> But centralisation has a way of creeping in, so I wouldn't be surprised if a platform came about to attract podcast creators with convenient revenue streams, in the same way Substack has for blogs.

Feed burner tried. Spotify tried. I think podcasting is like blogs or email newsletters. There may be value in centralization (dev.to, medium, etc for blogs, MailChimp, substack, etc for newsletters) but there'll always be a space for you to own and run it yourself.

Critically, you can port your subscribers in each of these cases, unlike subscribers to a YouTube channel or a Facebook group. I think thats a correlary of Anil's point. It isn't enough for discovery to be open, you, the creator, need to own the means of distribution.

I read other comments about 'forever redirects' of the RSS feed if you leave a podcast platform and they're a bit worrisome, but I wonder if a year or two of redirect service would be adequate. Probably depends on the growth of your podcast. I think I might have updated a feed URL once or twice in the decade or so I've been a podcast listener. Still safer to set up a reverse proxy under a domain you control.

> I dropped my Spotify subscription when it started getting exclusive rights on podcasts

To me, these no longer are podcasts, but are now shows hosted on Spotify. It's not different than any other talk show like Stern or some sportsball talking heads that are exclusive to XM/Sirius/ESPN/etc. It's just their shows don't have a "broadcast schedule". Maybe I'm just being too pedantic

No, you are absolutely right. Episodic shows that call themselves “podcasts” are trying to capitalize on the popularity of podcasts as an open system while shirking the openness that makes them popular. We should refuse to call them podcasts, because they are not.

I find this sort of hard-line opinion funny in the context that the pod in podcasts comes from iPod, device which was notoriously locked down. 1st gen iPods required a Mac to upload audio to the device; iTunes was not even available on other platforms!

Not to be an apologist for Apple’s closed platforms, but my understanding was that the original iPod’s Mac-only limitation was significantly influenced by the fact it used Firewire, which was available on every Mac but very few PCs. Firewire was a critical piece of why the iPod was actually good, because it provided fast transfer rates for syncing lots of audio, and higher power for faster charging. USB 2 was comparable, but still quite new and not present on most computers that people already owned at the time.

While iTunes was required, it was free and there was no subscription or limitation on what you could sync to the device. Apple actually seemed to be generally anti-DRM at the time, launching the music store with DRM as an industry concession, but eventually removing it and even allowing users to download DRM-free copies of songs that were originally purchased with it.

'pod' comes from Play on Demand and pre-dates the iPod (iPod being an apple branded Play on Demand device).

Thanks for article - possibly it's 'retcon nonsense' but the explanation of 'pod' preceding 'iPod' was told to me in the very early days of iPods so if it was made up then it was made up nearly 20 years ago.

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

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.

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).

I've been listening to podcasts since the 2000s, and have never owned an iPod. I used one app or another to download them, and listened on various non-Apple portable music players.

This is genuinely wild to me, I've been listening to audio content on the web since since early 00s I can't recall if it predates ipod (01) or not. There must have been another term prior?

There was earlier downloadable audio content but it was really early 2000s with RSS/Winer/Curry/etc. when 1st gen podcasting got its name and really took on something like it's current form. You can identify various other points like Serial/money flowing in/cellular connections/etc.

As locked down as the devices are, they have always, and continue to support RSS feeds from outside apple’s walled garden.

It’s like it came from some bizarro universe where only apple allows side-loading of content, but Spotify and YouTube do not (so they can take a chunk of your revenue, and censor/shut out competitors).

Monetization is a problem, centralization is a flawed solution.

I think the mp3 is responsible for much of the positive momentum of podcasts and audio in general. (That's pretty obvious.) But there is not a widely accepted analog in video. Video encoding is complicated. And since we are at a particular juncture where video is large enough relative to internet speed, compression and encoding are still very important.

So the complexity of that is what makes it hard to go totally open in my opinion, at least from the creator standpoint.

That and the fact that there is just too much momentum with YouTube's audience volume, if your goal is viewership.

Video also has the twist that, unlike audio, it has to support a bunch of different hardware configurations. You’ve got to support multiple video codecs, multiple resolutions and bitrates. And to be good you might even be serving several of those variants to the same client in one viewing—which means you have to intelligently chop up the video into smaller pieces. Plus the supporting client side tooling is more important—for example those little thumbnails that show up while seeking through a clip.

Audio is easy. Throw up an mp3 and you are done. The basic fundamentals of an audio client have remained largely unchanged since the invention of the tape deck. Video is a while different animal.

That being said, moving to an RSS based model for video would be pretty interesting. I just imagine there would be a lot of work on whatever system consumes those RSS files to make the video playable across the wide spectrum of video players.

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?

Basic video is good enough for a lot of purposes. But with minimal gear and software, I can clean up most speakers with very little work in audio (and there are better AI cleansing tools these days as well). For a given quality level, the bar is much lower for audio only.

This really isn't true. Mixing/mastering if you want to target:

  * in ear devices
  * vehicle audio systems
  * phone speakers
  * laptops
  * mid-range home stereo systems
  * high end home stereo/studio monitoring

is quite complex to get right, and generally you can't optimize for more than one at a time. That's even more so if you actually buy into the "immersive audio" hype, where playback is not even stereo anymore.

Audio can certainly get complex. But per the upthread query I'd argue that it's still easier to get understandable audio in an interview in a quiet location than it is to shoot video, especially outside of a studio setting.

and yet ... if the video quality is sub-par people care <--- this much --->, whereas if the audio is sub-par people care <----------- this much ------------->

Fair enough. For people speaking, we'll tolerate mediocre video with good audio over vice versa.

Arn’t video podcast still a thing? I mean I don’t watch any myself, but the technology has been there for at least a decade. If people aren’t using it, it’s probably more of a user experience or discoverability or other issue.

critically, even Substack still exposes their RSS feeds publicly. view it as a two-sided marketplace: Substack would need to control both a majority of feed sources and a majority of feed consumption (i.e. the install base of feed readers) to escape RSS. ditto with the podcasting space.

or at least, so is the theory. but i see that most of the shows i listen to aren't available when i search them in Spotify. so i'm not sure how Spotify users interact with podcasts: do they use multiple podcast apps? does Spotify win only those users who previously weren't listening to podcasts (and so don't lose access to anything they valued when moving to Spotify for podcasts)?