…
So it was inevitable that Apple would add video support to their podcasting apps. And it makes sense for Apple to update the technical underpinnings; the assumptions that were made
when designing podcasts over two decades ago aren’t really appropriate for many contemporary uses. For example, back then, by default an entire podcast episode would be downloaded
to your iPod for convenient listening on the go, just like songs in your music library. But downloading a giant 4K video clip of an hour-long podcast show that you might not even
watch, just in case you might want to see it, would be a huge waste of resources and bandwidth. Modern users are used to streaming everything. Thus, Apple updated their apps to
support just grabbing snippets of video as they’re needed, and to their credit, Apple is embracing an open video format when doing so, instead of some proprietary system that
requires podcasters to pay a fee or get permission.
The problem, though, is that Apple is only allowing these new video streams to be served by a small number of pre-approved
commercial providers that they’ve hand-selected. In the podcasting world, there are no gatekeepers; if I want to start a podcast today, I can publish a podcast feed here on
anildash.com and put up some MP3s with my episodes, and anyone anywhere in the world can subscribe to that podcast, I don’t have to ask anyone’s permission, tell anyone
about it, or agree to anyone’s terms of service.
…
When I started my pointless podcast, I didn’t need anybody else’s infrastructure or permission. Podcasts are, in the vein of the Web itself (and thanks at
least in part to my former coworker Dave Winer), distributed and democratised.
All you need to host a podcast is an RSS file and some audio files. You can put them onto your shared VM. You can put them onto your homelab, You can put them onto a
GitHub Pages site. You can put them onto a Neocities site. Or you can shell out for a commercial host and distribute your content across a global network of CDNs, for maximum
performance! All of these are podcasts, and they’re all equal from a technical perspective.
Video podcasts could be the same. Even if – as Apple suggest – HLS is to be mandatory for their player,
that doesn’t necessitate a big corporate third-party provider. Having an “allowlist” of people who can host your podcast’s video is gatekeeping.
Also, it’s… not really podcasting any more. It’s been pointed out that before “platform-exclusive” podcasts (I’m looking at you, Spotify) are not truly podcasts: if it’s not an RSS feed
plus some audio files, it’s not a podcast, it’s lightly sparkling audio.
Can the same analogy be used for a podcast player? Is a player that only supports content (in this case, video content) if it’s hosted by a particular partner…
not-a-podcast-player? Either way, it’s pretty embarrassing for Apple of all people to turn their back on what makes a podcast a podcast.
