The industry's seeming loss of interest in RSS as a technology does have me wondering, is there a replacement for podcasts? Are podcasts migrating away from RSS as their primary distribution concern? If there is a replacement, is it platform-independent like RSS or does it hinge on a single company like Apple?
I think podcasters generally only care about RSS because it's how to get into the Apple Podcasts app.
There are many hosting companies that will create friction and pain if a consumption platform attempts to vertically integrate and eliminate the idea that you can publish a podcast on any web server, but we're already in a world where some of the consumption platforms have distinct flavors of RSS published especially for them.
Not hard to imagine one of them offering better support if you use a more custom integration, which it's not impossible to imagine major hosting providers building.
