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Comment by caoilte | Hacker News Reader

The BBC is another bad actor in this space (although increasingly irrelevant). Their decision to "hide" most of their RSS feeds whilst still labeling their proprietary app subscribe links podcasts was unethical.

I see hope in the Patreon model. I don't mind paying a monthly subscription for a specific show if I get a locked down RSS link.

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> I see hope in the Patreon model.

Though, podcasters on Patreon are getting high on their own supply, asking for way, waaaay too much. "Just" 5 bucks a month? For one show??? Completely out of touch. Come back when it's ad-free @ 50c, or less.

I dropped the two BBC podcasts i'd been interested in (News Cast and In Our Time) for this reason, it's such a weird tack to take in order to chase views.

I have IOT still in my Antennapod feeds, last episode from 25 January.

I support a few podcasts on patreon. They have regular open RSS feeds and then a locked down patreon feed, containing special episodes, extra material etc. One podcast only charges for each locked episode, so if they don't make any for a while I'm not charged. They are all pretty niche and I don't know how much they earn from it, but from a user perspective it's working fine.

The last time I checked, you can see publisher revenue on patreon.

Each publisher account can decide whether or not to show that.

I'm trying to understand what you mean by this. Their podcasts still show up in e.g. Apple Podcasts and Pocketcasts. If you look at the 'podcasts' page for e.g. '13 Minutes to the Moon'[1] (which I hadn't realized there was a third season of), there is a (small) link to the rss[2]

[1]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w13xttx2/episodes/downloads [2]: https://podcasts.files.bbci.co.uk/w13xttx2.rss

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