Season 5-7. How Building Our Own Membership-Only Streaming Infrastructure Was Such a Deep Rabbit Hole That We Finally Threw It All Away

We decided to build our own membership-only streaming environment.

Normally, we use services like Art19 to distribute podcasts to various apps via RSS, but we wanted to deliver paid-exclusive episodes in the exact same way. Deciding to implement it fully from scratch without relying on external services, a drama of various designs and struggles began to unfold.

We hit various walls as implementation progressed.

At first, we thought we could just integrate the regular and exclusive feeds, but as we considered authentication and secure distribution methods, one difficult problem after another surfaced. While repeating technical trial and error, such as implementing a proxy to hide the location of the audio files, there were more hardships than expected.

We ultimately made the decision to let go of everything.

Although we spent a massive amount of effort building the environment, due to operational and security concerns, we ended up throwing away all the code and mechanisms. Be sure to listen to the full episode to hear the background behind this decision and the lessons learned along the way.