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The audacity of Apple Podcasts

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Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#21

Post by xoa »

crazygringo wrote: post #15

> You could sign up to allow Apple to host your show and its audio (for a cool $20/year). In exchange, you could charge a subscription fee to your listeners... If you host your show with Apple, the only listeners you can have are folks with the Apple Podcasts app... The audio will be protected with DRM. The author presents this as "audacity" and bad... but doesn't it make perfect sense? If you're charging a subscript…

>If you're charging a subscription fee then it makes sense that the podcast lives in a walled DRM'ed garden

No, it absolutely does not. In the same way it doesn't make any sense to have DRM on music or anything else I pay for. I'm a paying customer, why should my experience and the product I'm paying for literally be worse then the people who pirate it? This thinking is straight out of the 90s/00s RIAA playbook that Apple themselves played a major role in tearing down! Normal podcast systems charge money and make things member-only just fine with normal RSS and standard sound. If someone wants to save one they got while paying to listen to again later so what?

>Also, if Apple is hosting it for nearly free ($20/year is nothing), why would you expect Apple to make it available to competing podcast apps?

"Nearly" isn't actually free. It's a paid service, and it's for something that's "nearly free" to provide too by that argument. Why shouldn't it just be standard, with a bit of Apple polish in the interface and tooling and some options for users to add Apple as an intermediary for privacy if they want? This is a dumb, good-will burning approach for peanuts. Anything Apple gets from this isn't worth even having a front page story on HN and a few thousand people noticing and getting just a little bit more irritated. It's a symptom of a company that isn't thinking as holistically as it once did, or more charitably this is such an unimportant thing that it didn't actually get any serious attention and they just built it in a proprietary lazy way out of their current defaults I guess.

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#22

Post by moogleii »

dabernathy89 wrote: post #16
crazygringo wrote: post #15

> You could sign up to allow Apple to host your show and its audio (for a cool $20/year). In exchange, you could charge a subscription fee to your listeners... If you host your show with Apple, the only listeners you can have are folks with the Apple Podcasts app... The audio will be protected with DRM. The author presents this as "audacity" and bad... but doesn't it make perfect sense? If you're charging a subscript…

This service doesn't give podcast hosts a way to retrieve their own material. It doesn't inform them that they'll be completely locked into Apple's service. If creators were aware of this upfront, then sure, I'd say "just don't use it" too.

I'm a bit out of the loop but wouldn't hosts have the original source material that they uploaded? Similar to how users have the source images/videos to whatever they upload to TikTok and Instagram? I suspect neither offer an export either.

Additionally, the author complains that an Apple Podcast user has to go through the app (and all its restrictions), but again, not that different from Instagram posts. As a user, you must go through Instagram to see photos. These users aren't there just for generic hosting, but also for the network effects. For those that want generic hosting, there are other more appropriate services, like google photos or maybe Flickr (or self hosting).

I'm not arguing the Podcasts/Instagram model is better, just that there is fairly old precedent, so the purported shock value seems pretty low.

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#23

Post by harshitaneja »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #11
harshitaneja wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate the sentiment of not wanting to give into vendor lock-in for convenience but why manually download podcasts and go through the whole process when you can use RSS and ask podcasters to keep supporting RSS feeds? You get good ergonomics while still keeping the process decentralized and without vendor lock-ins?

I agree-- RSS feeds are wonderful. I just wish more podcasts kept a complete feed. I'm a "completionist" and it turns me off when I have to scrape episode archive pages to get download links for past episodes that have dropped off the RSS feed. That's the biggest barrier for me to start listening to a new podcast. I own an iPhone but also don't use Apple's built-in functionality unless the feature supports standards-…

I feel you. Even though I am more okay with the transience of the feeds.

I have a similar setup but running on my cloud VM and using my custom scripts and apps. I have built a CLI client but not gotten around to mobile apps yet. Hope to finish work on a proper self hosted server and a suite of applications for desktop and mobile for the same and open source it.

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#24

Post by nofreelunch »

vmoore wrote: post #2

I deliberately don't use any of Apple's services, even though I own an iPhone. The only thing I use is the App Store, and even then I'm a minimalist as to what I install. If I want to listen to podcasts, I use the VLC Player app, and grab the podcast from the Podcast's official site, and then use iTunes to transfer the .MP3 to VLC, over USB. Cause I'm oldskool like that. If the podcast in question doesn't have a site…

That is so much work to go through when you could just buy an android instead of an iphone!

I don't see how this could possibly provide you any benefit besides some sort of glib satisfaction. You don't want to support apple but still give them money to use their devices.

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#25

Post by bastawhiz »

georgel wrote: post #18
bastawhiz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> creating DDoS levels of traffic Author here. This has never been a problem, both in terms of volume and cost. I host ~0.25% (maybe more? I haven't checked recently) of all podcasts listed on Apple and up to a few years ago, I wasn't even using a CDN. Two Heroku dynos at ~$250/mo (25 customer subscriptions today) running a Python back-end with no caching at all was able to keep up without trouble. In fact, the only…

The entirety of all the podcasts on iTunes/Apple Podcasts RSS feeds downloaded is around 200-250GB across the 2.5M+ pods. Hosting the RSS feed should be an easy task. Add in caching via ETag and server-side (host the feed as a static file, only re-render when user updates something), and your server load goes down drastically. It gets a bit complex if your hosting company supports dynamic audio/ad insertion depending…

Audio insertion is actually straightforward: the audio URLs from the feed can redirect!

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#27

Post by browningstreet »

cosmotic wrote: post #7

I stopped using Apple Podcasts because 1) they killed connectivity to my iPod; 2) the app is extremely buggy; and 3) the app is totally unusable.

I only use Apple Podcasts to automatically sync a couple of podcasts onto my Apple Watch. The rest of the time I use Overcast. But that Apple Watch sync feature is a compelling use case.

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#28

Post by voytec »

I remember having an iMac with 3TB hard disk on which I stored all my CDs ripped in an lossless format. iTunes had an option to stream the library to local network and since this iMac was on 24/7, this was a perfect solution for me to have an audio-NAS and also kind-of remote streaming when I was connecting via VPN to my home network.

Than there came Tim Cook's "upgrades": OS X was renamed to macOS, iTunes to Music, and Apple blocked LAN-related options which came with purchased devices.

At the same time Apple asked me to pay for the same functionality and their ecosystem's attractiveness started getting shittier. Since then, with similar actions, Tim Cook switched increasingly more of my activities from Apple's increasingly-hostile and toxic ecosystem to almost anywhere else.

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#29

Post by bastawhiz »

moogleii wrote: post #22
dabernathy89 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This service doesn't give podcast hosts a way to retrieve their own material. It doesn't inform them that they'll be completely locked into Apple's service. If creators were aware of this upfront, then sure, I'd say "just don't use it" too.

I'm a bit out of the loop but wouldn't hosts have the original source material that they uploaded? Similar to how users have the source images/videos to whatever they upload to TikTok and Instagram? I suspect neither offer an export either. Additionally, the author complains that an Apple Podcast user has to go through the app (and all its restrictions), but again, not that different from Instagram posts. As a user,…

Author here.

> wouldn't hosts have the original source material that they uploaded

As far as I'm aware, Apple never resurfaces the audio after it's uploaded, even in your dashboard. Even if they did, making someone manually download and reupload every asset for potentially hundreds of episodes is sadistic. Moreover, you physically can't leave, because your listeners won't follow you to your new hosting service.

> These users aren't there just for generic hosting, but also for the network effects.

The network effects are limited to an app with only 40% of the market. Outside the US, that number is even smaller.

> just that there is fairly old precedent

Every podcast hosting service ever has allowed you to leave their service.

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#30

Post by bastawhiz »

crazygringo wrote: post #15

> You could sign up to allow Apple to host your show and its audio (for a cool $20/year). In exchange, you could charge a subscription fee to your listeners... If you host your show with Apple, the only listeners you can have are folks with the Apple Podcasts app... The audio will be protected with DRM. The author presents this as "audacity" and bad... but doesn't it make perfect sense? If you're charging a subscript…

Author here.

> If you're charging a subscription fee

The DRM applies even if you charge no fee.

> why would you expect Apple to make it available to competing podcast apps

Because every single other podcast hosting service does, with the exception of folks that signed a contract with Spotify.

> If you post something on TikTok it doesn't show up on people's Facebook feeds.

It can, actually. You can post a link. If I upload a podcast to Apple, it's physically inaccessible unless you have a Mac or an iOS device.

> Apple isn't taking away self-hosted RSS podcast feeds.

That was never the point, and not my concern. What they're doing is tricking small podcasters into signing up for a cheap service that prevents them from ever leaving.

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