John Gruber has a great post on Luminary and the trend of companies trying to redefine what “podcast” means. It’s not a podcast if there’s no RSS feed and it can’t work in multiple client apps:
Being client-agnostic is the spirit of the open internet, and I think it’s implicitly part of being a “podcast”. Openness was certainly part of how podcasting came to be.
Substack is another company that initially tried to ride the popularity of podcasts by calling their audio in email newsletters a “podcast”. I wrote about it here. I’m happy to notice that as of this week, Substack has real podcast support by adding private RSS feeds for newsletter subscribers. That’s the right way to go and now their audio shows work in any podcast client.
We do not need the “Netflix of podcasts”. Anyone can create and distribute a podcast — even Micro.blog has support for podcast hosting and a simple app for recording and publishing podcast feeds that work anywhere — so it would be a step back for the industry if a single company tried to control distribution.
