I have been using Stitcher too, and love it. Interestingly, after The Talk Show moved from 5by5 over to Mule Radio, I contacted all of the parties involved to try to get the new version of the show on Stitcher, so that all of my postcasts are managed in one app.

I got a reply from someone at Mule (whose name I didn't recognize) that said that they did not like Stitcher's business model. This strikes me as strange because I figured that the larger the audience, the better deal the podcast is giving its sponsors. But, no, apparently they don't want Stitcher to host their podcast and then serve iAds (which I ignore) in the app. But yet they have no problem with Apple hosting the podcast on their servers.

This really sucks because Stitcher does a lot of things that lend to a great user experience including (but not limited to) transcoding the podcasts so that they can be efficiently streamed.

Hopefully this new app from Apple will allow me to gather my podcasts under one umbrella.

Edit: Ugh...no, this new app is nowhere near as pleasant a user experience as Stitcher.

> But yet they have no problem with Apple hosting the podcast on their servers.

Apple doesn't host podcast episodes on their servers.. content is loaded directly from the provider's published URLs

You don't see why taking advertising money for repackaging someone else's content is wrong?

I figured they were taking advertising money to fund both their work on the the app itself (which is free) and for maintaining the server infrastructure that allows them to stream quickly (which can't be cheap to them).

Which would be an appropriate arrangement of it was their content. But it isn't. Would you be willing to pay for those two products without the podcasts themselves? Of course not, the app and the servers are valuable to a consumer because of the content. If the content creators don't get a cut of that advertising money then the business model isn't fair.

Not to mention that stitcher removes any editorial control over the kind of advertising associated with any given program.

Sure. At the same time it is all of the content on Apple's own iTunes servers that gives value to those servers, and Apple uses that value to sell more hardware. Are podcast creators getting a cut of that? If not, then why might they think that business model is fair?

Edit to reply to below: that has been the case for the download model. How certain are you that this is still the case for the streaming model of this app? Have you sniffed the traffic?

Podcasts aren't hosted on apple's servers. iTunes simply links to them, without ads.