RSS feeds are still everywhere. They are used by most of us quite regularly. I use them every day.
Probably the most common use of RSS is podcasts. And podcasting has many cool features, from episode images to transcripts and much more. I’m always a bit disappointed when the feeds don’t follow best in class rules.
Like why not use all the cool features that RSS and podcast has. But here we go anyway.
Example: This American Life
One of my favourite podcasts to listen to is This American Life. I listen to every new episode, and I’m working my way through the 800+ episode back catalogue.
This American Life, great podcast, not sure if they entirely understand RSS feed, though.
The RSS feed, as it is presented in the podcast apps, only contains 10 episodes. This has apparently to do with their business model, as you can buy a premium subscription, to which I’m happily subscribed to. But you can still download or listen to every episode on their website, so it’s exclusive, but not crazy exclusive.
They also have some wonderful episode images, one for every episode, which they unfortunately don’t share, even though it would be rather easy to add the <itunes:image> tag. This applies to their normal feed as well as their premium feed (which is a bit disappointing).
On their website, they also have a list fore every episode with the chapters for those episodes.
Screenshot of an episode page with chapters. Source: The Out Crowd by This American Life
Unfortunately, they don’t have the chapters in their feed. Not embedded in the MP3 file. Not in the <podcast:chapters> tag and not in the older Podlove chapters with the <psc:chapters> tag that has been around here for a long time.
The problem
The problem is the following: Podcasts used to be done by nerds on the internet, but now it is Big Business. So people don’t care anymore about building great technical tools, great technical tools that work awesomely.
Now it is tools that are used that are built by, for example Spotify, which is a bit of weary of an open RSS feed. For them, it might be much more profitable to keep the platform closed, which is not something I think is superb1.
Where do we go
Look, podcasts are awesome. I like to listen to them, but please, can we get better RSS feeds? Can we get chapters in the feed of This American Life? And give me an ability to pay for the complete back catalogue, not just “250 of our favorite episodes from the archive”.
I’m a Spotify subscriber, but their app interface is for behind a good podcasting app such as overcast or my favourite app: Pocketcasts. ↩︎