[fabricexpert]

> Reach has been growing and only a small proportion of listening is online. However, we should heed the lessons of other industries and change before we have to.

I too have been wondering how long podcasts will remain using RSS before being utterly demolished by paid for platforms.

Can you imagine if we had TV content shared over RSS? Actually pirates have distributed content through RSS for a long time and it was a much better UX than anything offered by the big players.

Good on the BBC for thinking ahead and taking difficult steps to protect consumers.

[Reason077]

”pirates have distributed content through RSS for a long time and it was a much better UX than anything offered by the big players.”

Perhaps if viewed through a technical/hacker lens. But platforms like Netflix, Spotify, and iPlayer have been successful at attracting (paying!) users precisely because their UX is so much better.

Better than traditional TV boxes, and also better than the pirate world.

[paule89]

As long as there is only 1 or 2 platforms, which you have to choose and pay for. If there are too many fish in the see and you have to pay for all of them, people will pay for none of them.

[emerongi]

Netflix's UX is that it works and there are no ads. Otherwise there are way better UIs out there in the pirate world which actually have features other than "scroll through boxes of images".

[cjmoran]

There's a very simple solution to keeping podcasts free and open: don't buy paywalled content, and don't listen to shows that are "only available on [proprietary app x]!"

I'm going to continue supporting independent, freely-available RSS podcasts through Patreon/direct donation, and you should too. Nothing (short of ISP-level censorship) can make those hundreds of thousands of hours of decentralized, self-hosted content go away.

[fabricexpert]

That works until all your favourite podcasts get bought up by distribution channels (eg see Spotify’s acquisition of gimlet media)