This is an archived page from 2019. Find out more
Luminary is writing a book on how NOT to launch a new company. The latest bad news for the paywall app comes from The Verge which reports that instead of directing listeners to an original podcast server, Luminary was routing the requests through its own servers first.
The explanation was that this route would make it faster for users. The industry just wasn’t buying it because what was also happening was, as The Verge reported, podcasters would then not get accurate data on where listeners were coming from or how many people were actually listening.
After the issue was discovered, ad reported on, Luminary appears to have changed its ways, issueing the following statement to The Verge:
Luminary appreciates the feedback we’ve received today about how our technology works. We’ve heard you and want to explain what we have done in response. To be absolutely clear: Luminary has never hosted or cached audio content for any open RSS feed podcast. We used a pass-through approach purely because we believed it would improve performance and speed for our users when listening to public feed audio files, particularly from smaller hosts.
We now see that this approach caused some confusion. We have spoken with multiple hosting providers who suggested changes we could make to clarify that public feed audio is not being hosted or cached by Luminary, and ensure that hosts receive the data to which they are accustomed. We have already implemented those changes for iOS and Android, and are working to retool web player settings.