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Comment by jccalhoun | Hacker News Reader

Spotify won't ruin podcasts any more than apple has. Right now if someone only posts a link to apple podcasts and not their rss then it makes it much less likely that I'll check out their show because I use android. The same thing will happen if someone posts a link to spotify. If you make it harder for me to get your product then I'll be less likely to bother.

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Apple doesn't host podcasts, especially not exclusively. In the contrary, they offer a API for free software podcast players to search for podcasts and point them to the RSS feed for subscribing and downloading the audio file.

I know that. In reality it doesn't matter who hosts it if you only give out a link to one source and I don't use that source then I am less likely to find out other ways to get your content.

Good luck getting a non-tech person listening to a podcast by supplying them with an RSS link. I don't mean to be snarky, and I hate it from the bottom of my heart, but it's the sad reality. For 99,999% of people, a RSS link is not just making it "harder" to get to the product, it's making it impossible. They won't bother.

Good luck getting an android person to listen to you podcast by supplying them with a link to apple.

You don't have to just have one or the other. Have all the links. They are free.

Completely agreed, your comment made it sound like you were suggesting only RSS instead of any vendor-specific links to me, but I misunderstood. :)

If it's a link (button) and you press it, AntennaPod will open it in it's UI and let you subscribe if you want to.

Which requires AntennaPod to be manually installed, which "normal people" won't do. (Either because they already have Spotify or Apple Podcasts or because they simply don't care enough.)

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