Comment by schnevets | Hacker News Reader

Comment by schnevets | Hacker News Reader

Creators may be entering a golden age, but the delivery methods and infrastructure have been stagnant for years now. We now have ongoing shows, evergreen episodic shows, "two amateurs in a basement" niche shows, 12-episode and it's done audiobooks, and various other designations of podcasts, and yet we still serve everything like it's a blog that needs to release content weekly. I also find it frustrating that we only categorize by topic. I'll listen to something very different on a 5 hour car ride than I would on a 15 minute walk with my dog (beyond something "Comedy" instead of "News")

Most listeners see Apple Podcasts as "good enough", but I find it confusing, and other applications follow the same approach with one or two "tweaks" that are not worth sacrificing features or adjusting to a new UI. I'm still optimistic that Spotify can get their act together (since they have the resources and incentive), but they haven't done anything dazzling since quietly adding a podcast section years ago.

It severely limits the capabilities of the medium, and yet no one seems to think anything is wrong. I understand this structure is a result of RSS serving as the backbone of "podcatchers", but everyone would benefit from a bit of lateral thinking.

Not sure what you are even exactly complaining about. Is it the UI?

I agree that most podcast players just lack features. They're built for "dummies": you can subscribe and click play, that's mostly it.

I'm a power-user. Podcast Addict on Android is the best player I have used, it has a ton of features and extreme customizability. Still, I am now using PocketCasts which is inferior by a wide margin, but it has sync capability, which ends up making my life a lot easier since I don't listen to podcasts on just a single device.

I think ultimately there is still space for another podcast player that is not built for dummies and offers a wide range of features on multiple platforms. Nothing like that exists, as far as I know.

Simply put, it's a UI issue that affects every aspect of the business. Podcasts have an artificially diminished shelf-life. If you don't release an episode every two weeks, your show gets buried in the library. It means the format is synonymous with churned, radio broadcast-like content.

This has also affected the monetization model. Most ads use promo codes for services, but those promos expire and change, rendering that content valueless. Given these limitations, it's a miracle any producers are funding serialized content that actually has a conclusion.

Lots of podcasts now use ad-serving platforms that splice in ads on the fly when the podcast is downloaded, so if you listen to old episodes today, you get current advertisers, promo codes, etc.

> If you don't release an episode every two weeks, your show gets buried in the library.

S-Town released all its episodes almost 2 years ago, and Pocket Casts still has it at #23.

As a happy PocketCasts user, what am I missing out on that Podcast Addict has? Looking over the Play Store feature list, nothing jumps out.

I've used both and there isn't really a reason to pick one over the other.

IMO we should celebrate that podcasts have managed to remain an open standard for so long. All of the open standards we have, are basically a historical accident: HTTP, SMTP, etc.

It's really easy for open standards to be killed by big companies, and it's impossible to create a new, open standard and get adoption when big companies already own the space.

I will not listen to podcasts on Spotify, because Spotify cannot be allowed to own podcasts like Youtube owns video.

I kind of can't believe I'm saying this because I almost always want better structured technology but I actually think the simplistic nature of the delivery has protected the medium. Things like lack of DRM, skippable ads may have slowed the profitability of the business and therefor slowed the dumbing down of the content you get when a medium is mined to extract maximum profit.

The infrastructure and delivery is just fine. You can start a podcast easier than ever now. The difficultly is in creating good content, not serving mp3s and RSS.

Discoverability is certainly a concern, but only because there is _so much_ good content out there. I find out about good podcasts via word of mouth much more than any directory or online source.

"Discoverability is certainly a concern, but only because there is _so much_ good content out there."

Quality is in the eye of the beholder. I've scoured top podcast lists and recommendations far and wide, and have found maybe 5 or 6 podcasts worth listening to for me in my whole life. I'm sure there must be others that I'd like, but they're buried in a mountain of uninteresting content.

Eh, I don't see it as a limitation of RSS, it's still up to the aggregator to display the episodes however they want after they've fetched the raw data.

This. An RSS feed of .mp3 or .ogg files is all I need for all of the formats mentioned by OP. It is annoying that some podcasts don't have RSS feeds -- this is what feels like a step back to me, but it's fundamentally a choice of the author/publisher. I'm much less likely to consume a podcast's backlog if it's not available as an RSS feed, and if the only obvious way to play content is through an embedded player or app that obscures the source media I probably won't play a single episode.

Edit: formatting fix.

If there isn't an RSS feed linking to audio files can you really call it a podcast?

Interesting question. I've seen collections of audio content claiming to be podcasts that don't have RSS feeds, so the term is definitely used that way. Whether that makes it a valid definition is open to interpretation, the word is pretty new still. Merriam-Webster seems to think that an automated download mechanism is required, though it doesn't specify RSS in particular:

>a program (as of music or talk) made available in digital format for automatic download over the Internet

I can see arguing that this doesn't even rule out walled-garden streams with an auto-play feature, since streaming and downloading are functionally the same (the only difference being what type of memory the data is stored in, and swap memory destroying that distinction entirely).

I'm of two minds on this. Sure improvements could be made, but the dead-simple infrastructure is part of what makes podcasts so appealing and what has kept them going. You can fetch an episode or subscribe to a feed, and that's about it. Old unmaintained stuff can continue to be available for ages. No one cares where it's hosted.

All the categorization stuff is totally outside of the podcasts themselves. Sure the default podcast apps suck, but lots of people have tried to do better and haven't caught on in a significant way. There are any number of alternative ways to get podcasts that I hear about all the time on the podcasts I listen to, have you tried those?

But ultimately, I don't think we want a rework of the infrastructure. It's not going to end well for podcasters or podcast listeners. User tracking, ad injection, and platform lock-in will be the priorities of the people who build the next successful podcast protocol.

Apple Podcasts has gotten worse pretty much every year. I have switched to Overcast and I find it excellent. Lean and clean.

PodCruncher was definitely worth the $3 or whatever nominal fee I paid.

Overcast seems to bug out on me everytime I try to play episodes in the order they were released instead of most recent first.

It also never removes played episodes no matter what my settings.

Seriously these should be simple things.

I had the same issue with it playing episodes in an awkward order because I wanted it to show me the episodes in "most-recent-first" order, but I wanted it to play in the reverse order. I got around it by creating smart playlists - I have some that are each for a single show, and I have a "back catalog" playlist for a group of podcasts where I'm catching up on older episodes, and it interweaves them all together based on their chronological release dates, so that if there's news that each one discusses, they generally get played back-to-back.

I've never had a problem with it not deleting episodes, so I can't help you there.

I have to use it, as it's the only app on the Apple Watch that allows you to stream over LTE/cellular.

I'd love to be able to use Pocket Casts or Overcast.

I like to listen on desktop and as far as I'm concerned there's nothing good.

For Mac I suffer itunes. For Windows, I ended up installing Blue Stacks and using Google's Podcast app. Nothing native or web-based worked well for me. Unreliable or being delivered through Windows Store which constantly crashes for me were my main issues.

For a while I used live bookmarks with Firefox, that was great but shortly after Firefox removed that feature :)

There used to be an app called Podcasts Beta (https://www.microsoft.com/en-in/p/podcasts-beta/9nblggh1zj3r...) which I used quite a lot back when my Lumia 730 was still alive. It's good and the developer was very responsive but not sure what's the situation now after 2 years.

If you mix desktops and mobile you might try PocketCasts and its web version, though it doesn't sync playlists/up next.

I don't know why anyone would subject themselves to the awfulness of Apple Podcasts. What were they thinking?! It's just bad.

Mind elaborating? I just search for a podcast and click play. Never seemed to need much more functionality than that. What am I missing?

Let's just take the "play bar" (for lack of a better term) that hovers over the 4 menu items at the bottom. It's always there. That's sooo frustrating. It grates on my desire for tidiness. Let me clear that. Long pressing shows no option to clear it. It ... it's just not intuitive at all.

Presumably if you're listening to a podcast you're not digging around the Podcast app? This is how Music works, and I think Podcasts copied this.

After it plays, it stays there. That bar doesn't go away.

That makes zero sense.

It often fails to download podcasts. Overcast I can just tap 'download' and trust that it will do its work. Not Apple Podcasts.

I got the "this episode is not currently available" message all the time whereas I never get anything similar from Overcast.

It often fails to transition from one podcast to the next in the playlist (ie, stops playing). Sometimes even when all involved episodes have been downloaded.

It fails to automatically delete old episodes.

It fails in multiple ways when it loses connectivity. E.g., it refuses to continue playing a very well-buffered episode if there's no connectivity. Mind you, I suspect that some of the connectivity issues may be a result of them never having tested it with 'slow' connections (2Mbps in my case). This obviously wouldn't absolve them in the least, however.

This is just off the top of my head. It's one of the worst pieces of software I have ever used. From a company with billions in cash.

I’m always surprised when people complain about it. It does everything it should for me, syncs with my other devices and automatically downloads the new episode over night and tells me about it in the morning. What are you missing?

I live in Germany. I can only see German-language podcasts in the app. If I want to see podcasts in English, I need to switch my whole iTunes account to a different country. Of course, that creates problems elsewhere.

I mean, come on. Most of the interesting content is in English. This is a simple feature.

You mean for the suggestions / Top 10 lists? Yes these are the ones from your current country just like in the iTunes store.

You can still find every podcast if you search by name or browse by category though. You make it sound like you can only listen to German podcasts via the stock podcasts app which is definitely not the case.

Apple's podcast app has always been horrible at syncing between devices. Overcast was like a breath of fresh air.

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