bufordsharkley

I'm disappointed in the responses by Adam of Midroll. This new system puts Earwolf in the position of being a technology company, which it very clearly is not (and should not be). Instead of engineering everything from the ground up, Howl should work on being a subscription service that integrates with already functional technology, and allows for consumers to obtain content as frictionless as possible, with all the expectations that come with listening to a podcast (listening offline, listening on any device). The objections to this (much simpler) system (which would almost certainly be a subscription RSS feed), namely that people will share files, strike me as paranoiac and impractical. You can't fear your paying audience-- bad actors will behave badly. But building a wall of subpar technology to keep them out is going to hurt you in the long run. Sorry for this rant. But these developments are bumming me out.

Paying Earwolf $60/year for its content is a bargain, and I'm happy to support all the wonderful people making great podcasts. And it's great that you're all concerned in keeping eps accessible to new folks at a free level, too. Cheers all around. THAT SAID: I don't use an iPhone-- I use gPodder on Ubuntu, and listen to podcasts on an iPod Classic (actually, I just switched over to the Fiio X1 (http://www.fiio.net/en/products/18) -- not nearly as good as the Classic, but it's nice that something is being made these days). That is to say, I am a non-smartphone user who consumes nearly everything offline. Fairly freakish in this day and age, but it goes to show-- RSS feeds just work. For everybody. A password-protected RSS feed would be completely platform-agnostic, and just seems the right choice, technology-wise. Forcing Earwolf to develop its own listening app (when there are so many other ways to listen, all of which carefully honed the user experience) seems like a burden on Earwolf, and giving a subpar product to the listeners. So that's basically it-- I want to give you money, but an iOS app (or even an Android app) is a non-starter for me.