Podcasts are, for the most part, decentralized and seem to be still booming in popularity. I don’t see why a decentralized video platform couldn’t work too.
I've never seen any that weren't being pushed to one of the major podcast apps - and thusly centralized. I mean, the whole term comes from the fact that it was originally downloadable to your iPod through iTunes. None of the podcasts I've ever found could really be considered decentralized - they might have a webpage somewhere, sure, but if they're not in Apple's iTunes/Podcast app, I'm not going to find them. Honestly, I haven't found a decent alternative on Android - I know there are several but none have as robust a catalog. I even use iTunes on Windows for podcast searching.
It's a very centralized market around specific aggregators. Could it weather a transition to a decentralized market structure if Apple were to disown it tomorrow? Maybe, but it would take a lot of energy to get there.
Believe it or not, but people without iTunes are also listening to podcasts.
I've yet to come across a podcast I wanted to listen to without an RSS feed available through a website. For discovery there are several good alternatives to iTunes, for example https://player.fm
Most people don’t know how to go to a podcast’s website, copy the link to the RSS feed, and then paste it into their podcast app. They just search for the podcast in their podcast app. So, if you produce a podcast, you need to be in the major podcast directories to get traction. Thus, in effect, podcasts are highly centralized.
This feels like moving the goalpost to me. If PeerTube succeeded, but most of its videos were being linked and shared on Facebook and Reddit, would you call it centralized?
It's fairly common for me to see people share direct links to a podcast's website if they want to share a specific episode. And even from the point of view where iTunes is a centralized indexer, they're still very clearly pointing at a decentralized service.
The biggest podcast aggregation service in the industry decided to rely on a decentralized model rather than hosting files themselves. That doesn't count for anything?
The fact that every single podcast app is using a distributed protocol (RSS), including Apple, doesn't count for anything?
Note that my original point was not that podcasts are centralized. I merely took issue with somebody else claiming that podcasts are decentralized. They’re decentralized for distribution. But distribution is the easy part on the internet. It’s aggregating attention that is the hard part. And that part of the podcast market is entirely centralized.
> But distribution is the easy part on the internet. It’s aggregating attention that is the hard part.
ATM for video the content hosting, distribution, discovery, indexing, consumption, and commenting are all centralized. Let's say PeerTube brings the video world inline with podcasts and knocks that list down to just discovery and content indexing. That would be a really big win. That would be way more decentralized than what we have now.
If you're right, and solving all of those problems are the easy part, then PeerTube will probably be an incredible improvement to the video ecosystem.
Podcsts may not be perfectly decentralized, but they're pretty stinking close. Services like iTunes are basically card catalogues at this point. The podcast app I use doesn't even include iTunes ratings, reviews, or suggestions, so they've obviously made the decision that these aren't features their users care about.
My experience with podcasts is I get recommendations in a decentralized manner from friends, family, social media, and online articles. Then I go to one of several centralized card catalogues and search for the podcast by the name. Then I add the decentralized source to any podcast app (all of which work with every podcast regardless of who developed them) and use RSS to download a file to my physical device, which makes it easy for me to back up or mirror the file to other devices if the source ever goes down in the future.
If 99% of my experience is decentralized, does the centralized 1% that basically boils down to a list of urls and a regex expression override that? Especially keeping in mind that nearly every podcast app still provides a mechanism for you to bypass that list whenever you want, and any good podcast app allows you to search for a podcast across multiple preloaded sources at the same time?
Maybe this is a better approach: what happens to the podcast market if Apple stops shipping a podcast app?
The priors that come to mind when trying to answer this hypothetical is what happened to independent blogs when Google shuttered Google Reader and what happened to news companies when Facebook tweaked their algorithm to show less 3rd party content. In both cases, distribution was decentralized (blogs host their own RSS feeds and news sites host their own content), but attention was centralized (people accessed blogs through Google Reader and news through Facebook). In both cases, the decentralized distribution failed prevent a massive decrease in traffic to blogs and news sites. And that’s because competition for attention is fierce, so aggregating attention is hard.
Neither of those things are dead though (news is struggling with the adblocking apocalypse, but that's a different category of problem). I kind of get what you're saying, and I agree that Facebook and Google are powerful, and that we should look for ways to distribute that power more evenly.
But at the same time, to me those scenarios kind of look like distributed architectures doing the jobs they're supposed to. I mean, Google Reader's shutdown hurt bloggers less than Live Journal's did, right?
Another way of looking at it: think about what happened when Microsoft bought Github. A bunch of people panicked, but for the most part, it was fine - because Git repos are decentralized. And a bunch of people came out with hot takes that said, "Git's not really decentralized, because Github is the part that matters."
But... no, for the most part it's decentralized, and we saw the benefits of that architecture.
If you have a decentralized core you might interface with or feed off of a few centralized services, but you will be more resilient and better equipped to deal with their failures. You don't have to be perfect to reap most of those benefits.
If iTunes stopped distributing podcasts, that market would suffer. But I'd still be able to directly share episodes on Twitter and Reddit, and there are at least 2 other preloaded sources on my listening app that could be serving the same purpose within a day with zero change to the way I find new podcasts or download them. The big change for people like me would be that when searching, I would click the second button on a list of sources instead of the first one. It would definitely hurt the health of the network (mostly just for iPhone users), and you can make an argument that it would disproportionately hurt the health of the network, but it probably wouldn't kill it.
But suppose Apple or Google stopped distributing an app store. That market would instantly die, for basically everyone, and no one would be able to do anything to save it.
You may choose to go through a big integrated directory-and-player system, but the content is read into Apple Podcasts via feeds of a standardized format hosted across the internet, and your device is also downloading the audio content from arbitrary third-party servers. Because of this, I can---and do---quite happily pull down those same feeds and content directly to my own Android device via my app of choice.
By the same token, people can choose to watch videos on YouTube/Dailymotion/Vimeo; or they can seek out self-hosted videos on the same topic all over the internet, which they can either stream or download to their device of choice. The presence of an extremely small minority does not change the real centralization of the marketplace as a whole.
I think the situation with podcasts is different, because I'm not required to go through Apple Podcasts to get to the same content from the same underlying sources. To access videos on a YouTube channel, I'm required to go through YouTube.
This doesn't mesh with my experience at all. Are there podcasts that you can only get on iTunes or one of the other platforms? I haven't ever come across one. Can you give me an example of a podcast I can find on Apple's Podcasts app but not on Overcast (on iOS) or PodcastAddict (on Android)?
iTunes essentially acts as a public database for podcast feed links. You can use their–admittedly inflexible–API to populate a list of podcasts in an app or website you create. Or you can use a number of other public feed lists.
If iTunes suddenly stopped supporting podcasts (which they won't), then another popular public database will materialize.
The real debate here is what does centralization mean in the realm of content distribution? I mean people will always gravitate toward popular platforms that offer nice features like commenting, profiles, rating, etc. but that information is all secondary to the podcast protocol. If a single server hosting a single podcast's files goes down, the whole system does not stop working. Is that not decentralization?
>but if they're not in Apple's iTunes/Podcast app, I'm not going to find them
And I've never owned a single apple device in my life, or used any of their itunes software, and yet still manage to find plenty of postcasts to listen to.
But podcast creators all give off frequent signals that they wish podcasting were centralized.
Specifically, I'm thinking of how they all ask you to leave a rating on some centralized podcast aggregation service, usually iTunes. Many also specifically ask that you subscribe through iTunes. That's because rankings and ratings on iTunes are as essential to their monetization strategy as Nielsen ratings were to over-the-air TV.
Surely there is a Nielsen-like system to measure popularity, through direct downloads and aggregator data...? Leaving it to Apple is doomed to fail (see also: Apple AppStore).
Podcasts are lovely but the scale is miniscule compared to video.
And video podcast technology exists but is deeply underused (perhaps in part because people choose podcasts when their eyes are busy)
Suppose I want to use a podcast client app to watch what today is in my YouTube subscriptions. Why not just use YouTube? I'm not obligated to read the comments. There's also a pattern that goes: Post a video to YT, then post a link to reddit.com/r/mychannel (or an alternative, or on several alternatives) where users can watch the video as an embed and then engage in discussion under whatever commenting/moderation system I choose.
> And video podcast technology exists but is deeply underused
It's almost invisible, but the Apple Podcast app still seamlessly supports video podcasts, but it gets harder to find with every update.
With the popularity of that app, I wonder why Apple doesn't push it more to create a Youtube alternative. I know part of the answer -- you have to do your own encoding and hosting (I think, info is hard to find), but you'd think Apple could step in and offer those services.
About the only video podcasts I've seen that are recent are a couple churches and some weird local real estate services.
Other than the much smaller scales podcasts operate on, are there any podcasts where the host has turned it into a living? There's a _lot_ of video creators out there who make those videos as their sole source of income now.
For the vast majority fo audiences, podcasts are basically centralized under iTunes. The only difference is that the creators have to pay for the bandwidth. So it's like the worst of all worlds.
No, they aren’t. Of course anyone can put up a podcast, but the successful ones tend to cluster into podcast networks of like shows or join the big podcast groups like Nerdist, Wondery, or Earwolf. Or be a part of an established media company like NPR or Slate.
It’s easy to start a podcast but very hard to survive and expand alone.
Additionally podcast revenue is heavily centralized, which warps the kind of programming around the whims of the sponsors - who are often Amazon or a subsidiary company of another Fortune 500.
Within a margin of error I'd imagine virtually all tech centric web content has at some point been sponsored by Audible (Amazon), Squarespace (private), Dollar Shave Club (Unilever), or rarely one of a few VPNs like Tunnelbear or Private Internet Access.
Isn't the idea of decentralization for podcasts to create an open protocol that anyone can conform to at their choosing? It is the choice of the content creator in those circumstances whether or not they join together in a group. Just because clusters form in a decentralized system doesn't mean the entire system isn't decentralized.
Organisms do find it easier to survive in groups, but the main point here is that even these groups like Nerdist, NPR, etc. would still have publicly available working podcast feeds if somehow iTunes stopped working tomorrow.
