[…] 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.
What podcasting holds in the promise of its open format is the proof that an open web can still thrive and be relevant, that it can inspire new systems that are similarly open to take root and grow.
Yeah, it's much better for everyone except the rent-seeking company... And it isn't even bad for the rent-seeker, they're just deprived of the gains they would obtain from harming the ecosystem by fragmenting it.
I feel him selling out turned me off ever wanting to watch it. He didn't need the money, he was already super well off. So he just showed that he didn't value his listeners, he knew he would lose some but didn't care.
Compared to my favorite podcast that offers people to email him if they can't afford the paid stuff because he just wants people to be able to listen.
Agree. I mean I dunno if I'd be able to say no to $100 million even if I was already wealthy, so I don't want to make it too black-and-white... But it definitely did harm, and I think it's fair to describe it as selling out.
One of my main motivations for cancelling my Spotify subscription was their insistence on capitalising on podcasts. They have a perfectly fine business model with music, why do they need to ruin podcasts?
Yeah the locking down podcasts for exclusivity to me is really fucking toxic and totally counter to what podcasts used to stand for. Really pissed me off when Gimlet went Spotify only and Reply All was no longer available elsewhere. Very anti consumer.
Because they don't have a perfectly fine business model. They get squeezed hard by both the oligarchs of music publishing UMG, Sony Warner who negotiate the price for the music.
And from the other side by the tech giants google and apple who can cross service subsidize their own streaming.There exists essentially no space for them to make any profit in streaming music. So they have to go other places.
The only reason they'll probably exist for the foreseeable future is because the rights holders are able to use Spotify to have more negotiating power against Google and apple.
Whenever I'm talking with someone about my podcast and they ask, "can I find it on Spotify?" a little part of me dies.
Like, yes it's available on Spotify, because it's available everywhere. But I strongly dislike what Spotify tried to do to podcasting, and there are much better apps out there.
I literally stopped listening to Rogan when he moved to Spotify even though I already had an account and used it, because their app was such garbage at the time.
Well plenty creators push product X, Y or Z. Whether that product is in itself also the hoster of the media you're listening to... I dunno. Just another ad to me, I don't really care about the details any more at that point. Sadly no sponsorblock for podcasts yet, AFAIK.
Hey, I get that. Honestly I do not even think they push Spotify because they're paid to do it. The ones I'm listening to, that is. They do it because they like the service and that's fine. It's just sad to feel like an afterthought. The adverts I'm fine with. I can just skip them.
Could someone explain to me (I'm a developer so use whatever terms you like, maybe), how does the massive amount of podcasts reach the world? Say if I wanted to make a podcast app (I don't, I love Pocket Casts), where would I sync the massive list'o'casts? Does it work like that? Or do you scrape the entire internet? What is happening?
It's done via RSS feeds that the podcast creators then submit to aggregators. Then apps pull that information down from said aggregators. This website explains the gist of it.
iTunes api, and if apple turns evil there are other list-o-cast apis like fyyd.de.
Whoever downvoted this has no clue. The Apple Podcast directory is currently unrestricted for any podcatcher to crawl and to get the RSS feeds. That may change at some point but for now it's actually the best maintained RSS feed directory. The aforementioned fyyd.de is a good but less complete alternative. It relies of community submissions. fyyd.de itself is not an open source service, though.
Apple has been evil since day 1. When have they done any single thing that wasn't evil? The EO is family a terrible, wireless person. I'm so confused what you mean.
The protocol used for it is a bit of an older protocol, but basically it uses the RSS protocol. It came out in the 90s and hasn't been updated since 2014, and I haven't touched any code related to it since before 2019. Otherwise, it'd just be standard HTTPS for websites like Spotify etc and whatever podcast discovery system they have on their site etc.
...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...
Who is suggesting that such technology is impossible? The internet is literally exactly this, based on an open standard (Internet Protocol) which is not controlled by any proprietary group.
IP wasn't the first computer networking standard to be developed, but its open nature made it accessible to any interested manufacturers and that made it the most successful standard.
Anyone suggesting that this "kind of technology" is "supposed to be impossible" is either ignorant or stupid, or both.
If IP was developed today, you'd be paying IBM or a similar corp royalties for every network adapter manufactured. Thats whats supposed to be impossible in today's late-stage hyper-capitalism web.
IBM tried that in the 60s, 70s and 80s with their business mainframe systems, along with HP and several other manufacturers. Before IP gained prominence every major manufacturer had its own proprietary connection system they tried to sell, and the competition in the market was just as fierce then as it is now.
It didn't work, the open model made all of the proprietary network systems obsolete.
I'm also not sure I can agree with that it's "a radical statement". It is... not? Unless I misunderstand what others mean with radical in this context, but linguistically it should the form free of pre- and suffixes and qualifiers, no?
So in this context, "wherever you get your podcasts" is... not very radical. That'd be not actually stating anything in regards to your podcasting platform, as it is in itself a qualifier for something else in that sentence, and hence removed.
It's also not radical in the political sense of course, but I kinda figured that's not what is being alluded to here anyways as it'd inherently not make any sense.
The IP helped the Internet to establish. But once established we see trends to try to limit the very technology into propriety. Think of the Facebook internet access schemes that tried to make everything go through facebook. Think of the attempts to make priviledged and throttled websites based on what the ISP likes...
When Podcasts were new, the open standard was embraced, but now we see attempts to make them exclusive too. Just that they didn't prevail yet.
Think of the Facebook internet access schemes that tried to make everything go through facebook.
You're right that they've tried to do this and it's ugly. But they've only been able to do it in places where they didn't have to compete with an existing service, so I would argue that it's successful only in a vacuum.
I think what the author meant was that it's impossible in the capitalist marketplace.
Joe Rogan is probably a good anti-example. His podcast (as I understand it anyway) is only available on Spotify. But Conan O'Brien, the Office Ladies, and even The West Wing Weekly (which hasn't been producing in years) is still available, for free, on any podcast platform.
I think what the author meant was that it's impossible in the capitalist marketplace.
Nonsense, the marketplace was also capitalist when the internet protocol was developed in 1974. It wasn't that long ago.
Also, I'll point out that open source software is very successful today and there are a lot of businesses based around open systems. Linux is the most widely used OS, particularly for embedded devices. Apache is the most widely used web server. You're using an open source platform right now. You probably interact with open source systems every day, you're surrounded by them, and they were developed in and thrive in the 'capitalist marketplace'.
The internet isn't exactly ancient technology. Do you think the 'current economic model' is significantly different from the 1970s? (and can you back up that conclusion?)
Ooh. Nice! I hadn't heard of AntennaPod before. It seems to have everything that I use in Pocket Casts except for trim silence. I will try it out for a while and see if I miss that. I do use it and it saves a lot of time. Still though, OSS is a big draw.
Edit: It also doesn't open the queue or start playing automatically in Android Auto.
After reading your comment, I checked my Pocket Casts stats page and it looks like between the skipping, variable speed (1.5-2x), and trimmed silence (mad max), I save nearly 20% of listening time with the majority of that being the silence trimming.
Might be an outlier, but with daily podcast listening, trimming is important enough to keep me on Pocket Casts, even though AntennaPod is attractive given it's open source nature.
Correcting myself here. AntennaPod does have silence trimming, but it's neither a player button nor in settings, but in a …-menu at the top of the player, which made it a bit hard to find (Same can be said about some settings in Pocket Casts.) and there's no graduation, so it's mad max only, from how it sounds.
Email newsletters kinda are too. You use a service to send them, but the list itself remains yours and can be moved around. No algorithm bullshit in your way. They're making a comeback lately it seems.
I have no idea where I get my podcasts; I hit Add Podcast in AntennaPod, it goes somewhere and I get a podcast subscription somehow. Can't explain that.
Easy to do when it's just audio files with no user interaction though. Neat that it's continued existence in this manner at least, even if the big companies have steered toward trying to be the podcast platform.
All the centralisation in podcasting is the content delivery network (where ads are placed for the commercial ones). Where the feed is hosted it's fairly irrelevant.
The reason companies want to control the podcast networks is because of targeted ads. They want to inject the ad at the time of downloading to personalize the ad to the person it thinks is listening. That’s the best kind of advertising in their eyes. They can’t do that process without owning the network or at least having some stake in it.
Did anyone listen to Adam Curry's Daily Source Code podcast? I remember him being very excited about the possibility of escaping the gatekeepers of traditional media. If i remember correctly, he was a major and important proponent of the open nature of podcasts.
not so fun fact: both of these apps actually just search iTunes
this whole article feels misleading to me. platforms where you can search for things by name without specifying who published it, cannot exist unless one (or a small handful) of organizations does all of the publishing. not unless search engines communicate with each other -- and since apple is one of the major players I can promise you they do not.
let's face it. 99% of podcasters use a monthly paid service that hosts their media files and submits them to the small handful of podcast search engines that exist, maybe even gives them a boost in the algorithm or whatever, and which could delete them at any moment should the podcaster stop paying. the only people who want to think about technology less than creators are consumers. approximately 0% of podcast listeners even know what an RSS feed is. if you don't like Apple (or worse, they don't like you), and people have to find the setting to paste a URL into their podcast app to listen to your podcast, an even smaller percentage of no one will listen to it than otherwise would have. "find us wherever you get your podcasts" is just a fancy way of saying "get to our website by googling our company name" (which more and more companies are doing in their ads). if you become someone Google doesn't want to appear in their results, or you're not big enough for google to notice you exist, your dream is over before it starts.
I'm honestly baffled how anyone can talk about the world of public podcasts being open and radical when they're like one industry cooperation away from supporting DRM.