I work for a company that tried to do exactly this and we ended up pivoting to enterprise once our technology matured. The money just isn't there, that's why this service doesn't exist. Podcasts are cheap to host and easy enough to produce that nobody is going to invest serious money unless they are a big producer like Gimlet, Slate, NPR, etc. In those cases they have their own resources and technology stacks. There's little need to rely on a third party like us.

Everybody else just used YouTube.

Well, distribution is fairly centralized [ADDED: in practice through iTunes/Google Play/etc.] and the hosting of the actual podcasts is cheap enough that throwing them on S3 or wherever isn't really a burden for most people. And advertising, when it exists at all, tends to be native advertising.

> The space is endearing - maybe that's why it is so vibrant?

That's true but arguably YouTube at least started out that way as well. I suspect that there are a number of factors; no single one I can think of (except maybe the hosting costs and that seems an unsatisfactory explanation by itself) really captures it.

I think it's decentralized partly because itunes doesn't integrate with any other services. So to serve android and IOS many podcasters NEED a single RSS feed that they point iTunes and other services to. Many relatively small services exist to help with hosting, and usually provide a hosted RSS link independent of itunes/whatever.

I really hate that many podcasters are trying to push their own app or their publishers / organizations app (even NPR is doing this). Getting everyone using the same platform is how podcasts will get youtubified.

The biggest thing I was surprised about when I started a podcast is that iTunes doesn't host or distribute podcasts. As an end-user, I thought I was getting iTunes content with podcasts. But in reality it's just an aggregator like reddit or HN: it's full of links, but those links are external and pull content from other places.

I was also surprised by how easy (and free) it is to get a podcast on iTunes, especially compared to getting an app on the App Store.

I suspect that a lot of it's just historical happenstance. Podcasting as we think of it today started ~2003 and was very intertwined with the development of RSS. The click-wheel iPod (which was really the breakout model) wasn't until the next year. And the current era of podcasting didn't really take off until it became easy to sync with smartphones.

So this was a case where Apple sort of came along for the ride and didn't see podcasting as being a big deal--which they were sort of right about; arguably even today it's somewhat mainstream but I'd bet the majority of people in the US have never listened to a podcast and certainly don't listen regularly.

Yeah another thing I'm surprised at, being a relatively new podcaster, is how often I approach people/businesses to interview them and they tell me they either don't listen to podcasts or don't even know what they are.

On a recent trip back home, I had some downtime and my device was broken, so I threw a bunch of podcasts on the Apple TV.

A few weeks later my dad calls to tell me he doesn't know how any of this works, but now he gets amazing content while driving, instead of just listening to the mostly ads that came through his antenna.

So.. just lack of awareness? Just fiddly enough to keep people away?

I have a sneaking suspicion that if tomorrow Apple or Google just subscribed everyone to 99% Invisible and waited, FM radio would be dead in a year.

Probably all of the above. Plus, for a lot of people, radio is mostly background noise that, in the case of news and talk radio, is always current. And there's always NPR to mostly avoid advertising.

Many people don't want to have to deliberately choose content a lot of the time. I've heard people argue that they don't want to always have to use Netflix because they can't just flip on a channel and/or channel surf.

Stitcher, Audible, Spotify, etc. are all trying, by creating walled gardens in the form of subscriptions. The end goal would be to create a youtube-like monolith for Audio media

I think what quickly became entrenched was the apps people used, which happened to be built on the decentralized model.

The directories are pretty centralized though they don't really need to be. I assume an app like Overcast draws from iTunes and/or Google.

Oh, yeah, that's true, but most of the apps have some sort of escape valve, right?

Typically you can always just add a URL manually.

That was what I was alluding to, yeah.

Isn't that what iTunes is? In the beginning, it seemed like the concept of a podcast and iTunes were intertwined.

Stitcher is trying to do this.

I love their UI, but the fact I can't load RSS feeds directly is making me look around for alternatives, so maybe it's a risky bet.