Luminary Proxying Podcasts Without Asking
Jack:
Luminary is caching 3rd party podcast MP3s on their CDN. Their iOS app doesn’t even go to the ATP RSS feed. How do you feel about Luminary redistributing ATP without permission?
Luminary’s show notes UI doesn’t have clickable links. And some shows have show notes truncated. Removing sponsors, promo codes. And call to action links to directly support podcasts.
This weird behaviour isn’t done by the app. If you look at the podcast “feed” the show notes have been edited in their backend.
This kind of reminds me of that time Google scanned books with an opt-out instead of an opt-in.
The Joe Rogan Experience, one of America’s most popular podcasts, has requested to be removed from Luminary, the new $8-a-month premium podcast platform, I’ve confirmed. The show explicitly cites licensing issues as the reason behind the intent to withdraw: “There was not a license agreement or permission for Luminary to have The Joe Rogan Experience on their platform,” a representative told me last night. “His reps were surprised to see the show there today and requested it be removed.”
It’s not just copyright infringement, it seems like this would potentially affect the statistics we use in order to show advertisers what kind of downloads we have, which would drive down ad rates, etc. Right?
Yup. The podcast economy works on download counts, not RSS subscribers.
Re-hosting platforms (Spotify, Google, formerly Stitcher) prevent each download from being counted properly by the publisher, under-reporting their audience size.
That’s why re-hosting requires opt-ins.
We have requested @hearluminary to remove @appstoriesnet from their service.
We have agreed to nothing yet our content appears to be cached on their servers and our show notes (with sponsor info) were stripped.
Their behavior is appalling and we want nothing to do with this.
Here’s the thing. @hearluminary is trying to build a spoken work subscription service that isn’t podcasting on the back of free podcasts it’s using to backfill their meager selection of original shows. If someone wants to be part of that fine, but they didn’t ask us and we don’t.
Luminary’s responding in this thread, claiming (I think) that they’re proxying, not caching — still re-serving, but making a new request to the publishers’ servers for each request.
If so, that’s still a copyright issue and still breaks most stats, which de-dupe by request IP.
Setting aside the fact that you shouldn’t have to opt out of someone scraping your show, if you have a podcast and want to remove it from @hearluminary, they have a support page with the details they want before they’ll remove it.
It’s not faster if it’s 1:1. That means for each request, a Cloudflare server must fetch the file from the publisher’s servers, then re-serve it to you. It will always be slower, even if only slightly. CDNs are only faster if they cache.
There’s also little speed difference to be had in practice even with caching, since most podcasts are already hosted on CDNs.
If @hearluminary is truly 1:1 proxying podcast files and not modifying them, they should be able to switch to HTTP redirection and achieve the same goals as whatever their problematic proxy/CDN is doing.
Proxying breaks any modern podcast stats (including IAB-compliant ones) because they require algorithms to exclude multiple requests from the same IP address.
Every proxy download will appear to come from the same small number of IP addresses, thus being undercounted.
To clarify my stance on this: I’ve seen enough startups come and go over the years that promise to aggregate RSS blog/podcast content to “elevate the medium”. They don’t care. Creators are just a commodity to them. They never ask for consent and act like the saviors of a medium.
Confirmed, the @hearluminary podcast-masking proxy URLs are now serving HTTP 302 redirects.
Glad they responded quickly. Should’ve been done properly from the start, but at least they fixed it.
This is better. But we’ll still be pulling AppStories due to Luminary’s behavior (we did not ask to be included in a closed platform), because they hide show notes, and because they won’t let listeners subscribe with our own, open RSS feed. We’re not interested in this business.
Update (2019-04-28): See also: Accidental Tech Podcast.
To clarify my stance on this: I’ve seen enough startups come and go over the years that promise to aggregate RSS blog/podcast content to “elevate the medium”. They don’t care. Creators are just a commodity to them. They never ask for consent and act like the saviors of a medium.
Now Luminary says to podcasters:
— it’s not copying your podcast files, and
— it’s no longer screwing with your stats, BUT
— but it really is killing all your show-notes links on purpose for your own safety
If you want to read a particular website, you can enter the URL for that website into any web browser. In the same way, if you want to listen or subscribe to a podcast, you can enter the URL for that podcast’s RSS feed into any podcast client. And all popular podcast players make it easy to search for podcasts by name so that you, the user, don’t have to know the URL or even know what a URL is.
[…]
So is a podcast a “podcast” if it only works in one app? I’m going to say no.
[…]
So putting aside (for the moment) whether Luminary’s own original shows qualify as “podcasts”, as a podcast player, Luminary’s app is in the incredibly bizarre position of not playing several very popular podcasts that every other podcast player in the world can subscribe to and play.
We need a new name for podcast-like things that have no feeds, are locked behind a paywall, can’t be archived, cited or shared, and don’t create any kind of record.
4 Comments RSS · Twitter
"Re-hosting platforms (Spotify, Google, formerly Stitcher) prevent each download from being counted properly by the publisher, under-reporting their audience size."
So it looks like this case was proxying, not caching, but if it wasn't, why would anyone on the open web begrudge someone cutting down on bandwidth use? That is, the comment above sounds like Marco feels it's a right to have your file served anew with every download request. Oh, really? Is it an ethical requirement that we turn off caching when we browse, too, so sites get a more accurate idea of the number of times we eat their advertising libraries?
If my ISP cached the most recent episode of This American Life (or any file it finds is reasonably popular) so it didn't have to pay to hit an external server again, and caching hot files like that provided a significant savings, I'd think that was efficient and smart, not a copyright violation.
So strange to hear self-styled privacy advocates change tune when it affects their bottom line. (Hint: You can't dedupe by IP unless you store it and the activity you see from it.)
Honestly, in thirty years, I bet people will feel naked when someone DOESN'T know everything they do online. It's quaint that people still delude themselves into thinking this isn't going to be our social norm and pull a Westworldian, "Doesn't look like anything to me," when they're really complaining that someone is preventing them from accessing analytics.
I love open podcasting, but it is, in some ways, a house of analytics built on sand. Stacks giveth and stacks taketh away. Pick one, and find better ways to estimate listeners based on what you do have rather than feigning outrage when there's a fly in your open ointment.
[…] recently, a bunch of closed, opportunistic, and VC-backed platforms like Luminary and Spotify started attacking the medium. Luminary came out swinging with high-profile exclusive […]
