Ah good old videogames.com.

Yeah premium podcasts are already a thing. There's no need to "figure out an API to let people use their license keys on third party players", it's simply HTTP Basic authentication embedded in the URL. Should work just about anywhere.

I'm also a premium subscriber; while they used to use basic HTTP auth, they've since switched to generating revocable, per-user keys. It's both better for security and easier for podcast clients to manage.

By "revocable, per-user keys" do you mean each user is given a unique URL to download premium content from or is some type of cryptographic DRM being leveraged?

Yup; you get a URL to the premium feed with a unique hash on the end.

I'd imagine it's a token in the request headers

I doubt it's request headers since that would require the podcast player to set them. Putting it in the URL itself would make it work with every player on the planet.

Oh nice. I was a premium subscriber for years but never bothered using the premium podcast URLs. The ads can be pretty funny.