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Comment by throwaway427 | Hacker News Reader

Theoretically I am sympathetic, but in reality I have 3 different podcast apps:

1. Overcast, great usability, terrible discoverability

2. Apple Podcast, bad usability, excellent discoverability

3. Spotify, ok usability, ok discoverability

The reason I have not unified on any one is these different trade offs and the low burden to having 3 different podcast apps. I only use Spotify for the Fantasy Footballers podcast and I can see myself unifying on Spotify if they became the sole distributor of a couple of casts I follow.

Which is to say, in practice, I do not share your conviction.

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Intriguingly, I've found more good podcasts through Overcast recently than almost anywhere else.. via their ads which are so high quality and well targeted that they work as a discovery mechanism.

I was actually going to pay for a subscription to Overcast even though you really got no benefits from it just to support a great product.

Then he introduced ads and his custom built ad platform was so good that I think of them as a feature that I would keep on anyway and he’s making money.

I’m a subscriber and I keep the ads on. :-)

I run a podcast hosting company, if I had a nickel for every customer that couldn't find _their own show_ on Spotify, I could lower my prices. Discoverability on Spotify is not optimal.

I can't find Joe Rogan Experience, one of the most popular podcasts in the world, on Spotify, though I can find 10 related or similarly named podcasts. I'm not sure why they don't seem to have it.

Doesn’t Spotify rehost podcasts instead of just indexing the RSS feed and serving the file directly from the host server?

Correct, Spotify apps can't play podcasts (meaning they don't support podcast standards like RSS, etc.). Instead, their backend ingests open web media and converts it for their proprietary platform. This allows them to "own" the listener/creator relationship, control what data the creators see, and modify the content to include additional advertising should they decide that's interesting.

Spotify does not monetize podcast content and likely will not in the future. My understanding is that they transcode audio to support all devices that the Spotify clients support, while being able to stream audio at a user-defined bitrate.

Spotify, for what it's worth, provides better analytics than most podcast hosts can provide because they also own the client. So by controlling the data that the producer sees, they're actually doing far better than the norm. They don't "own" any relationship any more than Apple Podcasts or Google Play (or any other pre-installed app) does.

Once you subscribe to a podcast in the Apple player, Apple’s servers are no longer involved. The app polls the RSS feed directly from the host’s RSS feed and gets the audio/video directly from the hosts server.

Every podcast out there is either in AAC or MP3. Every device that Spotify has an an app for supports both formats natively.

Apple also provides better aggregate analytics as of about a year ago.

Spotify does ingest RSS and MP3 files, but they rehost them from their own servers in a proprietary way. Some hosts have an agreement to "pass through" audio files, but the details of this are not clear.

Wow, thank you for the Overcast recommendation. The UX is indeed great. A small thing I especially love is that, while you need to "create an account" to use it, you can do so on mobile without having to hand over an email address and create a password. Hallelujah.

Overcast is written by one guy - Marco Arment. He was the first developer for Tumbler and was over development for a little while. He went on to create Instapaper and sold it and Overcast was his second major project.

He also has a few podcasts, but my favorite is Accidental Tech Podcast. He cohosts it with John Siracusa - the guy who wrote the book size overviews of the first 10 versions of iOS 10 for Engadget - and Casey Liss.

I'm pretty sure you mean he wrote the book size overviews for the first 10 versions of (mac)OS( X) and he did it for Ars Technica.

Yeah that....

Ever tried Pocket Cast? Carries Fantasy Footballers and has pretty good discoverability and search and great usability. Also offers cloud service, for an upcharge, to let you sync with a web player for your PC as well.

Overcast has a free web player....

But for this person doesn't have one of their podcasts. And according to you it has ads? Overcast does not.

iTunes on desktop is probably the worst Podcasting app

Google podcasts seems to have everything

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