Published 2026-05-15T12:00-05:00
How Podcasting Remained Free
Back in 2019, an academic called John L. Sullivan wrote a widely-circulated essay titled The Platforms of Podcasting: Past and Present. The basic argument was straightforward: podcasting was probably heading toward the same fate as every other internet medium. Open systems would slowly get absorbed into closed platforms, RSS would become an afterthought, and the companies controlling discovery would eventually control everything else too.
At the time, I thought there was a decent chance he was right.
Especially around 2021 to 2024, it really did feel like the gravity of Spotify and YouTube was becoming impossible to resist. Even people who were deeply committed to open RSS started quietly talking as if video podcasting would inevitably become platform-native.
But here we are in 2026, and podcasting is still weirdly independent.
Not perfectly. Not permanently. But compared to almost every other major online medium, podcasting remains remarkably open, decentralised, and difficult to fully capture. And the reason, more than anything else, is because of the beautiful simplicity of RSS.
I. RSS and the Strange Resilience of Podcasting
If you've ever subscribed to a podcast in Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Fountain, Castbox, or dozens of other apps, you were probably using RSS whether you realised it or not.
RSS is just a feed. A text file sitting at a URL that tells apps where the episodes live.
That's basically the whole thing.
No account required. No proprietary backend. No permission request to some central platform. Your podcast app reads the feed, fetches the media, and updates automatically when new episodes appear.
And because the feed itself is open, the creator keeps control over distribution in a way that almost doesn't exist elsewhere on the modern internet.
That last point is easy to underestimate until you compare it to literally anything else.
A YouTube creator doesn't really own their audience relationship. Neither does a TikTok creator. Instagram creators definitely don't. Even platforms that market themselves as creator-friendly almost always sit between the publisher and the audience in some meaningful way.
Podcasting is different.
If a podcast app disappears tomorrow, the show itself still exists. If a hosting provider raises prices or changes direction, creators migrate. The audience comes with them because the RSS feed comes with them.
I remember explaining this to a creator a few years ago who genuinely thought changing hosts meant permanently losing every subscriber they'd built up. That's how conditioned people have become to platform lock-in online. The idea that you can actually move your content infrastructure without losing your audience sounds genuinely unrealistic to the average content creator.
But in podcasting, that's been normal for years.
II. Fragmentation Turned Out to Be a Strength
One of Sullivan's concerns was that podcast hosting would eventually consolidate into a handful of dominant players who could start controlling the ecosystem from underneath.
To be fair, some consolidation did happen.
Spotify buying Anchor was the obvious example. And there were moments where it looked like the hosting layer and the distribution layer were going to collapse into the same thing. That's usually how enclosure starts online.
But podcasting never fully tipped over into that model.
In 2026 there are still dozens of credible hosting providers competing with each other. Buzzsprout, Transistor, Captivate, RSS.com, Castos, Acast, Simplecast, Fountain, Podbean, Libsyn and plenty more.
Some focus on analytics. Some optimise for dynamic ads. Some are building around value4value and Bitcoin micropayments. Some are now heavily focused on open video delivery.
The important thing is that creators can leave.
That sounds simple, but it changes the entire power relationship.
If your host becomes expensive, restrictive, unreliable, or politically difficult, you migrate. Usually without listeners even noticing. Most decent hosts will help redirect your feed properly so your audience barely experiences a disruption.
Compare that to YouTube, where creators spend years building a channel while quietly knowing that a policy update, moderation mistake, or algorithm shift could cut their reach in half overnight.
Those are fundamentally different systems.
Podcasting still behaves more like the open web than like a social platform. That distinction ended up mattering more than a lot of people expected.
III. Spotify's Bet on Closed Audio
Spotify deserves some credit here because they saw something before a lot of other companies did: podcasting was valuable infrastructure.
The problem is that their strategy was largely built around turning podcasting into something less open than it had been historically.
Buying Anchor, acquiring Gimlet, pursuing exclusives, integrating hosting directly into the platform experience - none of this was irrational. From Spotify's perspective it made perfect business sense. If you can move creators and listeners into a closed ecosystem, you gain leverage over both sides.
But podcasters should understand the trade clearly.
When a show exists through open RSS, it can appear everywhere simultaneously. Apple Podcasts can index it. Fountain can index it. Pocket Casts can index it. Independent apps can index it. Nobody owns the audience relationship outright.
Exclusive platform distribution changes that dynamic immediately.
And over time, some of the limitations became pretty visible. Several major exclusives from the early 2020s quietly drifted back toward open RSS after the initial platform push cooled off. Others just lost momentum entirely.
Meanwhile, a lot of the independent RSS-native shows simply kept compounding year after year.
There's probably a broader lesson there about open systems versus captive ecosystems, although I think people sometimes overstate it in ideological terms. Closed platforms aren't evil. They're just incentives machines. They optimise toward control because control is valuable.
Okay, maybe they're kind of evil.
Anyway, the useful thing about podcasting is that the underlying architecture still makes total enclosure surprisingly difficult.
IV. Video Podcasting Almost Changed Everything
Honestly, this is the part where I thought the open ecosystem might finally lose.
Audio podcasting was one thing. Video felt different.
YouTube already dominated online video infrastructure. Spotify was aggressively pushing video podcasts inside its own app. Most creators assumed that if they wanted serious video reach, they'd eventually need to choose a platform and live inside it.
For a while, that assumption looked correct.
Then things started shifting.
On 16 February 2026, Apple announced native support for video podcasts through standard RSS feeds using HLS delivery. That sounds technical and unexciting, but structurally it was a very big deal.
The interesting part wasn't really the Apple announcement itself. It was what happened around it.
Hosting companies started supporting open video workflows almost immediately. One feed could now handle both audio and video distribution cleanly. The same infrastructure that protected open audio podcasting was suddenly extending into video too.
Instead of creators needing completely separate ecosystems for audio and video, the industry started moving toward a unified open standard. Apps could support it. Hosts could support it. No single platform owned the format.
For years the dominant narrative was that video podcasting inevitably required a walled garden. Turns out that wasn't necessarily true after all.
V. Why This Matters Beyond Podcasting
Podcasting in 2026 is still one of the only major online mediums where:
creators can publish without permission
listeners can subscribe without accounts
shows can move infrastructure without losing audiences
no single company fully controls distribution
audio and video can both operate through open standards
That's rare now. And it also feels strangely fragile.
The open ecosystem only survives if creators keep choosing open infrastructure instead of convenience traps. And to be fair, the convenience traps are often very appealing. Platforms offer discovery, monetisation, analytics, recommendation engines, audience growth. Sometimes the trade genuinely makes sense depending on what you're trying to do.
But at the ecosystem level, openness only persists if enough people continue valuing it.
I think podcasting benefited from arriving early enough to avoid being built entirely inside platform silos from day one. RSS was already deeply embedded before the large platforms fully understood what podcasting might become.
That accidental timing may have saved the medium.
VI. A Final Thought
If you're thinking about starting a podcast in 2026, this is a great moment to do it.
The tooling is better than it's ever been. Hosting is competitive. Video workflows are finally becoming genuinely open. Distribution is still decentralised enough that creators retain meaningful control over their archives and audiences.
And despite years of predictions that podcasting would eventually become just another locked-down creator economy vertical, it never happened.
At least not yet.
Podcasting survived partly because it was unfashionable for so long. It wasn't sleek enough to attract total centralisation early on. Underneath all the microphones, studio gear, and content strategy talk, the whole medium still runs on a fairly old text-based protocol that nobody really owns.
There's something reassuring about that.
VII. Decentralisation is baked into our values
At pod21, we care a lot about open podcasting and long-term ownership.
We help creators launch and grow shows without locking themselves into ecosystems they don't control. That includes choosing the right hosting setup, structuring feeds properly, building sustainable workflows, and thinking long-term about audience ownership instead of short-term platform dependency.
If you're launching a new show, or trying to move an existing one back onto infrastructure you actually control, we'd love to help. So get in touch today.