>If you're charging a subscription fee then it makes sense that the podcast lives in a walled DRM'ed garden
No, it absolutely does not. In the same way it doesn't make any sense to have DRM on music or anything else I pay for. I'm a paying customer, why should my experience and the product I'm paying for literally be worse then the people who pirate it? This thinking is straight out of the 90s/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?
>Also, if Apple is hosting it for nearly free ($20/year is nothing), why would you expect Apple to make it available to competing podcast apps?
"Nearly" isn't actually free. It's a paid service, and it's for something that's "nearly free" to provide too by that argument. Why shouldn'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'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's a symptom of a company that isn't thinking as holistically as it once did, or more charitably this is such an unimportant thing that it didn't actually get any serious attention and they just built it in a proprietary lazy way out of their current defaults I guess.
> In the same way it doesn't make any sense to have DRM on music or anything else I pay for
You're not buying it, you're renting it. A subscription is a monthly payment, you will no longer have paid access once you choose to stop paying for it. It has DRM for the same reason Spotify, Apple Music, et al. use DRM.
In the context of podcasts where there's a regular stream of episodes, it's perfectly reasonable to say that you have DRM free access to any episode that occurred prior to your subscription ending. It's how every single other podcast subscription service works.
(full disclaimer: I run engineering for a competitive podcast subscription service, Supercast)
So you think Apple should host podcasts for free out of the goodness of their heart? Apple's a business, not a charity/non-profit.
Podcast hosting for $20/year is a huge bargain. Libsyn's cheapest plan is $5/month with limits on storage. Add in the fact that you're published by one of the largest podcast directories on earth and the value is immense.
I personally don't have any trouble with them charging for hosting. I don't even have a problem with them offering paid subscriptions. I have a problem with them restricting consumption to their own Apple Podcasts app, because that makes the results not a podcast at all. Like Spotify, they're creating on-demand audio shows that require their client to listen to.
No, it absolutely does not. In the same way it doesn't make any sense to have DRM on music or anything else I pay for. I'm a paying customer, why should my experience and the product I'm paying for literally be worse then the people who pirate it? This thinking is straight out of the 90s/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?
>Also, if Apple is hosting it for nearly free ($20/year is nothing), why would you expect Apple to make it available to competing podcast apps?
"Nearly" isn't actually free. It's a paid service, and it's for something that's "nearly free" to provide too by that argument. Why shouldn'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'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's a symptom of a company that isn't thinking as holistically as it once did, or more charitably this is such an unimportant thing that it didn't actually get any serious attention and they just built it in a proprietary lazy way out of their current defaults I guess.