobby that people
| engage in for its own sake. If you think they listen to
| some podcasts and not other podcasts because they care
| what's in the podcasts, why would they care if Apple
| hosts a list of podcasts?
| remh wrote:
| discoverability, if a friend talks to me about a podcast
| I could be interested in, i'd rather just have the name
| of the podcast than a full URL. Here i can just use any
| podcast app that integrates with Apple podcast service
| and type the name of the podcast i want to listen to.
|
| Your question is the same as: "Why do you care if
| $YOUR_SEARCH_ENGINE (google, kaggle, duckduckgo) hosts a
| list of websites?"
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| You can already find the podcast by name using the normal
| internet method of searching for it. Where does Apple
| come into it?
|
| The last search engine to host a list of websites was
| Yahoo!, and nobody did care.
| remh wrote:
| sure, you can use google or a search engine, look in the
| results for the actual feeds url (vs just a website or
| something), and copy paste it in your podcast player. Or
| you can just search from it directly in your podcast app.
|
| The UX on the latter side is clearly superior.
| colinsane wrote:
| not to mention that unless the podcast has an official
| site, a Google search for the feed will turn up 10
| different mirrors of the feed, without any clarity about
| which one's the canonical source.
|
| in the past i've subscribed to a dead feed this way i
| think because the author changed who they syndicate
| through. i assume Apple's directory is maintained in a
| way that largely avoids this (simply by it _being_ the
| canonical directory).
| ska wrote:
| > You can already find the podcast by name using the
| normal internet method of searching for it.
|
| You could, but I suspect most people search in their
| podcast app. Which is where apples directory comes in.
| Talanes wrote:
| A lot of smaller podcasts don't have much web presence
| outside of their RSS feed, and often have pretty generic
| titles to boot.
| dpedu wrote:
| Ah, my app doesn't have a directory of feeds. It requires
| that I add urls directly.
| colinsane wrote:
| i think it's a historical argument. i.e. from when the "pod"
| in podcast meant "iPod".
| alberth wrote:
| > _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 product 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-...
| gavinhoward wrote:
| Mini Ask HN: How _do_ you get your podcast on every platform? I
| 'd like to start one soon.
| WesleyLivesay wrote:
| 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.
| gavinhoward wrote:
| Excellent, thank you!
| donio wrote:
| RSS of course. I don't care what platform you use just make
| sure there is an RSS feed.
| gavinhoward wrote:
| Of course. Can it be the RSS feed for the podcast website if
| that is the only thing on the feed?
| Kye wrote:
| Podcast apps that only support audio containers should just
| ignore other kinds of containers in the RSS like the one
| blogs use for posts.
| JohnFen wrote:
| 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.
| getoffmyyawn wrote:
| 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.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > 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.
| qznc wrote:
| You have to serve all the channels.
|
| Do it live on Twitch. Publish video recording on Youtube.
| Audio as podcast. Transcript as blog/newsletter. Short
| snippets on Tiktok. Images with quotes on Instagram...
| colinsane wrote:
| 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.
| speckx wrote:
| Until Google decides to remove RSS from YouTube.
| adsharma wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| RajT88 wrote:
| Somewhat tangential - is there any good OSS podcatchers out
| there?
| colinsane wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| maxglute wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| teekert wrote:
| 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.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "But here's the thing: being able to say, "wherever you get your
| podcasts" is a radical statement. Because what it represents is
| the triumph of exactly the kind of technology that's supposed to
| be impossible: open, empowering tech that's not owned by any one
| company, that can't be controlled by any one company, and that
| allows people to have ownership over their work and their
| relationship with their audience."
|
| This is certainly a thought I have had as well. The question this
| raises for me is why this statement should only pertain to audio.
| Why would it not apply to video or text, for example.
|
| There is some good material to be found in podcasts. For me it's
| the large amount of "informal" interviews, where ordinary people
| may disclose information that cannot be searched on the web.
| Nevertheless most (not all) podcasts, including the ones produced
| by major news organisations, are garbage, IMHO.
|
| The issue that really deserves more "blog posts", IMHO, is the
| role of ads in podcasting. Often the ads in podcasts can feel
| like radio, where the host recites the ads themselves, e.g.,
| "brought to you by our sponsor", etc. Perhaps it is generational
| and triggers nostalgia for me, but compared to what so-called
| "tech" companies are doing, this is _tolerable_ advertising. It
| is not programmatic, personalised or based on hidden
| surveillance. It has boundaries.
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