

- #Pocket casts vs overcast software
- #Pocket casts vs overcast password
- #Pocket casts vs overcast plus
The software-side workarounds can be effective - especially considering RSS, the backbone upon which the podcast industry was built, doesn’t allow for many technical improvements.

We’re not talking about national security secrets here.” The companies let you get away with that,” Stern says.
#Pocket casts vs overcast password
“You could always share a username and password to Hulu or Netflix, and that’s sort of okay. Supporting Cast CEO David Stern says the team has only had to take action fewer than 100 times in the year and a half that the automated monitoring has been active. So far, the issue hasn’t become a huge problem.
#Pocket casts vs overcast software
The software also monitors the IP addresses where someone is listening and the podcast app they’re using to see if anything seems out of the ordinary.
#Pocket casts vs overcast plus
Slate’s Supporting Cast - which powers multiple membership-oriented shows, including Slate’s own Slate Plus network - monitors private RSS feeds for suspicious activity, like thousands of downloads on what’s supposed to be someone’s single-person feed. To prevent situations like this, software has been touted as a possible solution. Much of the podcast subscription industry is built around private RSS feeds, but a link can be shared He adds that, inevitably, people will find ways to subvert the system, whether that’s recording audio and distributing it on their own or sharing their private feed links among friends. “This is the beauty and the mess of the open system - the web is amazing and allows us to publish content everywhere, but restricting access to content is always going to be tricky,” says Justin Jackson, co-founder of podcast hosting service Transistor.fm. Although Castbox is small enough that the leaks likely aren’t on most podcasters’ radars, they still illustrate the problems one weak link in the distribution chain can create. Already we’ve seen pirated shows on Anchor, and re-uploads of the Spotify-exclusive The Joe Rogan Experience on Castbox, as well. Piracy might become a growing concern, too, as the industry looks toward subscription and exclusive models. Notably, podcasters don’t have to manage multiple backends across services and can publish all their subscribers’ content at once.īut private feeds still have a glaring downside: these links can be easily shared, and anyone with the link can access private content. Podcasting remains a mostly open ecosystem, and although this content is paywalled, shows still benefit from seamless RSS distribution.

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The links can be pasted into any supporting podcast app, like Apple Podcasts, Overcast, and Pocket Casts, and for the most part, the system’s worked. Prior to both of these proprietary solutions, the podcasting world’s subscription products mostly centered on private RSS feeds, or links typically assigned to individual listeners that allow them to access shows. Multiple private RSS feeds are publicly available through Castbox Spotify announced its own subscription product, too, but with caveats - the main one being there’s no actual in-app button. Apple, which makes the dominant podcasting app, introduced in-app subscriptions with a button that lets people directly subscribe to a show from the app. Podcast subscriptions have existed for years, but they’ve gained wider attention this past month. “It’s a little bit like playing whack-a-mole with them,” says one source, who asked to remain anonymous because of their ongoing work in the space. Two people in the podcast space tell me they’ve reached out to Castbox multiple times, only for the company to remove a show and then have it pop up again, an infuriating cycle for someone trying to charge for their content. In fact, leaked podcast feeds from dozens of subscription-only shows, including Wetzel’s and The Last Podcast On The Left, are available to stream through Castbox, a smaller app for both iOS and Android, just by searching for them. But the show’s also been available on a smaller podcasting app for free. There’s only supposed to be one way to hear exclusive podcast content from sports host Scott Wetzel: by paying $5 a month to subscribe to his Patreon.
