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Comment by CharlesW | Hacker News Reader

Podcasting is RSS. That means that 26% of Americans (I don't have worldwide stats handy) depend on RSS every month.

So, more Americans use RSS every month than use Twitter.

Tangentially, this is also a great argument in music business discussions against the finality of Spotify, Youtube and other centralized streaming platforms. People are doing just fine consuming podcast RSS feeds using players when the UX is smooth; there's no reason why that couldn't be the case for music or other verticals in general (direct artist-to-fan).

Problem with video is still bandwidth and the fact that it is more difficult to distribute.

For podcasts you need one mp3, usually quite compressed. For video you usually need more than one source, adaptable stream quality and good seeking (because most people do not watch videos end to end but only view parts of it).

This is probably not insurmountable but I guess we need better tools for creators to abstract all of this.

This is already solved by HLS - all you'd need is a .m3u8 file in the feed. Industry insistence on DRM issues is what's preventing it from taking off, but "indies" could do it.

That's quite interesting. Do you have more stuff to read about it? I never really used podcasts so I always wondered how people listen to it and assumed people use spotify or something like that.

Podcast 'subscriptions' are a perfect RSS use-case.

A 'podcatcher' (ie whatever app downloads it) is downloading the 'enclosure' url (which can point to any type of media) of the latest RSS 'item'.

> Do you have more stuff to read about it?

Yes! Check out the deck and video from Edison Research's "The Podcast Consumer 2018" at http://www.edisonresearch.com/podcast-consumer-2018/.

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