Q: podcasts won't advance in playlist, won't download and visible time length/duration loads incrementally/behaves erratically

I have had trouble with podcasts not advancing past the end to the next item in the list when playing them.  Now also I have one particular podcast I am subscribed to that has suddenly started coming up with an "This episode of ____ is temporarily unavailable" on some of its episodes.  On other episodes it looks as though it begins to load, but doesn't actually load.  It shows the duration of the podcast which grows up to the approximate duration of the podcast itself, but when it gets to about where I expect the length to be, it stops and then the podcast doesn't play.  For example, an hour and a half long podcast will start loading and the duration will start at 2 minutes, something seconds, advancing by 2-3 minutes and some seconds every half second, until it reaches the full length of the podcast. When it loads a podcast it should get the duration right away, not count up to it.  Even when it finishes loading this counting up to the duration of the podcast, it won't play.  Some of the ones that load the duration correctly come up with "temporarily unavailable" and won't play anyway.  And some load fine.

I've only seen something like this once before, on a podcast I literally gave up on because I couldn't get it to play on any mac device and no one else was having this issue that I could find.   On that one the duration would fluctuate up and down wildly if I could even get the podcast to play at all, in a browser or on my iPhone.

Is this something on my end or something on the end of the people compiling the audio?

Currently the podcast I'm having issues with plays fine in iTunes on my macbook.  But not on my iphone with the podcasts app.