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.
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.
Spotify signs new deal with Joe Rogan reportedly worth up to $250m
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/feb/02/spotify-j...
Sounds like they got a deal.
Idiotic if you ask me. He’s just like any dimwitted everyman: every single pub in the UK has at least two Joe Rogans. I was sat with my back to one in a coffee shop the other day.
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.
I wouldn’t disagree that podcasters are in control of distribution; that’s not actually exclusive with the distribution being centralized. The point I was making about the exclusivity deals is just that these platforms have started to try -- and likely will continue to try -- to entice some of the more popular productions into such deals, which would necessarily increase centralization if they go through.
It’s a cynical perspective so maybe best kept to myself but I see all the right pieces for a UX bait-and-switch. I suspect the parent commenter (to whom you asked the initial question) sees the same thing. I think it’s seemingly intentionally misleading to call this decentralized; like “that’s what they want you to think” as a paranoid way of putting it. Regardless of any motives, it seems to serve certain interests that this is seen as decentralized, and I don’t think they’re the interests of podcast fans. Food for thought, I guess.
(Spotify is trying to break the openness of podcasting but they mostly haven’t managed to do so, yet.)
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.
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.
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?
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.
But thanks for posting this! Occasionally, I can't find a particular podcast on my preferred site.
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.
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).
Top Podcast Hosting Companies by Episode Share: https://livewire.io/podcast-hosts-by-episode-share/
Top Podcast CDNs by Episode Share: https://livewire.io/podcast-cdns-by-episode-share/
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?
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.
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.
You can play it using a web browser app by going to TikTok's website.
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.
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?
It’s just companies being nice, because the incentives to not be nice haven’t showed up yet.
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.
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.
It's akin to saying "wherever you get your music".
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.
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.
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.
In other words, is any 1+ set of media files on RSS a podcast?
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.
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)
> 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?