Ask HN: How to Start a Podcast in 2020? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to Start a Podcast in 2020?

I used to do a podcast (the AWS podcast) back in 2012-2014.

Now it's 2020 and I'm about to start a new podcast. Any tips or recommendations?

I'm going to talk more on the technical aspects here, not about marketing or ads or sponsorship or affiliate revenue.

I guess the simpler, though somewhat time consuming to decide on, way is to find a podcast media host depending on your needs (downloads and storage) and then use that service. There are many to choose from, such as anchor, captivate, buzzsprout, libsyn, blubrry, transistor, podbean, simplecast, castos and many others.

You have to register your feed with the various podcast directories, such as Apple, Spotify, Google, etc.

Then you need a podcast site that you can share with everyone, which could be something offered by the podcast media host or a WordPress site of your own (there are plugins from podcast hosts you can use to sync uploads and information to your site).

One issue I see with all these specialized hosts is that they allow using custom domains for the RSS feed (the one that podcast directories like Apple, Google, Spotify and others host and the clients refresh for subscriptions), but the actual audio/media files are referenced in the feeds with the podcasting service's domain. So if you switch media hosts, you'd have to make sure that your older host provides a (preferably free) redirection service in the feeds (which puts a 301 Moved Permanently for each episode in the feeds there to point to your host). I haven't found a specialized podcast host that allows using custom domains for the media files, but would love to know if any service offers this.

The issue of each hosting provider having a custom URL is significant and a source of lock-in. For going from "final audio" to published I was working on a PowerShell Core script (and testing it on Linux) to perform tasks like: transcoding, applying ID3 tags, embedding artwork, uploading to the podcast provider, getting the service URL, appending a 302 redirect on my website to the hosting service's file location, updating the podcast.xml feed file, and publishing a blog post about the new podcast episode (I'm using a JSON sidecar file with the data needed for show title, summary, links, etc for making a complete blog post/shownotes). I was thinking of rewriting the script into either a python or nodejs application.

Thanks. Do you have any experience with Substack's audio feature? Given that I'm also going to start a newsletter (of course!!! Everyone does!), I am considering that for the podcast too.

I run a startup[1] in the space that provide hands off podcast production experience to podcasters and I recommend that you (or anyone who wants to start a podcast) read this blog post at least once: https://www.podcastinsights.com/start-a-podcast/

[1] https://www.useCastup.com

I started recording podcast and hosted it on anchor. And submitted to all podcast directories.

Now you can search my podcast on google as "MeThoNenu"

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