Ask HN: How Podcast Distribution Works

2 points by privacyonsec 4 years ago | 3 comments

I noticied that podcasts are really different from videos, unlike youtube and twitch, the same podcast or episode can exist in different apps and platforms, spotify, google, itunes, etc ..., is it something that the publisher take care of or is there a centralized place, a kind of RSS freed to find all podcasts in the world ?

Thanks !

jamescridland 4 years ago |

Each podcast publisher makes an RSS feed, which includes data about the show and each episode.

They then add podcasts to podcast directories - https://podnews.net/article/all-the-podcast-directories is a big list - which index them.

> is there a centralized place, a kind of RSS freed to find all podcasts in the world ?

Apple runs a freely-available API of its directory, but https://podcastindex.org runs a free API and a full download (scroll down) of its index.

privacyonsec 4 years ago | |

thank you this is very helpful

Jugurtha 4 years ago |

Interesting question. Do you mean "Upload a video to one service and it will upload it to Spotify/YouTube/[insert-platform], then automatically transcribe it and create a blog post with the transcript, then summarize that transcription and put in a summary at different places, then detect laughter and automatically make segments and title them based on the topic in the neighborhood of that laughter and upload segments, then post thumbnails to Instagram and similar platforms, and Tweet about it, then send something to a list of feeds and newsletters"?