# I built a crappy video podcast player

**tl;dr:** Try out [telecast.company](https://telecast.company); share your
complaints/gripes [on GitHub](https://github.com/surprisetalk/telecast).

2005 birthed the [iPod Video](https://ipodwiki.com/wiki/IPod_video) and
[YouTube](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube).

20 years later... it's 2025. Compare YouTube against the podcast (iPod
broadcast) ecosystem. YouTube pisses off its creators, fuels a clickbait
thumbnail arms-race, and fosters addiction (protip:
[disable recommendations](https://github.com/lawrencehook/remove-youtube-suggestions)).
Podcasters thrive in an ecosystem of interviews, educational content, and
long-form journalism.

[^note]: Okay, this is a bit unfair. Trash podcasts exist. Quality YouTube
    channels exist (and are strafing over to [Nebula](https://nebula.tv)).
    Incentives tend to produce different median media on their platforms;
    YouTube's centralized advertising model seems to encourage unsustainable
    behavior from its advertisers, its creators, and its consumers.

Yes, video podcasts have been a thing since 2005, but YouTube dominated online
video by simplifying hosting/delivery/discovery. Twenty years later,
creating/consuming video podcasts remains an awful experience.

[^note]: "vidcast" and "vodcast" are clunky portmanteaus, so I'm co-opting the
    term "telecast" (television broadcast) for video podcasts.

## Proof-of-Concept

And so I built a very crappy video podcast player.

![](/telecasts-000-1.gif)

Some initial features/findings:

- I first tried [VanJS](https://vanjs.org), but ended up
  [using Elm](https://taylor.town/elm-2023). Elm is handy for medium-sized
  projects like this!
- [podcastindex.org](https://podcastindex.org) is a great resource for
  jumpstarting podcast search! Unfortunately, it doesn't provide any easy means
  of exclusively searching _video_ podcasts/episodes, so I'll likely have to
  build my own directory from scratch.
- Podcasts apparently support
  [live broadcasts](https://podcastindex-org.github.io/docs-api/#get-/episodes/live)!
- YouTube already already
  [exposes an RSS feed for every channel](https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/mgnsyg/quicktip_youtube_channels_have_an_rss_feed/)!
  But searching/browsing YouTube channels will impede telecast adoption.
- I eventually want to facilitate creator donations, but web monetization is not
  quite there yet.
- The loading times for thumbnails was prohibitively slow for many podcast
  feeds.
- Full [local-first](https://www.localfirst.fm) will not be feasible with
  limited browser storage, but it will ease the transition to native apps
- The app looks way too empty/intimidating on first load. I'll want to create
  some curated starter packs.

## Throw One Away

That prototype was too crappy. I tossed it in the proverbial garbage.

[^note]: "Throw One Away" is my favorite way of acclimating to a new problem
    domain.

Here's what it looks like now:

![](/telecasts-000-3.gif)

It's designed to be
[local-first](https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first-software/) software;
nearly everything lives in the frontend. The only server endpoints are (1) a
public search API and (2) a CORS/cache proxy for RSS feeds and video thumbnails.

I used [duckdb](https://duckdb.org) and some
[nasty sql](https://github.com/surprisetalk/telecast/blob/main/scripts/podcastindex.sql)
to load the search database with ~100K feeds from
[PodcastIndex.org](https://podcastindex.org).

```bash
curl -O https://public.podcastindex.org/podcastindex_feeds.db.tgz
tar -xzf podcastindex_feeds.db.tgz -C /tmp/
sed "s|\$DATABASE_URL|$DATABASE_URL|" import_feeds.sql | duckdb
```

[^note]: Thanks to [PodcastIndex.org](https://podcastindex.org) for helping make
    the internet open, free, and accessible!

Beyond video podcasts, I also added a bunch of my favorite RSS feeds from
YouTube, plus channels from Kagi's
[smallyt.txt](https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb/blob/main/smallyt.txt)
list.

The code is [on Github](https://github.com/surprisetalk/telecast). It's crappy,
but it's _mine_ -- I'm tired of smelling other people's crap.

Try it out at [telecast.company](https://telecast.company)