John Gruber:

The first thing to understand is that Luminary is two things: (1) an $8/month subscription service for exclusive original audio shows, from some very well-known people; (2) a podcast app for iOS and Android that you use to listen to Luminary’s own shows and any real podcast. You can use Luminary’s podcast player to listen to regular podcasts without subscribing to Luminary’s service.

And:

This thing with Luminary is a bit rich. On the one side, their own original shows are proprietary and they promote them for being ad-free. On the other, they want to be a podcast player for all regular podcasts, many of which (and most of the ones produced as professional endeavors) are funded by advertising. This spat with The New York Times and Gimlet Media is fascinating because The Times’s The Daily and Gimlet’s shows are indisputably podcasts — their RSS feeds and MP3 files are available for anyone or any client to download over the open web. Luminary isn’t being blocked technically from playing them, they’re being blocked because The Times and Gimlet asked them to, and Luminary agreed to comply. So putting aside (for the moment) whether Luminary’s own original shows qualify as “podcasts”, as a podcast player, Luminary’s app is in the incredibly bizarre position of not playing several very popular podcasts that every other podcast player in the world can subscribe to and play.

The whole thing is, to me, a rich rewarding read. Twitter exploded with complaints about Luminary’s methods (intentional or not), along with a host of podcasters discussing their efforts to remove themselves from Luminary’s service.

A perfect pairing with John Gruber’s explainer is this excellent rollup from Michael Tsai, filled with tweets and details, called Luminary Proxying Podcasts Without Asking.

One last quote from Gruber:

As a side note, I think the $100 million in venture capital that Luminary raised is going to be $100 million flushed down a toilet.

Amazing.