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Comment by Kye | Hacker News Reader

Podcast technology is RSS. RSS is distribution. An MP3 or MP4 (or whatever Google uses) is just a container. Without distribution, it sits there doing nothing.

Being able to look up almost any podcast in any podcast app and find its RSS feed and subscribe to it directly without requiring any intermediary is a huge thing in this era of proprietary silos. That's the point he's getting at.

Apple could go rogue tomorrow and start rehosting all podcasts in its directory, which most apps depend on, and I would still have my list in Overcast to go and get RSS feeds direct from the source.

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> Being able to look up almost any podcast in any podcast app and find its RSS feed and subscribe to it directly without requiring any intermediary is a huge thing in this era of proprietary silos. That's the point he's getting at.

The sad part is this used to be completely normal. I remember browsing the web and most sites would show that little RSS icon in my browser indicating they have a feed available.

But people are happy to let companies like apple run their lives for them and decide what they are allowed to consume, so now we have to act like this perfectly normal and reasonable thing is special.

Yes, Siri. Thank you, Siri. May I watch another podcast, Siri?

The RSS header is often still present. It's browsers that stopped supporting it.

Not really, I have a browser extension that still shows it. Super rare now, which isn't surprising, because like you say the browsers don't show it by default anymore.

Right. Browsers stopped supporting it. Defaults matter. You can add a plugin for any obscure thing.

I'm not sure what your point is, but I think we're basically agreeing? RSS and decentralized hosting used to be normal until the bigcorps got greedy and started manipulating the masses (by removing features from browsers and such) into believing walled gardens are the only way.

i think your point is that RSS used to be a norm on the consumption side, and is no longer; and GP's point is that it still is a norm on the publishing side, such that for the users who care -- like yourself -- the practical difference is not that large.

beeboobaa is saying basically the opposite: that they have RSS detection enabled, but many fewer sites/publishers have RSS or have the autodiscovery tag for it, and they're saying that's an understandable effect of the browsers no longer supporting it.

maybe it's a matter of degree then. enough publishers still support RSS that i can still use it exclusively and not miss much. maybe my reader is doing more magic to find the feeds than it used to?

there's the weird email newsletter format (say, Matt Levine's column) which completely ignores RSS, but that's probably tangential to the argument. the biggest offenders i see are less $BIGCO and more individual developers who roll their own blog and overlook RSS. but in that latter camp, every off-the-shelf publishing system or static site generator gets RSS support by the time i'm liable to encounter it in the wild, whether the operator knows it's there or not.

I'd like a Really Simple Podcasts site where I can just log in with a username and a password, drag and drop an MP3 file from my computer, and have it get published as a new episode. Bliss.

That's how most podcasting platforms work. For example, that's exactly how https://transistor.fm/ works. You make an account, upload an MP3, get an RSS feed.

Yeah! This is exactly what I was looking for, thank you!

> RSS is distribution

It’s not content distribution.

> get RSS feeds direct from the source.

But what is the source? Who is typically hosting these? Audio is easier to distribute than video, but aren’t most podcasts hosted on a handful of large services?

There is one centralised bottleneck - Apple's iTunes podcast index / search API - which seemingly everyone else in the company has forgotten about and runs pretty openly for anyone to submit to and use.

There are also a handful of essentially CDNs that host the .mp3 files themselves, but these are more or less completely interchangable. They're just infrastructure for hosting files.

I'm a very (very, as in: too) avid podcast listener and the fact that apple run one of the biggest "phone books" has literally never stopped me from doing anything podcast related. I find new podcasts just fine, by word of mouth as well as in other directories.

The only player in town that seems to really make a dent in the openness is Spotify which have been aggressively buying out podcast teams and taking them off the open web, and that's one of the prime reasons I cancelled my subscriptions.

Then there's smaller losses like the BBC4 which made most of their podcasts have a 1 month delay vis-a-vis their own app. I have no interest in that. In effect, this just served to curb some of my compulsive newsy consumption. If something isn't important enough to still be heard a month later, maybe I didn't need to hear it in the first place.

Anyhow, I very much agree with the article and I'm happy someone made the point so much more eloquently than I've managed in my many debates about the matter.

https://podcastindex.org/ is a great.

I use https://podcastaddict.com/

But thanks for posting this! Occasionally, I can't find a particular podcast on my preferred site.

So do I! Podcast Index is one of the built-in indexes in the Podcast Addict app's search feature; that's how I discovered it!

Almost every podcast I listen to comes from a different site. It's as easy as setting up an RSS feed on your own website, which is very comparable to hosting your own blog. Sure, plenty of people use Medium, but lots and lots still self-host.

> It’s not content distribution.

Yeah, this is what I thought. RSS will give a URL to a sound file, which is hosted by someone, somewhere. It doesn’t sound like there’s anything inherent to podcasts -- not even RSS even though it’s so ubiquitous -- which prevents the content distribution to be more centralized.

If a podcast recording is exclusively hosted by Spotify, that is where everyone gets that podcast; even if they got the URL for it elsewhere. It’s a bit like saying I get my articles from HN (disregarding that I don’t use RSS for it).

> But what is the source? Who is typically hosting these? Audio is easier to distribute than video, but aren’t most podcasts hosted on a handful of large services?

Top Podcast Hosting Companies by Episode Share: https://livewire.io/podcast-hosts-by-episode-share/

Top Podcast CDNs by Episode Share: https://livewire.io/podcast-cdns-by-episode-share/

You are not representative.

The vast majority of podcast listeners subscribe a channel on YouTube, Spotify or Apple.

The vast majority of podcasts are served from similar centralized media companies.

Which is why "JRE is moving from YouTube to Spotify for $200 mil" is a thing. If podcasts were decentralized you wouldn't "move" from one content company to another.

Which is why "Wherever you get your podcasts" is a radical statement.

99% of people read that as "Whichever you prefer from Spotify/YouTube/Apple"

But you can get 99% of the same podcasts via Apple as you can via Spotify or many other podcasting apps. Just like you can visit websites on almost any web browser. This used to be how everything was expected to work online, but that has changed dramatically, and for the worse.

(Spotify is trying to break the openness of podcasting but they mostly haven’t managed to do so, yet.)

Could you elaborate a bit further? I don’t see why this is necessarily true.

Someone is hosting the sound file that’s ultimately played when the podcast is listened to. A sibling comment to yours is saying that JRE is newly to be hosted with multiple hosts, which is the only real step away from centralization. RSS is just providing the means for an up-to-date URL for the podcast episodes.

At the end of the day, the podcast is served by one of these hosts, regardless of how it was discovered. It can be observed that they’re centralized when media companies make exclusive deals as Spotify attempted with JRE.

Apologies, I’m probably missing some nuance but I don’t see anything in your reply that is meaningfully different from the comment above. The existence of major platforms does not necessarily challenge the notion that podcasting is open by design. The advent of exclusivity deals seems to confirm the standing assumption that podcasters are in control of distribution.

Ah yeah, I didn’t explain the point well.

I wouldn’t disagree that podcasters are in control of distribution; that’s not actually exclusive with the distribution being centralized. The point I was making about the exclusivity deals is just that these platforms have started to try -- and likely will continue to try -- to entice some of the more popular productions into such deals, which would necessarily increase centralization if they go through.

It’s a cynical perspective so maybe best kept to myself but I see all the right pieces for a UX bait-and-switch. I suspect the parent commenter (to whom you asked the initial question) sees the same thing. I think it’s seemingly intentionally misleading to call this decentralized; like “that’s what they want you to think” as a paranoid way of putting it. Regardless of any motives, it seems to serve certain interests that this is seen as decentralized, and I don’t think they’re the interests of podcast fans. Food for thought, I guess.

Yeah that’s a fair point. The protocol may be open but much of the discovery/hosting is siloed in maybe 2-3 services. It doesn’t take much imagination to see where that could lead.

JRE used to be distributed on his personal website before Spotify. And it seems like they're now going back to hosting it on several platforms.

Because the deal will end (at the end of this year) and presumably they correctly sense it won't be renewed.

Are you sure about that?

Spotify signs new deal with Joe Rogan reportedly worth up to $250m

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/feb/02/spotify-j...

Sounds like they got a deal.

Oh, last week. I missed that.

Idiotic if you ask me. He’s just like any dimwitted everyman: every single pub in the UK has at least two Joe Rogans. I was sat with my back to one in a coffee shop the other day.

That's just a power rule, not an insight. The idea that you can choose between YouTube, Spotify, or Apple for the same product is good. The fact that you can still choose from a long tail of RSS providers for most shows is even better.

The long tail is really the important thing. Most things over the last 10 years ended up binary: either almost no one used it, or everyone used one thing. All efforts by centralized services to take it over have failed. And most of those efforts were only viable in the now fading overheated market driven by free money.

If you make such statement you need to provide some numbers to back it up.

I mean, Android is still the largest platform in terms of users and it doesn't have a dominant podcast app. Spotify for a long time didn't offer podcasts and it still offers only very poor experience for podcasts.

> Which is why "JRE is moving from YouTube to Spotify for $200 mil" is a thing.

It's really not. They bought his regular anti-intellectual dribble not because podcasts aren't decentralised, but the opposite: because the inexplicable draw of his particular brand of common-sense-insulting prole-feed might convince people that podcasts are something only big services can do, and to compete with other big services trying to do the same things. They want to give the impression that big content is "locked up" by services, when it's not.

In my estimation it hasn't really succeeded (in his asinine, consistency-free, bloviating world or anywhere else).

All they really did is associated their brand with his twaddle.

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