Hey I was just looking at grabbing the first couple HOP episodes, the videos, and I only see as far back as ep4 in pocket casts. Is there any reason for that?
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Bandwidth. I know that all are available from the website, but only the latest 10 are on the feed.
AFAIK this is purely out of cost grounds.
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Is this a new thing (only 10 episodes)?
I remember in the early days, I got all of Security Now’s back catalogue, but for most shows there are just too many back episodes that the feed files become too unwieldy and they use too much bandwidth.
I don’t know when they switched, but I think it is probably a couple of years. The last couple of times I switched phone or podcast app, I only had a limited number of episodes turn up.
As I only ever keep the current episode on my device, I never really bothered to look at how many episodes were kept in the feed.
I think someone already asked this question in the last month or two. Leo stated that they only make the last 10 episodes available this way. I think it was for bandwidth reasons, if I remember right. So, people wouldn’t necessarily just gobble up old shows in bulk that they wouldn’t necessarily even listen to. I’m working off memory, so maybe I have it wrong…
You can go back on the TWIT website and pull older ones manually, though - if you like. I do that with old episodes of the Tech Guy
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Plus you don’t want an ever increasing RSS feed.
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Thanks for looking. There’s always YouTube, too. 
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This is exactly it. It’s not so much the episodes that people download, but the feeds themselves. If we put EVERY episode of Security Now in a feed, that feed would be many megabytes…and it would have to be downloaded by your podcatcher EVERY SINGLE TIME you check for new episodes…even if there’s not a new episode yet. That’s problematic for our fans. On our end, when we have THOUSANDS of fans trying to download all our shows feeds so often and they’re large feeds, that’s an issue.
We’ve seen that downloads really drop off after 10 weeks, so that’s why most shows only have 10 episodes. (The Tech Guy has 20 since its twice a week. TWiT Bits, Radio Leo, and All TWiT Shows feeds have different amounts because those get multiple episodes per day.) If you want older episodes, there’s always the web site. Also, some apps (like Pocket Casts) will cache feed data back to the start of your subscription (as long as you check for updates every few weeks).
FYI: TWiT has limited the number of episodes that are in the feed for as long as I’ve been working for the company…so at least since April 2013. I subscribed to shows as a fan before that, but don’t recall how many episodes were in the feeds back then.
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In ye olde dayes of yore, there was a keeper of the realm appointed to handle the boring distribution task.
Winamp/AOL then Winamp/Cachefly.
Actually I like having a feed with all the old shows even if the files are gone, because it is a fast way to filter and find topics from old shows.