301–310 of 327 posts
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Every other podcast hosting service in existence provides RSS feeds. But unless you've already done your homework and you're starting a podcast, you don't know why not having one is important.
Spotify?
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>they say it will have DRM I confused what possible definition of 'Digital Rights Management' could entail 'anyone can freely rip your files.'
How about 'nobody can freely rip my subscriber only files' but free files are free to be ripped? Seems like a reasonable interpretation to me. Even more reasonably, I might expect that I can freely rip my files regardless of DRM.
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>they say it will have DRM I confused what possible definition of 'Digital Rights Management' could entail 'anyone can freely rip your files.'
What about "I can freely rip my own files"? Does the definition preclude that also?
I don't use their app (Overcast for iOS is great!), so I wasn't familiar with any of this, but most of their site seems focused on the usual podcast stuff, same as it has been for a long time. When I started digging to find the bad behavior, I eventually came across this page about subscriptions.
Is the idea that people who have an existing podcast and are tired of paying the S3 or OVH bill (or whatever) look into this "Apple Podcasts Subscriptions" service and it says right up top you can offer your podcast for free. So they click through to the pricing page[1] and see that they can sign up for $20/year and keep offering their show for free, and it isn't clear on the publicly-available pages I've linked so far that this is going to break your podcast, making it no longer freely available everywhere.
It's possible that's buried somewhere in the fine print, and given how many lawyers Apple employs, I'd be shocked if it's not. Still, this is BAD behavior, a bait-and-switch.
It's possible to offer podcasts by subscription. Even on their own list of hosting providers[2] they mention Blubrry, Libsyn, Omny, and RSS.com, all of which do that. (Most of them charge more than $20/year for hosting, too.) But critically, all of those still offer a feed so you can listen in the app of your choice. Once you take away the feed and lock it down to only your app, you're not producing a podcast anymore. You're producing an on-demand audio show, like Spotify does.
I get the appeal. Spotify and Apple both can say "using our app, you can listen to any podcast, PLUS a bunch of shows exclusive to us!" But of course, Spotify's exclusives can't be listened to in Apple Podcasts, and Apple Podcasts exclusives can't be listened to in Spotify, because they're not actually podcasts at that point.
Apple should know better. They're usually better than this. Shame on Apple.
0. https://podcasters.apple.com/878-subscriptions
1. https://podcasters.apple.com/support/904-availability-of-app...
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> 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…
So you think Apple should host podcasts for free out of the goodness of their heart? Apple's a business, not a charity/non-profit. Podcast hosting for $20/year is a huge bargain. Libsyn's cheapest plan is $5/month with limits on storage. Add in the fact that you're published by one of the largest podcast directories on earth and the value is immense.
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It's perfectly reasonable for a user to pay a big company for hosting, and then delete their local copies, since they paid for hosting. And then assume that, because their data is publicly available, that they'll be able to download that information. Getting your photos off of Instagram is easy, according to the top 10 search results for "Instagram photo downloader". But even then, the distinction that you're not pay…
> and then delete their local copies I don’t understand this practice. Why would you delete your own local content you probably took time to create and care about….? This strikes me as just a novice computer user type thing.
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You don’t need to be a lawyer to have opinions on what the law should be, but if you’re going to propose a legal reform you’re going to come up against the existing values that caused the existing laws to be formed. Contract law is about one of the oldest forms of law there is and it persists because it is fundamentally two or more parties coming to and being bound by an agreement. It is an age old tale at this point…
Yes, contract law is as old as the Garden of Eden but there can also be too much of a good thing. The reality is that each of us enter into contracts all the time that we don’t read. And even if you read it the first time, you’ll get periodic updates to terms and conditions in your inbox. If everyone had to read the terms and conditions each time, society would grind to a halt. Given that fact, the only reasonable wa…
Life would be nicer if everyone wrote with clarity, but given that they don’t, we have a special class of people who went through three years of house training to interpret long-ass documents written to disambiguate any possible ambiguities in advance to a standard the parties can agree to; because if you don’t spell everything out exactly, then you might lose if you have to go to court.
The contracts themselves do have to be within the bounds of what’s legal. So for example, you can’t legally sell yourself into slavery because that would come right up against the law and be an illegal contract. Similarly, NDAs don’t pass muster in California because they’re statutorily limited.
So given that you’re probably not going to get rounded up and made into a Human CentiPad for agreeing to the Apple Music TOS or give up your firstborn to use Gmail, I guess you have to prioritize don’t you? When the stakes are “I’ll lose access to this service”, you better figure out what can cause you to lose it if you value the service. A good place to start is to know what is mission critical, like a web host for your podcast if your business is podcasting and an invoice tracker if you do a lot of billing.
So if you’re doing business and you didn’t review the service agreement ahead of time, that is on you. I work in a small business right now with a very small number of people: we review our service agreements ahead of time before we sign them, and even after we’ve reviewed them we have a lawyer on retainer we run them by even if we’re just changing vendors or adding a new vendor because sometimes vendors try to slip things in. That’s what it’s like to do business. There’s a lot of paperwork too, even if the paperwork is virtual and if you take shortcuts, it might work out for you, but you’re exposing yourself to issues down the road if you don’t do your due diligence.
Life’s tough in the aluminum siding business. I don’t know what else to tell you.
> 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…
The key issue here is that uploading an audio file to Apple Podcasts Subscriptions makes it available within the Apple Podcasts app--but nowhere else. Not Chrome nor Safari nor Firefox, not Overcast nor Google Podcasts nor any other client. So no, these things are not the same, not even close.
Every podcast ever can be listened to in any podcast client ever, with two exceptions: Spotify's on-demand audio shows that they insist on calling "podcasts," and Apple's on-demand audio shows that they call "Apple Podcast Subscriptions." They are the outliers, and deserve to be shamed for it.
Other solutions for subscriber-only and paid podcast subscriptions exist, but Spotify and Apple are doing their own proprietary things which should not then be called podcasts.
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You don’t need to be a lawyer to have opinions on what the law should be, but if you’re going to propose a legal reform you’re going to come up against the existing values that caused the existing laws to be formed. Contract law is about one of the oldest forms of law there is and it persists because it is fundamentally two or more parties coming to and being bound by an agreement. It is an age old tale at this point…
Laws supposedly punish anti competitive practices, yet somehow Apple still hasn't been shut down for owning both an OS and an app store (and with their own apps in there too !) on very personal computers...
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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 si…
On the topic of subscriptions, Spotify does have an open ecosystem where purchasing a subscription through Spotify isn't necessarily purchasing a subscription through Anchor. With Apple, the only subscription you're buying is Apple's subscriptions and other platforms are completely locked out.
> it’s because they’re trying to turn their Podcast app into YouTube for Podcasts with an App Store model which is just on its face total crap
C’est la vie. I would give Spotify kudos but their own podcast foray is what caused me to quit them.