Ricky Gervais Podcast Goes Paid

Audible announced today that they have signed a deal with Ricky Gervais (and his buddies Steve and Karl I suppose) to distribute his podcasts going forward.

I love these podcasts and have blogged about them. They are my alltime favorite podcasts.  Karl Pilkington is the first great comedian of the podcast era.

But I am disappointed that Ricky and his friends feel the need to DRM their content and make it available in a proprietary format that makes it less available and less user friendly.

I don’t want to go anywhere near the iTunes fairplay DRM and I certainly don’t want to use Audible’s proprietary format.

I like getting the show in mp3 format. I’d be happy to listen to ads. That’s the way talk radio works.  Why can’t podcasts work that way too?

Or let me send them the $6.95 via Paypal for a RSS feed URL that allows me to continue to subscribe the way I want.

It’s not just the content that matters to me. It’s how I get it and what I can do with it.

So count me out Ricky on your next couple seasons of podcasts. I am sure you’ll get a ton of listeners.  But I won’t be one of them.