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The audacity of Apple Podcasts

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Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#131

Post by lmm »

crazygringo wrote: post #19
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.

Why would there be any expectation that a podcast distribution service should also serve as a private file archive? And why would podcast hosts even need to retrieve their own material? If there are podcast hosts who don't hold onto their original audio files they had before uploading them, then what are they thinking? That's like sending a project to a client and then deleting your own copy of it. I understand that…

> Why would there be any expectation that a podcast distribution service should also serve as a private file archive? And why would podcast hosts even need to retrieve their own material?

If it's a podcast distribution service it should be distributing the rss and mp3s. That's what "podcast" means!

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#132

Post by filoleg »

makeitdouble wrote: post #126
tcarn wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, this is a great workaround then to the author's issue.

For sure, it's nice to know there's an out for people willing to work it out. TBF, I'd assume the author knows there would be workarounds, like de-DRM the iTunes files. Or go full analog loophole style and rerecord the podcast audio etc. The point was probably how shitty of an experience it stayed for people outside the Apple bubble (podcasts are really about convenience. I only started seriously listening to them on…

> The point was probably how shitty of an experience it stayed for people outside the Apple bubble

Could be, but they made it sound like those workarounds are required everywhere outside of Apple devices (which would include Windows as well). Which is painting a pretty different picture from what the reality is, as none of the workarounds are required on Windows, it is click and play just like on any Apple device.

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#133

Post by bastawhiz »

CharlesW wrote: post #100

> Here’s what’s fucked: once you’ve started using Apple for hosting, you’re stuck. The fundamental misunderstanding is that Apple is not hosting the source RSS feed or media. As someone who operates a podcast hosting service, it's bizarre to me that the author doesn't understand this. > This customer was pasting their Apple listing URL, but the import tool was not getting a feed back. Of course, because it's not an R…

> The fundamental misunderstanding is that Apple is not hosting the source RSS feed or media. As someone who operates a podcast hosting service, it's bizarre to me that the author doesn't understand this.

Please Google the Apple Podcasters Program, launched in 2021. This absolutely exists and is distinct from shows that they only list in their directory. They absolutely host the source material. I signed up for it myself to test!

> Of course, because it's not an RSS feed URL. And again, I'm shocked that this person doesn't understand the difference.

Apple exposes a public API that returns the listing metadata given the podcast ID (extracted from the end of the listing URL). That contains the RSS feed URL. You can test this with a service like getrssfeed.com. Other hosts like Transistor also offer this convenience.

Perhaps you should do a little more keeping up with the podcast industry if you're one of my competitors? ;)

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#134

Post by filoleg »

bastawhiz wrote: post #125
filoleg wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That part of TFA confused me as well, because I just tested it out on my Win10 desktop, and it worked effortlessly. I didn't even have to search for the local files. iTunes had a nice "Show in Windows Explorer" button next to the episode I downloaded, which opened a directory with the mp3 audio file for the episode (neatly tagged and named and all). I opened it with VLC and confirmed that the playback works perfectly…

Here's an example show, I'm curious if it works for you: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/test-podcast/id1667708...

Do you happen to have another example? This one doesn't work for me, but for an entirely different reason - it says that this specific podcast isn't available in the US store at the moment. So I cannot even access the episode on any device at all.

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#135

Post by bastawhiz »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #107

I was interested to read the article and comments here because I am a very happy user of Apple Podcasts, but had not thought about the service from a content creator standpoint. One question I had is: if you want to make money from a podcast, is it really so bad to just pick one platform like Apple Podcasts, or YouTube, or, etc.? As a small business, isn’t having one simple to use platform pretty good? Also, I have e…

Author here. I run pinecast.com, which offers paid subscriptions for Podcasters as one of the features. You can do what Apple does without looking yourself to one platform. Pinecast is hardly the only service that offers this, as well.

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#136

Post by SllX »

bastawhiz wrote: post #122
SllX wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re a hobbyist, you might go “oh no, this won’t work out, Overcast users can’t see my podcast” and switch hosting providers. If you’re going into podcasting as a business, don’t skimp on having a lawyer review the things you’ll be signing up and paying for, and if you skimp on that and get unlucky, expect to be doing the work required to move providers if what you signed up for isn’t satisfactory. It’s really t…

> expect only exactly what the service offers in the agreement, and if the terms are not satisfactory, go sign with someone else. You can't go somewhere else, because going somewhere else means starting over from scratch. That's the whole point of my post: you're locked in. The customer who reached out with this issue has hundreds of episodes and can't reasonably manually reupload them all to another service.

And that sucks for them, but it is also what the service is. It’s a cheap way to funnel people through the Podcasts app and generate more services revenue for Apple; you can’t even really call it a podcast host by any reasonable definition. Spotify’s service is about funneling people through the Spotify app to sell subscriptions and ads. YouTube’s service is basically the same. It’s a legitimate service that they signed up for that if you know what you’re getting into probably isn’t the worst deal.

Total crap though for podcast listeners, and also if you didn’t check out the service before committing to it. Sorry for your prospective customer, hopefully your post helps keep others out of this lobster trap.

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#137

Post by howinteresting »

tomxor wrote: post #102

> That’s right: if you host your show with Apple, the only listeners you can have are folks with the Apple Podcasts app. This feels like an absolutely wild choice from a product perspective; it’s the mindset of a company who still thinks that they have dominance over the podcasting world. It’s ludicrous to assume that it’s a good thing for listeners to have to have specific hardware in order to listen to a podcast. I…

I was fully in the Apple ecosystem several years ago. I came to the realization you talk about some time in 2019 or so—very glad I got myself out of it.

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#138

Post by layer8 »

CharlesW wrote: post #100

> Here’s what’s fucked: once you’ve started using Apple for hosting, you’re stuck. The fundamental misunderstanding is that Apple is not hosting the source RSS feed or media. As someone who operates a podcast hosting service, it's bizarre to me that the author doesn't understand this. > This customer was pasting their Apple listing URL, but the import tool was not getting a feed back. Of course, because it's not an R…

I’m sure they do understand, but it breaks their (clients’) use case of migrating a podcast from Apple to their service by using Apple as the source. Their clients may still have the original media, but it is missing the podcast metadata (episode descriptions etc.) that was presumably entered/authored using Apple’s system, making it difficult to associate that metadata back to the original media in an automated fashion.

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#139

Post by bastawhiz »

jackson1442 wrote: post #65

I think some of these issues stem from the paid subscriptions part (especially the lack of an RSS feed). I'm not very familiar with RSS, but is there a solution for authenticated RSS yet? The authentication could be used to validate that you're a subscriber, and push out subscriber-only content, allowing creators to monetize in more ways while also keeping the platform open.

There are specs. Notably the folks at RadioPublic put one out a few years ago that would standardize the process, but it never panned out. At Pinecast you get a unique feed URL that's tied to a paid subscription, but that's a bit hard to use, unfortunately.

Re: The audacity of Apple Podcasts

#140

Post by bastawhiz »

julienb_sea wrote: post #83

It seems bizarre to me that any serious podcast would fail to retain: - Their own backups of their master audio - Separate uploads to competing services with significant market share (e.g. Spotify) It's not really surprising that Apple DRM-locks the audio files pulled from their podcast service. They should have messaged that better, but Apple has DRM locked everything coming from their music services for a very long…

Even if you did retain the audio files, you still can't move your listeners to a new hosting service. You're forced to start over. Making you manually reupload your audio just adds insult to injury.
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