Everything about Luminary rubs me the wrong way. But I don’t think any publisher should tell an app not to include their shows if it’s displaying the contents of public RSS feeds and downloading audio directly. It’s like a website asking a certain web browser to block them.

How do you feel about Swoot? I love the idea of social curation, friend recommendations and its cross platform. But the thought of not using bit.ly/2IU0E0h bums me out.

How does that even work 🤔 if you are in a public RSS feed how can a podcast tell Luminary not to include them?

I'm perfectly willing to pay for podcasts (and do) but the proprietary player is a deal breaker. My Podcast life is very much centred around Overcast and I can't believe any proprietary player will have the same level of polish.

Marco does a great thing with Overcast, and I want him to flourish in this ecosystem. But I see no logical reason why a proprietary player couldn’t in theory at least, with a bigger workforce and more money, build an app as or more polished.

Because the bigger companies with more money always build the better apps, right? Oh, wait… 😂

Not always, no. But it’s perfectly possible that they could… which was my point.

Marco is (I assume) focused on building the best Podcast app for iOS. At some point the Luminary player team reports to someone who has other things to balance against. Small focused teams almost always produce a better result for their niche?

I know this would be hard for all parties to coordinate and do, but I would love the opportunity to pay for ad free versions of podcasts from within my player of choice (which happens to be Overcast). More possible business models for podcasters seems like a good thing.

I just don’t want podcasting to fragment like video streaming with its exclusive content.

expect to see more of this as larger media orgs dump money into podcast plays

I think Overcast added linking to Patreon et al. sites, didn’t he? They just had to add it to the feed with a specific tag. Maybe Marco was just talking about doing it...

Agreed nothing looks good with Luminary but why should they comply?

Never a shock when “Tech” sees people doing interesting things and its response is “We deserve a cut of that.”

Apple should create an open standard for paying for premium podcasts. Podcasts should have a good way to ask for payment (hopefully instead of ads). The fact that this doesn’t exist might be a reason why there is a drive to push ‘exclusive’ shows behind all encompassing paywalls.

But Luminary is creating content it plans to withhold from the broader ecosystem altogether.

Yea, I thought that was super weird. I mean - I guess it’s their prerogative, but… weird.

THANK YOU Marco! I’ve been screaming this since @Spotify grabbed a bunch of properties like @Gimletmedia #stopcallingthempodcasts among other things.

And honestly why would this surprise anyone? We are so bent on siloing everything from services to work to politics to nationalism.

I’ve been reading about Luminary, and can’t seem to get an answer to one question. Will they inject their own ads into the “free” tier podcasts? Maybe this is obvious, but I don’t see a direct reference to that anywhere.

Nope! We will not put any ads into a podcast that’s available within the free app. If a series within the free app is ad-supported, those will stay put.

Another place I’ve seen this before: There are some radio stations that told Tune In to stop including their public stream URLs in their app because they wanted them limited to their own app

Is luminary rehosting? If not I don’t get how people want to ban an rss client from their rss feed

The second I read VC funded, I was immediately turned off… I get some people want better stats, but investors want returns. Never ends well for us consumers.