Apple Podcasts Subscriptions Will Soon Support Video

I'm old enough to remember when Podcasts were free...I'm glad the space is evolving but I'm sick of subscriptions for everything.

I don't understand why we're still downloading podcasts at all. I just stream everything now. I understand in the early days you had to download the files first so you could transfer them to an iPod or whatever, but we don't need to do that anymore. There's no need to have these massive files taking up space when you can just stream it from anywhere.

Road trips or flights or other environments where data connection is flaky or unavailable.

It's more enjoyable, to me, to have them onboard and ready to play instantly.

I run a Podcast that we host ourselves. Audio files are simple to self-host, video not so much... For the video version of the podcast I just upload it to YouTube - there's pretty much no restrictions on space and no technical overhead. The space issue is real, we sometimes do 2 x 1-hour Podcasts each month - and those files are like 20GB each. That adds up quickly on a self-hosted site.

I can't see us using this unless they sync up with YouTube - which they are NOT going to do.

Yep .. I've done a lot of unsubscribing over the past two years.

Subs are out and if they get too onerous or "creative" with ADs, they are also out.

Any show that allows programmatic AD insertion is IMMEDIATELY out.

It's shocking how bad the experience is when an AD gets inserted literally mid sentence of someone speaking.

How folks creating those shows are "ok" with that is totally beyond me.

If they care that little, I don't need to listen to them at all.

Anyone notice YouTube ad skip button on iPhone now just skips to the NEXT ad rather than taking you to the video? Also ads are coming in like every 3-4 minutes now. I can only watch it on my Mac now with an adblocker.

These guys just can't help themselves ruining everything.

Unfortunately for Apple, it's too little too late. Anyone with a decent podcast will only care about YouTube views. They aren't going to fragment their subscriber base by offering HLS podcasts.

why though? The podcast app is quickly becoming everything else but a podcast: centralized, controlled, censured, and now video? Why don’t you just watch these shows on Youtube at this rate?