Save Open
Podcasting

Podcasting has always been open. That's not an accident.

A podcast is, at its heart, one simple thing: an RSS feed. A creator publishes a feed, and any app that speaks RSS can subscribe to it. Nobody has to ask permission, nobody owns the pipe, and no single company can decide who gets heard. That openness is why podcasting grew into something the size of radio without a gatekeeper in the middle. It is the whole reason the medium works.

That is what "open podcasting" means: the show lives in an open feed, you choose the app, and the app you choose can play any show. The relationship is between you and the creator. No platform sits in between deciding what you can hear or which app you're allowed to hear it in.

What's changing

More and more "podcasts" now aren't published as open feeds at all. When a show is exclusive to a single closed platform, there is often no RSS feed for it anywhere else. It's called a podcast, but it's really audio locked to one company's app. You can't take it to the player you prefer, you can't subscribe in an open app, and if that platform changes its mind or shuts the show down, the show simply disappears.

It's easy to check for yourself: try to find the open RSS feed for a platform-exclusive show. Often there isn't one.

The big platforms have real reasons to prefer it that way. A closed platform owns the listener relationship, the data, and the advertising around the show. Open feeds give all of that back to the creator and the listener. We think that's a feature worth defending, not a bug worth closing.

Why this matters to you

• Choice of app. Open feeds mean you pick the player that fits how you listen: faster playback, better accessibility, privacy, whatever you value. Closed platforms take that choice away.
• Portability. Your subscriptions should be yours to move. Open podcasting lets you switch apps without losing your library using open formats like OPML. Walled gardens don't.
• Durability. A show in an open feed can outlive any one company. A show locked to a platform is only as permanent as that platform's business priorities.
• A fair deal for creators. Open podcasting keeps the creator's audience relationship theirs, instead of renting it back to them through a platform.

We're not doing this alone

This campaign stands alongside the people who have been protecting open podcasting for years.^* The Podcast Standards Project is a coalition advancing open standards across the ecosystem, and the Podcast Index exists specifically to preserve, protect and extend open, independent podcasting. If you care about this, they are worth your support too.

The independent apps keeping podcasting open

The best answer to closed platforms is to use an app that plays the open feeds. There are more good ones than most people realise, on every platform, from volunteer-built open-source players to polished commercial apps that chose open podcasting on purpose. We've profiled them below, including the ones that compete directly with us.^** Using any of them is a vote for open podcasting.

A note on who's behind this

Save Open Podcasting is a campaign by Podtastic, an independent podcast app. We build a player that lives entirely on open feeds, so we have a stake in this, and we'd rather be upfront about that than pretend to be a neutral third party. The independent-app directory below lists our competitors as generously as it lists us, because the point isn't to win you to one app. It's to keep podcasting open enough that you get to choose at all.