>I'm actually worried that podcasts are going the way of the web. What, for a while, was a weird world of enthusiasts talking about things that interests them seems to be morphing into a world of a few big corporate entities calling the shots.

I think podcasting is somewhat shielded from this by the fact that you really don't need an insane amount of capital to put out a good product. There definitely are podcasts that have expensive, professional studio set ups, but there are others I've listened to that are just straight up recorded on an iPhone and they can actually sound very decent. This low barrier of entry makes it easy for people to make their own weird podcast without having to water down their product and pitch it to investors. I guess with time that could change if your podcast is considered dead if its not on one of these big corporate channels. As someone who really enjoys the "homemade" feels, I hope this never happens, a podcast feeling overproduced is a big turn off IMO.