Podcasts that aren't

I recently added the RSS feed of a podcast I like from NRK to a podcatcher for Android. When I listened to that podcast, in the end of every episode, NRK warned me and said that no more episodes will come to the feed and if I want to listen to more episodes, I have to use either NRK's app or radio.nrk.no. A similar thing happened to BBC podcasts a year or two ago as well. And a few more years back, Spotify began to distribute what they called podcasts that you could only hear in their app.

The definition of a podcast is an audio or video file shared through an RSS feed. An audio or video file only available through an app or a specific website isn't a podcast. The point of podcasts is that they use an open standard, RSS, for distribution. This makes it possible to listen to them on any device with any player. I use the RSS reader Elfeed inside Emacs with a few extra functions when I listen to podcasts at home via my computers, and AntennaPod which is available in F-droid on my Android phone. In the past, I used Newsboat and before that gPodder on GNU/Linux.

The idea is that the user can use whatever app or program they like on whatever device they like and get podcasts from a number of different media outlets in the same place and automatically get the new episodes whenever they are out. RSS is a great standard that has worked well for many decades and continues to be the best way to get not only podcasts, but also other web content from a lot of websites which has a feed (ie every good website) in stead of manually opening a number of sites to check if there is something new. RSS makes podcasts and other web content much easier to digest.

The infuriating thing is that I paid through my taxes for content that is now inaccessable to me unless I go to a number of different places to check manually. I get why the venture capital funded tech companies enshittify their users' experience if they can get more tracking data about their users to sell to advertisers, force subscriptions on people or force people into using their other services by exposing them inside their proprietary audio and video file distribution apps (even though it is very short term and makes me never want to ever use any of those companies' products or services ever again).

I don't get why public service broadcasters need to enshittify their offerings, though. NRK isn't going to sell tracking data to advertisers, sell subscriptions or other services any time soon. So why is it so important to them that I use their app or website instead of getting my audio through an open standard that is more convenient to use? Are they trying to do the same as the companies that offer worse services at terrible terms to seem more trendy and with it? Isn't the point of public service broadcasting to be publicly available? And isn't RSS the best way to do so when you have an audio or video show to distribute over the web? NRK and BBC probably lost many listeners since they no longer make podcasts. I won't listen to non-podcasts since I can't get them in my podcatchers of choice.