For those that listened to the recent THC show with Adam Curry, aka The Podfather, he mentioned working on a new open-source podcast platform/manager called Podverse. It's available now for both iOS/Android/Web and it supports all the features you'd expect: auto-download, RSS feed subscription (i.e. for THC+), and a great search library of many (if not all) podcasts out there!
There's an optional premium feature that adds cool things like "Chapters" which allows you to select clips from within an episode, so that you can "zoom in" on a topic. I'd never thought of this before, but I think it could be the next big thing (especially if it would be intuitive to use)
Here's an example of chapters from the THC episode: https://podverse.fm/clip/LmdUSMXz6
The app is still young and imperfect, but I love Adam Curry, and the fact that he's been highlighting THC publicly, so who knows, if this works well, I may even switch from the default apple podcast app one day soon!
So go ahead and try it for yourself:
I've always had a vision that RSS feeds could become the next big tech to advance communication, simply byway of using RSS feeds and adding layers where listeners/followers could interact the way Twitter or Facebook does (and where monetizing applies, at least some of it would go towards the podcast you like, to support them). I already use Feedly as my news aggregator which allows me to plugin directly to people I enjoy, and I think this is just the tip of the iceberg.
