RSS hosts and players

You may upload your music and shows at one place and listen to them elsewhere. How does that work?

RSS is an open standard that allows you to upload your audio in one place and listen to it everywhere. Often, hosting companies like RSS Blue will focus exclusively on the hosting part, leaving the listening part to RSS-based players.

Hosting companies

Hosting companies like RSS Blue provide you with a place to upload your audio files and create an RSS feed. Alternatively, you may self-host your audio files, or use a hosting company for the media files but your website for the RSS feed.

At RSS Blue, we provide only basic listening functionality just for you to make sure your feed is working. See feeds.rssblue.com/rss-blue-podcast as an example. Full-featured players offer much more functionality, including subscriptions, playlists, sending payments to creators.

RSS-based players

Once you submit your feed to a directory, players will regularly check it for new tracks or episodes.

Podcasting 2.0 players

At RSS Blue, we are embracing Podcasting 2.0. To make use of listener payments, transcripts/lyrics, chapters, and other amazing features, you can direct your listeners to modern podcast players. Some of our favorites include

How players fetch audio files

There are two ways in which players download audio files:

  1. players that download audio files from podcast hosting services (such as RSS Blue) separately for each user
  2. players, such as Spotify, that download audio files from a podcast hosting service only once, store them on their own servers, and distribute them to their users on demand

This is summarized in the diagram below:

As a result, the number of downloads from RSS Blue does not necessarily reflect the total number of episode downloads.