Pocket Casts acquired by NPR
npr.org
npr.org
The paramount quality of a good app is how easily it gets out of the way and lets you enjoy the content. Pocket Casts has done a spectacular job at that.
I've been using Antennapod for over a year now and it a great podcast app and does a lot of stuff the paid ones won't even do, including syncing what episodes I've listened to to gpodder.net, searching iTunes and other websites and just having an easy to use, simple UI.
It's just a shame that these FOSS apps which have much lower overheads as well, just can't market themselves as a commercial proprietary application like Pocket Casts can.
For other people there it is; there's the appeal. It does everything they want.
To add to that, there are issues between the GPL and the Apple App Store ToS so open source apps on that platform are at a disadvantage as a result.
When I was using Downcast on iOS refreshing all feeds took ages and a lot of traffic (some feeds with a lot of episodes can be more than 500 kB, that adds up when you're subscribed to 50 feeds) and since the refresh wasn't even threaded all it took was a single slow server to block the whole refresh.
Now in Overcast (which does server-side crawling) the refresh is instant and I can even get immediate notifications about new episodes.
Serverside crawling means your app just needs to grab whatever's different instead of downloading 20 RSS feeds every few minutes/hours. Definitely a bandwidth saver
You mainly seem to rail against people preferring a commercial solution over a FOSS solution. The reason for that is simple, people don't care about the difference and Pocket Casts provides a better user experience that just works instead of having to cobble different parts together yourself.
Also in my experience, relying on small-scale FOSS apps means opening myself to the vagaries of their on/off development cycles, dealing with their underinvestment in design, and the impossibility of them spending significant resources on good old fashioned centralized backends. Of course FOSS apps have many strengths of their own (esp. in the desktop content/code creation category), but the apps on my phone are "lifestyle" - I want them to be rock solid, aesthetically pleasing, to require zero thought, and to respect my privacy, and I'll happily pay good money for that, which is something I think in this day and age should be encouraged. FOSS apps are simply a different value proposition.
That's the issue for me. If it's proprietary, I simply don't trust it to keep my data secure. I have no way of knowing that myself.
And that's the great thing about gpodder too, you can host your own instance of it so you are in total control of your services.
[Edit: there's a blog post on the topic from ShiftyJelly: https://blog.shiftyjelly.com/. It's a little misjudged in tone, maintaining their jokiness which has been enjoyable in other contexts but feels more like misdirection when a user is hoping for information on the future. Perhaps mildly reassuring though]
I'm not gonna say that there isn't cause for concern that an organization like NPR might not be very good at this sort of development or product, but I don't think naked greed or exploitation needs to be a significant concern. And more than any content producer I can think of, I'd trust NPR to maintain relative neutrality towards external content.
@peterjlee's other post here also suggests also that NPR's own current app is spyware. I have no idea whether or not that's true, but if so, it augurs badly.
We'll see. I'd be delighted if my suspicions turn out to be entirely wrong.
I also wouldn't call NPR's app spyware by any means unless you call the vast majority of apps and websites spyware too.
> I also wouldn't call NPR's app spyware by any means unless you call the vast majority of apps and websites spyware too
The 'Spywareness' that matters is relative: it's not so much a matter of whether information is collected at all, but rather how much & what information, in what form, for what purpose, and who gets access. The move from an indy content-neutral app to one owned by content providers changes the incentives significantly.
We don't know what will happen, so let's face it, anything we write is just speculation. But it would hardly be unduly cynical to suspect the direction to be towards more surveillance, and less support for the openness of podcasting.
As for other apps, I haven’t found anything that suits me as well. PC has a decent UI, is user (as opposed to publisher/advertiser) focused, and syncs between all my devices. It’s a truly great indie app. Rarely are such things improved by acquisition.
This statement by defenders of NPR always cracks me up. "Only" 20%? Why, that's "only" $445 million, or a mere "$1.35 per citizen," as the President and CEO of PBS put it recently. (Per citizen, not per taxpayer.)
So, what percentage of the funding for NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, and Fox comes from the government? Or, what service does PBS provide that the others don't?
Oh wait, that's right, they're "neutral." That one only makes me laugh harder.
It also funds most of the SBS, a foreign language service meant to foster multiculturalism and introduce foreign cinema and television to those who wouldn't normally have easy access to it. And they do a lot of English language subtitles for smaller foreign releases.
I have no clue where you get the idea that NPR has a budget over over 2 billion per year, but you are way off.
Your source implies less than 17% in 2009 and declining since; 50% of NPR funding was from member stations, who in turn get 6% of their funding directly from federal, state, or local government, 10% from the CPB which is mostly federally funded, and 14% from universities (which have varying shares of government funding), and 2% of NPR funding was from competitive government grants that it wins. And since 2009, your source notes several expansions of non-government revenue initiatives for NPR.
I use pocketcasts daily and share your unease at anything changing. But. It looks like things may stay broadly the same so maybe we have nothing to worry about?
Translation: we're going to start tracking listeners' behavior.
> And yet despite this remarkable renaissance, the listening experience — particularly around discovery — has remained virtually unchanged. Pocket Casts will enable us to forge a closer relationship with our listeners
Translation: the podcast ecosystem being built on open, decentralized standards limits what we can do (see above), so we're going to use the market position we just acquired to "extend" it with proprietary features.
From their privacy policy, they at a minimum track what you subscribe to: What information do you collect about me? Your username in the form of an email address, and password; Your podcast subscriptions, episode data and settings configuration; Your unique device identifier, device language and licence validation data; Pocket Casts web service also uses cookies and like technologies to keep you logged in.
Should you choose to generate a support request from within the Service, we may generate an attachment containing additional data to assist in addressing your support request which you’re welcome to view prior to submission.
Just tell people to use a FOSS podcast app like Antennapod and to avoid closed silo listings and move on.
That being said, I don't feel confident at all that NPR will now respect my privacy as much as Pocket Cast, the company. I'm really scared that NPR will change the app like all those media companies do when they acquire something good - that is transforming the tool into an ad machine, or at the minimum something to track users.
Despite the blog post where they announce that nothing will change, I hope Pocket cast's team will continue their good work and resist the pressure of a media company.
To be honest I would totally be cool with letting podcast producers know when I play a thing and pausing and whatnot. I think it might be useful to them for improving things and making stuff be better cut.
The counterpoint is that this stuff would probably also be used for ads. But there's already ads in the podcasts? I'm pretty desensitized to targeted ads at this point...
NPR has the NPR One app but I guess not enough people are using it. They've been open about what data they're collecting and I honestly don't mind NPR knowing about my podcast listening habits.
That's exactly what I don't want
> These data were traditionally not available to podcast publishers because podcast is really just an mp3 file uploaded to some server.
Good. Long may it remain so.
According to Pocket Casts, variable speed has saved me 281 days, 2 hours. Removing silence 3 days, 23 hours.
(@rustyshelf, if you're out there, how do I rank? :-) )
- 1 day 5 hours from skipping - 25 days 19 hours from variable speed - 1 day 12 hours from remove silence - 8 hours 28 minutes from skipping intros
I'm most surprised by hour much "remove silence" has saved me.
It's annoying enough having to get my phone out of my pocked to press the fast forward button. If the ads were unskippable, I'd switch apps immediately.
Additionally you won't have any new requirement to create a new account or pull analytics from your listening habits as you mentioned towards the end.
Source for AntennaPod: https://github.com/AntennaPod/AntennaPod
If so, I wonder if they're going to cram livestreaming into Pocket Casts. That'd be enough for me to switch to something else, I much prefer apps that do a single thing extremely well.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/03/npr-decides-it-wont-promote...
You'll have 3 minutes of "Korean War Ended", 2 minutes of "Mueller Investigation", then 5 minutes of "Help Minnesota Public Radio pick the best lake in the state - listen to why Mike thinks it's the one he grew up on".
The local stuff is so bad I've mostly stopped listening as well. Wish there was a way to only get the national component.
I hope this is just an unintentional underrepresentation of how many podcast producers are out there (many thousands, not just hundreds) and doesn't mean they're limiting which podcasts can be listened to in Pocket Casts.
It covers almost all of the "big" podcasts, but there are a handful of local ones I've had to add manually.
I wonder if that changes.
I finally gave up on the Apple app years ago after it was unable to sync my place for the 1200th time.
Never had that issue with Overcast.
As for subscriptions, I simply hate that business model with a passion and will do almost anything to avoid it.
I've always worried a bit that Shifty Jelly's model would prove unsustainable with money from new sales needed to continue paying for their servers and I've felt at times that they were strapped for resources, so this overall seems positive to me.
Can you name a few specific ways in which you think this is true? (I personally think it's come a long way from the awful skeuomorphic reel-to-reel metaphor, but I'd love to hear your thoughts.)
Well, that sucks.
In a world full of free stuff, this is the only piece of paid software that makes my day better. They deserve this.
Important to note that it’s not NPR per-se, but a group including NPR.
> “We turned them down because the unique thing about this opportunity is the mission driven nature of these organizations. They want what’s best for the podcasting space, they want to build open systems that everyone can use.”
The initial headline had me worried but I like the tone of the press release and have no reason to doubt the intentions of Shift Jelly or NPR. I hope they continue to improve what I feel is the best medium to consume podcasts that currently exists.
One thing that annoys me, when I go to a new Podcast I like to listen from the beginning, and Pocket Casts marks old episodes as "Played" so it's hard to go through and listen to them in order as I forget where I've gone to.
Any solution for stopping the app marking these old podcasts as played?
If you're having issues with Pocket Casts marking old episodes as played when new ones come out, go into the settings (either for the whole app, or for a particular podcast) and turn off "Auto Cleanup".
The perfect syncing and playback (speed + silence) of Overcast, with the fast (older) web UI of PocketCasts, with the searching abilities of CastBox.
Someone please make this.
I use both the Android and the Web versions of Pocket Casts and it syncs, trims silence, does speed adjustments, and so forth.
Overcast has the syncing perfected, but it has a much worse web UI. Pocketcasts new web UI is much slower too, with more clicks, popup windows, and less information density. I use the web interface during work, when I dont have my phone and just to browse quicker so speed and functionality are important.
Castbox has a great search interface that can find the words inside the audio of any episode, which is absolutely great for discovery.
Also there should be a simple subscribe button with 2 options: subscribe from latest episode, or subscribe from the beginning. Pocketcasts has a very strange way of changing subscribing to episodes just from sorting them differently.
> find the words inside the audio of any episode
Woah, that I didn't know about!
OT, but if you're interested in British History you might be interested in This Sceptred Isle. Most of it isn't available on iPlayer, but it should be in the usual places.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b009t23k
There are four episodes of this available: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00qh19l/episodes/player
- Let me search within a podcast (search titles as well as descriptions). I just found out about Planet Money but it has nearly 1000 episodes. The internet can help be find highly recommended episodes, but there’s no easy way to jump to these in the app.
- please let me set playback speed.
I also have a faint hope that this acquisition would allow Pocket Casts to go open source.
Play a podcast episode and tap on the "now playing" bar to open up this screen http://i.imgsir.com/1OMb.jpg
The settings are hiding here http://i.imgsir.com/GZAL.jpg
I just came here to say how much I enjoyed reading the list of changes every time there is an update. There is always something super funny in there. I really hope they keep doing that!
But you can use RSS to listen to new episodes, so I wouldn't say they don't want us to listen to their podcast.
Good old fashioned entertainment in 2018.
Time for me to start looking for another podcasting app...
But it feels weird to me knowing that I donated money to NPR, and that money might be used to purchase a private company.
I just feel like when they are doing the on air campaigns the plea's feel like they are desperate. Without your support this content wouldn't exist.
I just don't really expect them to have the budget to make that content, and ALSO make sure I can enjoy it in an application that is better than Apple's default podcast app. Or Stitcher on the web.
I enjoy the app, and I am glad they are making sure its available. But they next time I hear that they desperately need my money to continue... I'm going to think... "Ya, do you really?".
I don't think it was from donations, but I could be wrong
You can argue that donations to local NPR stations helps free up revenue for NPR the organization, but donations don't directly translate in to anything that NPR does.
Call me a cynic but I have a feeling their bias (and questionable tech capabilities) will drive it down to the ground.
I love NPR’s content, yet I am still worried about my favorite posdcast app getting aquired. I guess there will still be overcast if it goes down badly, but that would be a shame.