Proposal: <podcast:private>

[aegrumet]

When developing podcast playback applications, it's helpful to know whether an rss feed is intended to be public or private. Two particular use cases are worth noting:

1. Background attempts to match the rss feed with a podcasting 2.0 guid. This should be skipped if the feed is known to be private.
2. UI that offers to "share this show" or "share this episode". These should be hidden if the feed is known to be private, unless we have a way to offer the public version of the show or episode.

The proposal is to create a channel-level tag

<podcast:private publicFeedUrl="someUrl">Yes</podcast:private>

• The tag is either Yes or No.
• publicFeedUrl may optionally set to help with the sharing use case.

By itself this would help a lot with application development.

Optionally we could go deeper...

Episode Sharing

If we want to share an episode from a private feed that has a public version, how should we designate which episode? One option is to suggest that publishers use the same item guid for both. That seems simplest, and is what I'd recommend.

A more complex option would be to specify an item-level version of podcast:private.

Additional Considerations

We could also recommend that private feeds having a public version, set podcast:guid to their public feed to help with sharing. Specifically, an application could resolve the podcast:guid to the public feed, as opposed to looking for a publicFeedUrl attribute. This might be easier to maintain for podcast publishers.

[Dwev]

I like the idea of having something in the index, even for a private feed, and maybe the "additional consideration" solves that.

For example, I see this as useful with audiobook medium feeds, where the public side can be a sample chapter or promotion, and the private feed is the full audiobook (for premium / paid access). The index would pickup the public feed with all the relevant meta data.

[nathangathright]

I really like the idea of accommodating podcast sharing, both show and episode levels, but I wonder if it’d be better to handle that with a separate tag. Maybe something like a <podcast:canonical> tag at both the channel and item levels where private feeds can link to the public feed/GUID?

<item>
  <podcast:canonical>
    <podcast:remoteItem
      feedGuid="917393e3-1b1e-5cef-ace4-edaa54e1f810"
      feedUrl="https://feeds.example.org/917393e3-1b1e-5cef-ace4-edaa54e1f810/rss.xml"
      itemGuid="asdf089j0-ep240-20230510"
    />
  </podcast:canonical>
</item>

[theDanielJLewis]

I like these ideas. I only worry that it's a lot of special development for very little audience-facing benefit or use.