Still a few bugs in the system

Hey there, loyal readers and listeners, just a quick follow-up on Monday's announcement about our move to PodcastOne. Unsurprisingly, it hasn't been a completely smooth transition — well, unsurprisingly for anyone who's ever dealt with podcasts, that is.

1. The feed

The decentralized nature of podcast distribution makes things like this a major pain. Our change in hosts means a change in our RSS feed. iTunes, our most popular delivery system, is run by a cranky and unresponsive corporation that is slow to make such updates, and other people have added our old feed to many other services for which we have no access (and in some cases, awareness!).

We are working to update our iTunes feed at the source rather than use the current redirect, which means that the current two-day delay on new episodes showing up with Apple should be mitigated soon. I've also contacted Downcast and Stitcher and have asked them to update the feed on their apps, which... hopefully happens.

If you use a different service to download Retronauts, please let us know so we can contact them! It feels weird and annoying to have our primary product so far out of our control. Podcasts, man. In the meantime, you can update your own Retronauts information to point to the following feed: http://www.podcastone.com/podcast?categoryID2=1060

2. The pay wall

As I mentioned on Monday, our older episodes on the feed have been gated behind a paywall. We were told this was optional, and I asked PodcastOne not to do it straightaway so we could give everyone several months of warning... but their system defaulted to an active paywall anyway. We requested they disable it as soon as it went up, but that still hasn't happened. You're not happy about this, I know, but neither are we.

We haven't decided for certain that we'll be using the paywall at all — that's certainly PodcastOne's preference, but it doesn't make a lot of sense for a show like this, and it's certainly a change from the way things have been over the past decade. Hopefully they'll get that sorted out on their end soon.

In the meantime, our old Libsyn page still has all our episodes dating back to July 2013, so you can grab anything you want to listen to that way for now. I don't know how long we'll keep the Libsyn feed up, but it'll be there for several months, at least. New episodes won't appear there, but the old ones will remain.

3. Patreon

The show will continue to be supported through Patreon — I mean, PodcastOne hasn't even started putting ads in the show, so we're not making any money at all there just yet. The idea is to have a few different forms of income propping up the show, as I've been part of far too many media properties that rely on a single revenue stream and crumble when that stream dries up. So your patronage (patreonage?) is vital! And appreciated! Patrons will continue to receive:

  • Early show access
  • Higher-quality versions (in terms of bitrate) of the show
  • Full access to the entire catalog of episodes that have been posted to Patreon
  • The various goodies we send out twice a year
  • Occasional random bonuses

Which, hopefully, you'll agree is worth your $3 per month.

4. More

This site will be launching into a proper website soon, e.g. not a blog. Please look forward to it.

The Good Nintentions and Game Boy World books I've been publishing on the side are also part of Retronauts now (as one of the revenue streams, you see). I'm hoping to have a new book ready in May— probably Good Nintentions 1986.

5. More?

If you have any questions about any of this, don't be shy about asking. Things are a little bumpy at the moment, but that's pretty much always the case when it comes to massive changes like this... give us a week or two and it should all be smooth sailing again. Thanks for bearing with us!