<story><title>The audacity of Apple Podcasts</title><url>https://basta.substack.com/p/the-absolute-audacity-of-apple-podcasts</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>crazygringo</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;You could sign up to allow Apple to host your show and its audio (for a cool $20&amp;#x2F;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.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;The author presents this as &amp;quot;audacity&amp;quot; and bad... but doesn&amp;#x27;t it make perfect sense? If you&amp;#x27;re charging a subscription fee then it makes sense that the podcast lives in a walled DRM&amp;#x27;ed garden. Also, if Apple is hosting it for nearly free ($20&amp;#x2F;year is nothing), why would you expect Apple to make it available to competing podcast apps? If you post something on TikTok it doesn&amp;#x27;t show up on people&amp;#x27;s Facebook feeds.&lt;p&gt;Apple isn&amp;#x27;t taking away self-hosted RSS podcast feeds. It&amp;#x27;s presenting a separate paid subscription experience within its Podcasts app. No &amp;quot;audacity&amp;quot; about it. If you don&amp;#x27;t want that as a creator, don&amp;#x27;t use it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bastawhiz</author><text>Author here.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; If you&amp;#x27;re charging a subscription fee&lt;p&gt;The DRM applies even if you charge no fee.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; why would you expect Apple to make it available to competing podcast apps&lt;p&gt;Because every single other podcast hosting service does, with the exception of folks that signed a contract with Spotify.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; If you post something on TikTok it doesn&amp;#x27;t show up on people&amp;#x27;s Facebook feeds.&lt;p&gt;It can, actually. You can post a link. If I upload a podcast to Apple, it&amp;#x27;s physically inaccessible unless you have a Mac or an iOS device.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Apple isn&amp;#x27;t taking away self-hosted RSS podcast feeds.&lt;p&gt;That was never the point, and not my concern. What they&amp;#x27;re doing is tricking small podcasters into signing up for a cheap service that prevents them from ever leaving.</text></comment>
<story><title>The audacity of Apple Podcasts</title><url>https://basta.substack.com/p/the-absolute-audacity-of-apple-podcasts</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>crazygringo</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;You could sign up to allow Apple to host your show and its audio (for a cool $20&amp;#x2F;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.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;The author presents this as &amp;quot;audacity&amp;quot; and bad... but doesn&amp;#x27;t it make perfect sense? If you&amp;#x27;re charging a subscription fee then it makes sense that the podcast lives in a walled DRM&amp;#x27;ed garden. Also, if Apple is hosting it for nearly free ($20&amp;#x2F;year is nothing), why would you expect Apple to make it available to competing podcast apps? If you post something on TikTok it doesn&amp;#x27;t show up on people&amp;#x27;s Facebook feeds.&lt;p&gt;Apple isn&amp;#x27;t taking away self-hosted RSS podcast feeds. It&amp;#x27;s presenting a separate paid subscription experience within its Podcasts app. No &amp;quot;audacity&amp;quot; about it. If you don&amp;#x27;t want that as a creator, don&amp;#x27;t use it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>xoa</author><text>&amp;gt;&lt;i&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re charging a subscription fee then it makes sense that the podcast lives in a walled DRM&amp;#x27;ed garden&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;No, it absolutely does not. In the same way it doesn&amp;#x27;t make any sense to have DRM on music or anything else I pay for. I&amp;#x27;m a paying customer, why should my experience and the product I&amp;#x27;m paying for literally be worse then the people who pirate it? This thinking is straight out of the 90s&amp;#x2F;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?&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;&lt;i&gt;Also, if Apple is hosting it for nearly free ($20&amp;#x2F;year is nothing), why would you expect Apple to make it available to competing podcast apps?&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Nearly&amp;quot; isn&amp;#x27;t actually free. It&amp;#x27;s a paid service, and it&amp;#x27;s for something that&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;nearly free&amp;quot; to provide too by that argument. Why shouldn&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;s a symptom of a company that isn&amp;#x27;t thinking as holistically as it once did, or more charitably this is such an unimportant thing that it didn&amp;#x27;t actually get any serious attention and they just built it in a proprietary lazy way out of their current defaults I guess.</text></comment>