An unsolicited prediction of what The Big A will do next. Well, even if they don’t, then they really should. Despite what you might think, not one second of Apple’s podcasts are actually hosted by Apple. “But how can that be”, you may ask, “when they ‘host’ hundreds of thousands of them?” It’s simple. When you download a podcast ‘from Apple’ what you are really doing is using them as an index — a pointer, if you will — to a file located somewhere else. That’s why you might find some podcasts really sparkle on iTunes, downloading quickly and streaming promptly, while others really stink. I know because I’ve done it both ways. Incidentally, not stinking is a great way in increase download counts, as I eventually discovered. But I‘m ahead of myself... Listen to the rest by clicking the play button, above. A version of this essay previously appeared on Medium (https://medium.com) on April 24th, 2017. On June 10, 2017, Apple announced Podcast Analytics (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjRfPNmkdzY&feature=youtu.be&t=23m19s) which will be launched later this year. This is very close to at least one aspect of what was predicted in this essay. (header photo: Shunichi Kouroki via Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en))