“You can find us anywhere you get your podcasts.”
I *adore* this phrase, because it has been like two whole-ass decades and not one single venture capital darling has managed to unseat plain RSS as the distribution method for podcasts. Not one. (And they have really tried!)
Podcasts are just out there, like air. You don’t go to one place to get them; you get them from everywhere and anywhere. You can choose how you want to engage with them and manage them and it is legitimately heartwarming that nothing has ever gotten in the way of that being a fundamental fact.
This is the best of what the web is. It will never have a stock ticker or even a marketing scheme. Most people don’t even know it is there. But it endures (past the many, many attempts by squillionaire corporates to kill it) because of its absolute unshakable utility.
My suggestion: any time you hear “anywhere you get your podcasts”, send a little thanks to RSS for keeping the real web alive.
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Carsten Raddatz
in reply to attacus • • •Simon Elvery
in reply to attacus • • •Petra van Cronenburg
in reply to Simon Elvery • • •calcifer
Unknown parent • • •@Capheind @NatureMC @simon @daedalus hosting is the least expensive part of producing a quality podcast. Things like Spotify exclusivity aren’t about hosting, they’re about a reliable income stream for the Podcaster, who can now free up time and spoons that were previously spent on managing sponsorships and so on.
I’m not a fan of Spotify for doing it, but I can hardly blame a Podcaster for finding the offer compelling
calcifer
Unknown parent • • •@Capheind @NatureMC @simon @daedalus even the DIY shows, the main cost is time, if there’s any care about producing something good (and most DIY podcasters who have any success do seem to care a lot about quality.) Time to research, plan, write, edit, produce. If this is someone’s livelihood, it also means time to do the business management parts of subscriptions and/or sponsors and ads. Hosting is nothing in comparison.
I can’t blame someone for looking at Spotify’s offer and concluding it might be easier to spend time on the parts they’re passionate about if they have a more reliable income and less business management to do. But go ahead and be angry at the people doing the hard work and not the big corporation exploiting them. You do you.
Petra van Cronenburg
Unknown parent • • •Petra van Cronenburg
Unknown parent • • •Mark Gardner
in reply to attacus • • •like this
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Ken Fallon (PA7KEN, G5KEN)
in reply to Mark Gardner • • •Mark Gardner
in reply to Ken Fallon (PA7KEN, G5KEN) • • •Ken Fallon (PA7KEN, G5KEN)
in reply to Mark Gardner • • •True. True, but keep in mind (IAMAL) that without specifying your copyright as #CreativeCommons, it is by default "ⓒ all rights reserved". You could argue that it's illegal to even download it.
Mark Gardner
in reply to Ken Fallon (PA7KEN, G5KEN) • • •@ken_fallon Nope, if that were true then computer and network equipment memory, browser caches, and other temporary storage that’s part of the very nature of digital computing would be illegal. A quick Internet search (which creates a lot of copies, including copies of the copies in a search engine index!) would tell you that.
I’m also not a lawyer and I don’t know what jurisdiction you’re in, so I’ll leave it at that to get you started if you want to learn more.
Ken Fallon (PA7KEN, G5KEN)
in reply to Mark Gardner • • •@mjgardner The transfer of the media through the network is covered by Common carrier rules. "...would not be liable for the copyright violations of third parties on their network..." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_c…
Your typical news site, photo sharing sites, video, and music streaming sites apply techniques such as drm, watermarking and tracking to prevent redistribution. The podcast sites would much prefer you to "stream" rather than download, much like the video sites are doing.
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Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Ken Fallon (PA7KEN, G5KEN)
in reply to Ken Fallon (PA7KEN, G5KEN) • • •@mjgardner
The fact that RSS historically provided the ability to download and transfer it to a media playing device (think iPods), is the exception rather than the rule when it comes to providing online media.
The unfortunate state of affairs is that in the majority of the world, all works are automatically copyrighted and it is illegal to download or distribute them without explicit permission.
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Ken Fallon (PA7KEN, G5KEN)
in reply to Ken Fallon (PA7KEN, G5KEN) • • •@mjgardner
That permission is to be found in each of the sites terms and conditions page, or in the terms and conditions you agree to when opening an account. This means that as a listener you have an individual contractual relationship with each of the podcasts you listen to.
By licensing your podcast as #CreativeCommons you have a clear understanding of what that relationship is.
Mark Gardner
in reply to Ken Fallon (PA7KEN, G5KEN) • • •Temporary copies
The IT Law Wikiclacke: exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛
in reply to Mark Gardner • • •Cadu Silva :v_blue:
in reply to attacus • • •@fsnk
and also today you have things like Castopod that lets you host and manage your own podcast, making it ready for RSS and to publish at services like Apple and Google Podcasts.
Castopod is also part of the fediverse so you can follow your favorite podcasts via Mastodon and the like.
I love when a podcast isn't restricted to a platform like Spotify, it must be free for audiences to choose where to consume it.
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Trolli Schmittlauch 🦥
in reply to attacus • • •It's interesting that you take this as a positive sign, because I see this as a sign that the decentralised open podcast landscape might be loosing slowly but surely. Let me explain why:
While there is of course no single source for *all* podcast, each podcast indeed has this definite source: Its feed and the files linked to it, under a certain URI and domain. This feed is then often fed into directories like iTunes or even not-really-podcast platforms like Sp*tify.
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Trolli Schmittlauch 🦥
in reply to Trolli Schmittlauch 🦥 • • •Thus, podcasts used to have a website with a big “Subscribe” link or button on them.
Saying “Wherever you get your podcasts” actually stops mentioning that single source. More and more often there are no fancy websites at that source; in contrast people are just told to rely on their intermediary of choice (directory) to even discover that podcast source.
->
AC Nelson
in reply to attacus • • •What podcast.platforms do you recommend? Currently using Castlight for Android but it is starting to annoy me. It fails to download some episodes and continually retries them. Looking for alternatives.
@adamshostack
clacke: exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛
in reply to AC Nelson • • •attacus
in reply to attacus • • •Given that this post has been read by way more people than I was expecting, and some folks are learning about the role of RSS in podcasting for the first time, here’s a bit more context:
Like many long-running projects, there are a lot of people who deserve the credit for RSS being what it is, including the amazing Aaron Swartz.
Most relevantly for podcasting, at the turn of the millennium Dave Winer released an update to RSS that added support for multimedia to be included in feeds, and gave the example of using it for audio. This is the technical mechanism that led to the rise of podcasting and is still what fuels it today.
RSS is how your podcast-listening app of choice (yes, even Spotify, Stitcher, and Apple Music) knows that the podcast exists and when new episodes are published, no matter where they are hosted. It is what enables syndication and listener choice. (If it isn’t syndicated, it technically isn’t a podcast! That said, technical definitions aren’t social definitions, and many things fall under the colloquial umbrella, so use “podcast” however you like. Audio is such a great medium regardless of what is under the hood.)
#RSS #podcasts
attacus
in reply to attacus • • •RSS does so much other stuff, too: news outlets and blogs often have RSS feeds (and so does your Mastodon account).
Facebook and Twitter used to support it, but have done their best to kill that support in favour of forcing people to visit their sites directly for content. Many people still lament the deprecation of Google Reader because it was such a good and popular place for curating feeds of syndicated content, and its ending was a big blow for public awareness of RSS as tech corps shifted to monetised platforms.
But RSS is still what fuels podcasting! It has survived so much, especially the post-GFC pivot to centralised platforms, and the fact that it is still driving podcasting at a fundamental level is a miracle and a joy.
In the current era of rapid change and renewed excitement for a human-centred, community-powered web, I hope to see it celebrated, supported, and embraced again in more contexts. Don’t be afraid to believe it can still happen.
#RSS #podcasts
Mark Bramhill
in reply to attacus • • •Bob Jonkman
in reply to Mark Bramhill • • •@mcbramhill I do hope you provide the RSS feed URL too. My podcatcher doesn't have a list of all podcasts ever produced. That would be an aggregator, of which I'm trying to avoid the commercial, proprietary ones (Apple, Spotify, Mixcloud, &c.)
@attacus
Mark Bramhill
in reply to Bob Jonkman • • •Bob Jonkman
in reply to Mark Bramhill • • •@mcbramhill Yay for the RSS url!
@attacus @overcastfm
mytwobits01
in reply to attacus • • •I have the opposite perspective on the phrase. I'm not a big podcast user, and "anywhere you get your podcasts" doesn't actually tell me where to find it. I don't use apps or a mobile phone for podcasts; my default way to find content is to look for it on a website. But without being told where to go, I have a devil of a time tracking it down.
I'm not arguing the utility of RSS. Just saying it doesn't cover all the bases of where users are coming from.
clacke: exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛
in reply to mytwobits01 • • •@mytwobits01 @attacus I want to argue that a good podcast allows you to just enter the website root URL and your audio feed client finds the feed.
Unfortunately that disqualifies 95% of the podcasts I enjoy from being "good podcasts".
It's just one stinking HTML element. But people don't do it. Many don't even facilitate finding it on the web pages and you have to use the podcast search facility and hope someone else found it.
David
in reply to attacus • • •clacke: exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛
in reply to David • • •silverwizard
in reply to David • •That seems wrong
Not having a single method, single location, or single app *is* the value
And trying to explain allvof RSS and podcast signoff, which is talking to people who are already listening, is ridiculous