Podcast App Breaker Adds Support For JSON Feed, Believes the RSS Alternative Could Benefit Podcast Ecosystem (medium.com)

Erik Michaels-Ober, the creator of popular podcast app Breaker: The decentralized structure of podcasts creates a chicken-and-egg problem for JSON Feed to gain adoption. There's no incentive for podcasters to publish in JSON Feed as long as podcast players don't support it. And there's no incentive for podcast players to support JSON Feed as long as podcasters don't publish in that format. Breaker is hoping to break that stalemate by adding support for JSON Feed in our latest release. As far as we know, Breaker is the first podcast player to do so. Unlike other features that differentiate Breaker, we encourage our competitors to follow our lead in this area. The sooner all podcast players support JSON Feed, the better positioned the entire podcast ecosystem will be for the decades to come. JSON is more compact than XML, making it faster for computers to transfer and parse, while making it easier for humans to read and write. Updating Breaker to support JSON Feed was fun and easy. It took us less than a day from when we started working on it to when the change was submitted to the App Store. Update: Julian Lepinski, creator of Cast (an app that offers the ability to record, edit, publish and host podcast files), announced on Tuesday: Like a lot of software, much of Cast's internal data is stored in JSON, and publishing JSON data directly would be pretty straightforward as a result. So I sunk my teeth in, and in about half a day I'd added experimental JSON Feed support to podcasts published with Cast.

Comments

The problems isn't XML vs. JSON. It's data silos.

[Hydrian]

XML didn't kill RSS Feeds. Switching to JSON isn't going to help it either. What is killing RSS Feeds? It is the big social media data silos. Facebook, Google+, maybe Twitter.

Facebook is the 200lbs elephant in the room so I'll point to them. Instead of letting end-users select what RSS feeds / 'subscriptions' they wanted to add to their timeline, Facebook made their own non-standardize API that that content authors need to work with in order to let the end-users access the content the way they want. Google+ did the same thing. This takes time and energy from the content creators which is a limited resource. Instead of building an RSS aggregator in to their social media site, those companies decided to create custom APIs that can only be used with 'their' social media site. All of these moves are to get you consuming on their site and not how you'd want consume it.