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Comment by Derbasti | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I've gotten into podcasting when it became easy enough to do so. About ten years ago, you could download Podcasts with iTunes, then sync them as a playlist, then... too complicated.

A few years ago this changed. I now have an app on my phone that auto-downloads the newest episodes of my favourite podcasts in the background. Whenever I want to listen to a podcast, the app will have one available. Additionally, these apps allow me to speed up playback, read through show notes, and skip forward over ad reads or boring sections.

This is very convenient, and only began to exist in the last few years, hence the "new" popularity of podcasts in the last few years. I don't think we need to invoke in-car internet access to explain podcast popularity.

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The Nokia N91, released 8 years ago, had 3G and Wi-Fi and came with an official podcasting app that could auto-download episodes. It also had better sound quality than the contemporary iPod, an 8GB hard drive and full support for music playback over Bluetooth.

The S60 were really nice devices, it's such a shame the UI/UX didn't match the capabilities :|

Spot on for me as well. The workflow you mention of Mac iTunes, discovery, download, change settings, plug in your iOS device, sync over USB 2, etc changed into simply opening up the Podcasts app on your iOS device. Settings are synced, I can steam, I can download, I can discover, etc all within the same easy to use app made by Apple.

Add that there are numerous exceptional podcasts out there, such as Science Friday, Radio Lab, This American Life, Serial, etc -- it's lovely combination. Plus, most content producers have seemed to have finally gotten over the gimmicky delivery methods like video podcasts. It works when the content lends itself, but this is not common.

I suppose some of it even has to do with the cell/isp network speeds we are all accustomed to now. The thought of streaming or downloading podcasts over a cell network years ago meant frustration and long delays.

I don't get the auto-downloading. Why aren't podcsts simply streamed like spotify and Netflix/hulu? I actually think that's what might be continuing to hold podcasting back. I don't want to subscribe, I just want to listen.

I don't know about other phones but streaming is an option with the Windows Phone podcast app. I like to download mostly because I have a data cap and I set the app to download only on WIFI. If I find myself away from a hotspot and want to listen to a show, I can always just stream it.

Because where I live, the cell network is still not 100% reliable. At certain times or places, the stream would stop. Also, mobile data is not free, and volume-limited.

Personally, I do want to subscribe. I don't want Internet radio, I want podcasts.

I think a lot of podcasting apps (including the iOS app) do in fact allow streaming now.

That being said, autodownloading is still very useful and essential for me. Without podcasts, my subway commute would be infinitely more boring.

That would burn through my data volume real quick … (some podcast clients do allow you to stream without subscribing or downloading, but I really don’t see the big difference).

Most of the other answers have been technical, along the lines of the storage space and bandwidth are minimal. Once you can download 20 times faster than you can listen, and you've got at least one show in the backlog of things to listen to, it doesn't matter. However, I'll give a content oriented response against streaming.

Selecting a stream at a random time midprogram would work very well for content that has no past and no future and no logic or information, like a morning zoo show or a news show or sports coverage. I guess that stuff is called infotainment now.

That wouldn't work very well at all for maybe 90% of current podcast content. If the content were aggressively dumbed down, it might be possible to join in the middle, but then no one would listen to the dumbed down stream given an option of non-dumbed down podcasts.

Maybe another way of phrasing it is its like the difference between tuning into a random webcam at a random comedy sports, vs watching this weeks sitcom episode. The former is likely to be pretty funny but no idea what you'll get, and the latter has at least has an 18 minute long story, if not a longer series based story.

I prefer to pre-download (automatically of course) podcasts as I listen while travelling, meaning sometimes the network drops out. Having said that however the podcast app I use (instacast) does indeed stream if I hit play on an episode that isn't already downloaded

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