RadioPublic's CEO: “Can podcasting succeed w/o sacrificing open distribution?”

"My hope for podcasting is that it can remain loosely coupled, that you end up having a whole series of centralized systems, that there's a healthy tension between where different pieces of the value chain around content creation, distribution, sales, listener, and engagement taking place; not all in one place, but you can still have some very successful large-scale companies that are providing some of those services without it being a winner-take-all."

"Part of our design of RadioPublic was consciously to not try to integrate all of those things, and instead to leave hosting and ad sales and other systems outside of what we do and make sure that we could interoperate with multiple other parties and platforms who are doing that, so we don't just work with PRX's network, but we also make sure that we can tie into Libsyn and Simplecast, and other hosting companies. Or work with Panoply in their Megaphone system, or ART19 and its data system. If we can prove successfully that there's a new way of making sure that podcast listeners support the business models of podcasters on a consumer facing app where the listening happens, we might have the chance at then propelling forward some new standards that we would be thrilled if they got picked up by Apple and others. A simple example is: we have the concept of a gateway episode in a feed where we encourage a podcaster to flag an episode as the one that a new listener should start listening to first."