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Why do podcasts have preroll ads now?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024
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Privacy
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It has nothing to do with AntennaPod, it just downloads the file from the server and the server looks at your IP address and just chooses what add to put at the beginning of the file.
I get that. But is Spotify using the same third party server then? Because the ads are always the same regardless of platform
Yes, most podcasts are hosted outside of your podcast player and distributed via RSS (even if this is Spotify which already hosts music).
So when a service has the podcast it means it lists the response from the RSS feed, but usually they just copy the text data, including the URL where the actual audio is stored.
This audio is served by whatever other service the creator of the podcast uses, which means you're a free user to that service even if you pay for Spotify, which means the wonderful benefit of ads.
And these are ads you can't block since they're included in the audio stream (yay! /s).
Podverse (the player I use) mentions this as an issue when creating clips of the podcasts because they can't know how much the timestamp has been offset by those ads, so your clip probably only sounds good to you.
I mean, usually when I download podcasts there's just 5 or so ads that get injected over-and-over. I don't think it would be too complicated to have some software recognizes the length of an ad, and that it occurs >2x in a file, and then just mark that section as "ad" and auto skip over it
Thank you for the explanation. Kinda sucks that a premium service like Spotify doesn't even host their own content, but that's capitalism I guess.
copy paste from another comment under this post:
apparently they host their own content under a different name
Podcasts are distributed via RSS (example). Spotify is probably just a frontend for that.