Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 213, published June 11, 2019.
Walls, walls, walls. It’s been a little over month since Luminary, the aspiring “Netflix for podcasts,” stumbled out into daylight, and it’ll be a little while longer before we can figure out if the deep-pocketed upstart will actually tell us anything about the viability of a subscription-based business model for podcast-style programming. (It’s also worth noting that Luminary may well end up telling us not much at all outside of its own story.)
That said, whatever Luminary becomes, it won’t serve as a “pure” test of the subscription model, given the relatively late-stage revelation that it was going to also distribute the rest of the open podcast ecosystem. The choice essentially rendered the whole thing into a sparklier version of something we’ve seen before — a luxuriously resourced Stitcher Premium. Plus, Luminary won’t be alone as a newcomer within this…
