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> Because what it represents is the triumph of exactly the kind of technology that's supposed to be impossible: open, empowering tech that's not owned by any on

> Because what it represents is the triumph of exactly the kind of technology that's supposed to be impossible: open, empowering tech that's not owned by any one company > Contrast this to other media formats online, like YouTube or Tiktok or Twitch, which don't rely on open systems, and are wholly owned by individual tech companies. This is a strange argument, unless I just misunderstand. Are they intending to point out that there are more podcast services than video services? Is “podcast technology” different from an mp3?

FroshKiller 3y ago
Well, yes, of course it's different from an MP3. Part of what makes podcasting possible is RSS. If I upload an MP3 to my website, that isn't the same as uploading an MP3 and publishing an update for it to an RSS feed monitored by individual subscribers and podcast services.
- Solvency 3y ago
  Eh. If I make short documentaries in MP4 format and only distribute them in RSS are they podcasts? If I'm a musician and make music videos through RSS are those podcasts? In other words, is any 1+ set of media files on RSS a podcast?
  - FroshKiller 3y ago
    If you publish them to a podcast-compatible RSS feed, yes, of course, you are podcasting. There are plenty of video podcasts. I know a lot of people conflate "podcast" with "show." Just publishing a podcast feed of your songs might not be something you consider a show per se, and that's fair, but if it's a podcast feed I can subscribe to in my podcast player, then you are podcasting.
ricardobeat 3y ago
It’s not entirely clear, but I think it’s the fact you can simply 301 redirect to your new feed on a different platform. Seems a bit misguided, because unless you’ve been pointing to your own domain the whole time, you still depend on the previous platform to 1) offer this feature at all, 2) keep serving that 301 forever or your old subscribers will be lost. Do podcast apps permanently change the feed URL when they see a 301? Am I missing something?
- Kye 3y ago
  AFAIK most podcast platforms offer redirects.
  - ricardobeat 3y ago
    That does not represent a “triumph of […] tech that's not owned by any one company, that can't be controlled by any one company” though. It’s just companies being nice, because the incentives to not be nice haven’t showed up yet.
- kevincox 3y ago
  The fact is that I don't think it is well specified. My feed reader will update the URL if the ending feed has a self URL that points at itself. But I don't think that is very common. In theory a permanent redirect should also be a signal to update the URL.
Kye 3y ago
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.
- epcoa 3y ago
  > 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?
  - madeofpalk 3y ago
    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.
    - black_puppydog 3y ago
      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.
paulgb 3y ago
If I post a video on TikTok, you need to use the TikTok app to play it (with all the privacy implications of that). If I give you a podcast URL, you can play it in pocketcast, overcast, or even write a few lines of Python to download it and play it in an mp3 player.
- mock-possum 3y ago
  You don’t even need python, RSS is just plain old (plaintext) human-readable XML, just follow the link and find the .mp3 url directly
- charcircuit 3y ago
  >If I post a video on TikTok, you need to use the TikTok app to play it You can play it using a web browser app by going to TikTok's website.
  - input_sh 3y ago
    Can you play a TikTok video on, say, Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts? That's the point. Feature-wise, they're all nearly identical. With podcasts, you can just choose your client or even create your own with the same catalogue as any of the big players. With short-form videos, you can't.
    - charcircuit 3y ago
      Those apps embed a web view which allows those apps to load links to TikTok within the app.
  - themoonisachees 3y ago
    ...with all the privacy concerns that entails. The website is slightly better than the app but it's still a privacy nightmare
adriand 3y ago
To put it simply, no one is able to say, “wherever you get your videos”.
- Kye 3y ago
  We very, very briefly had something like audio podcasts with video. I would fire up Miro (then Democracy Player) when I went to class, then come back to a bunch of videos downloaded via RSS's video containers from places like Revision3 and TWiT. All it lacked was a discovery platform like Apple Podcasts, though the player itself tried to provide discovery. All the surviving shows have moved to YouTube. YouTube could provide the same sort of service, but it's not compatible with Google's dependence on ads.
- hattmall 3y ago
  Sort of, if a user has the same handle and post to all the major sites it works like that.
antihero 3y ago
Podcasts are just a type of media like music or TV. It's akin to saying "wherever you get your music".
- black_puppydog 3y ago
  Except that really, for music there's only 2-3 stores you can get any significant amounts of it. And all of them suck, and lock you into their own apps. Even with physical media there's only so many big labels, and the rest is vanishingly small. Who offers podcasts and operates them is so different from these in quantity that it makes a qualitative difference to the medium.
  - ubermonkey 3y ago
    There are more places to get music now for most people than there were when I was a teen in the 80s. Sure, the streaming services lock you in, but that's part of the deal you make -- small sub fee, all you can eat. I'll make that deal. But Apple, at least, also offers online PURCHASE of DRM-free audio files. I dunno who else still does (Amazon?), but I don't think any of those vendors are still trying to do DRM or lock-in for purchased music. It's just that, by and large, the mass market has moved to the streaming model instead of the purchased-music model.
    - zerocrates 3y ago
      Amazon still does, there's Bandcamp, and you still see individual bands and some labels just selling downloads directly. I don't know of anybody who's selling anything DRM-encumbered for download. Google was still selling MP3s not that long ago but they no longer do since they killed Google Play Music. Amazon also sometimes really nudges you to their subscription and you have to do some clicking around to find a way to buy instead.
eddieroger 3y ago
This quote got me because I think the author missed the goal of the podcast as originally set out. Apple didn't want to sell the medium, they wanted to sell players. They've had many chances to lock down iTunes for podcasts, but didn't, because that's not what they were after. They wanted to sell iPods, then iPhones. And they kinda won - we call them "podcasts" after all, despite people trying to change it to netcasts or other such terms.
oli-g 3y ago
If I follow a podcast, I follow that creator. If I follow a YouTuber, I follow that person's channel on a particular, closed, privately-owned platform. If YouTube decides to kick them out, I no longer follow them. Yesterday I actually learned about an app trying to solve that problem [1] through an absolutely bad-ass video response by one of its creators to a takedown notice from Google [2] (the mic-drop part starts at 3:29) [1] https://grayjay.app/ https://grayjay.app/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJ42f-tV_3w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJ42f-tV_3w

FroshKiller 3y ago

Well, yes, of course it's different from an MP3. Part of what makes podcasting possible is RSS. If I upload an MP3 to my website, that isn't the same as uploading an MP3 and publishing an update for it to an RSS feed monitored by individual subscribers and podcast services.

Solvency 3y ago
Eh. If I make short documentaries in MP4 format and only distribute them in RSS are they podcasts? If I'm a musician and make music videos through RSS are those podcasts? In other words, is any 1+ set of media files on RSS a podcast?
- FroshKiller 3y ago
  If you publish them to a podcast-compatible RSS feed, yes, of course, you are podcasting. There are plenty of video podcasts. I know a lot of people conflate "podcast" with "show." Just publishing a podcast feed of your songs might not be something you consider a show per se, and that's fair, but if it's a podcast feed I can subscribe to in my podcast player, then you are podcasting.

ricardobeat 3y ago

It’s not entirely clear, but I think it’s the fact you can simply 301 redirect to your new feed on a different platform. Seems a bit misguided, because unless you’ve been pointing to your own domain the whole time, you still depend on the previous platform to 1) offer this feature at all, 2) keep serving that 301 forever or your old subscribers will be lost. Do podcast apps permanently change the feed URL when they see a 301? Am I missing something?

Kye 3y ago
AFAIK most podcast platforms offer redirects.
- ricardobeat 3y ago
  That does not represent a “triumph of […] tech that's not owned by any one company, that can't be controlled by any one company” though. It’s just companies being nice, because the incentives to not be nice haven’t showed up yet.
kevincox 3y ago
The fact is that I don't think it is well specified. My feed reader will update the URL if the ending feed has a self URL that points at itself. But I don't think that is very common. In theory a permanent redirect should also be a signal to update the URL.

Kye 3y ago

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.

epcoa 3y ago
> 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?
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  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.
  - black_puppydog 3y ago
    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.

paulgb 3y ago

If I post a video on TikTok, you need to use the TikTok app to play it (with all the privacy implications of that). If I give you a podcast URL, you can play it in pocketcast, overcast, or even write a few lines of Python to download it and play it in an mp3 player.

mock-possum 3y ago
You don’t even need python, RSS is just plain old (plaintext) human-readable XML, just follow the link and find the .mp3 url directly
charcircuit 3y ago
>If I post a video on TikTok, you need to use the TikTok app to play it You can play it using a web browser app by going to TikTok's website.
- input_sh 3y ago
  Can you play a TikTok video on, say, Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts? That's the point. Feature-wise, they're all nearly identical. With podcasts, you can just choose your client or even create your own with the same catalogue as any of the big players. With short-form videos, you can't.
  - charcircuit 3y ago
    Those apps embed a web view which allows those apps to load links to TikTok within the app.
- themoonisachees 3y ago
  ...with all the privacy concerns that entails. The website is slightly better than the app but it's still a privacy nightmare

adriand 3y ago

To put it simply, no one is able to say, “wherever you get your videos”.

Kye 3y ago
We very, very briefly had something like audio podcasts with video. I would fire up Miro (then Democracy Player) when I went to class, then come back to a bunch of videos downloaded via RSS's video containers from places like Revision3 and TWiT. All it lacked was a discovery platform like Apple Podcasts, though the player itself tried to provide discovery. All the surviving shows have moved to YouTube. YouTube could provide the same sort of service, but it's not compatible with Google's dependence on ads.
hattmall 3y ago
Sort of, if a user has the same handle and post to all the major sites it works like that.

antihero 3y ago

Podcasts are just a type of media like music or TV. It's akin to saying "wherever you get your music".

black_puppydog 3y ago
Except that really, for music there's only 2-3 stores you can get any significant amounts of it. And all of them suck, and lock you into their own apps. Even with physical media there's only so many big labels, and the rest is vanishingly small. Who offers podcasts and operates them is so different from these in quantity that it makes a qualitative difference to the medium.
- ubermonkey 3y ago
  There are more places to get music now for most people than there were when I was a teen in the 80s. Sure, the streaming services lock you in, but that's part of the deal you make -- small sub fee, all you can eat. I'll make that deal. But Apple, at least, also offers online PURCHASE of DRM-free audio files. I dunno who else still does (Amazon?), but I don't think any of those vendors are still trying to do DRM or lock-in for purchased music. It's just that, by and large, the mass market has moved to the streaming model instead of the purchased-music model.
  - zerocrates 3y ago
    Amazon still does, there's Bandcamp, and you still see individual bands and some labels just selling downloads directly. I don't know of anybody who's selling anything DRM-encumbered for download. Google was still selling MP3s not that long ago but they no longer do since they killed Google Play Music. Amazon also sometimes really nudges you to their subscription and you have to do some clicking around to find a way to buy instead.

eddieroger 3y ago

This quote got me because I think the author missed the goal of the podcast as originally set out. Apple didn't want to sell the medium, they wanted to sell players. They've had many chances to lock down iTunes for podcasts, but didn't, because that's not what they were after. They wanted to sell iPods, then iPhones. And they kinda won - we call them "podcasts" after all, despite people trying to change it to netcasts or other such terms.

oli-g 3y ago

If I follow a podcast, I follow that creator. If I follow a YouTuber, I follow that person's channel on a particular, closed, privately-owned platform. If YouTube decides to kick them out, I no longer follow them. Yesterday I actually learned about an app trying to solve that problem [1] through an absolutely bad-ass video response by one of its creators to a takedown notice from Google [2] (the mic-drop part starts at 3:29) [1] https://grayjay.app/ https://grayjay.app/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJ42f-tV_3w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJ42f-tV_3w