These days you're lucky if you can actually get the podcast and not just stream it from some awful "cloud" service with widevine DRM thats also trying to push you to pay ten bucks a month for a premium account which only forces you to listen to the ads embedded in the podcast itself.
Those aren't podcasts, in my opinion.
When things I subscribe to become not-podcasts (which has only really happened once - looking at you BBC), I spend a few minutes looking for something new to try out instead. I always have too much in my queue anyway.
My understanding (and I might be wrong here) is that the BBC not-podcasts are for folks within the UK, since the globally available ones have ads, right? I'm not in the UK, and am subscribed to several BBC podcasts, none of which have been not-podcasts.
Not sure to be honest. A couple of years ago someone at the BBC decided they wanted to push listeners to their app (which has live "radio" as well as shows on catch-up). They chose a few of their most popular podcasts, including The News Quiz, and made the appropriately surreal announcement that (great news!) this _topical_ comedy panel show would now be available six weeks sooner via their app.
The RSS feed still doesn't have ads last time I checked (at least for me, accessing from the UK), but now aggregates six-week-old political satire. I do have BBC sounds on my phone, but I never remember to listen to it. I always just go to my podcatcher out of habit, and end up listening to something else.
You get ads outside the UK, which is always weird for me when i get back from holiday and have a bunch of shows i downloaded while I was in another country and haven't listened to yet. Actually, I say bunch - but I've deleted everything except In Our Time. Australian Broadcast Company does more better podcasts than BBC these days.
The distribution pipeline is invisible because of the open, distributed ecosystem.
As soon as a podcast announces it is going platform-exclusive, the pipeline becomes extremely visible for everyone except those already subscribing via that platform.
Maybe I'm not "that into" podcasts but I've never had to pay to listen to the podcasts I like. I can't even remember being prompted like you describe. I don't even pay for the software that plays the podcasts... (well one time a LONG time ago I paid for a player that was really nice).
Clouds are not per se awful if you compare it to manually managing mp3 files and not all podcasts contain ads. I’m not saying your statement is completely wrong, I’m saying it could use some more nuance.
I do, because I'm ... well, I do a last minute scramble to download that one or two episodes before the flight takes off, and haven't ever thought about setting up an app for it, because it's just mp3 files I can download from a webpage, duh!
I guess it's time to accept that I'm a regular listener and I'd be much better off with some semi-sane system.
What podcasts do you listen to that are like this? I've subscribed to countless podcasts over the years using PocketCasts on my phone and I've never once encountered anything like what you're describing.
