Google Podcasts to shut down in 2024 • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Podcasts to shut down in 2024

#141

Post by tibbydudeza » Tue, Sep 26, 2023, 5:49 PM UTC

Remember Google Videos ???.

Could for the life not understand back then why Youtube and this existed at the same time.

It make sense - move all consumer content under the Youtube brand - hopefully the teams working on these products don't have the same "I got to start a new team to launch another shitty duplicated product in order for top management to notice and promote us.

The folks working on Youtube are doing great work even if most Googlers higher up might think it is so mundane and boring - it pays the bills.

Re: Google Podcasts to shut down in 2024

#142

Post by NicuCalcea » Tue, Sep 26, 2023, 5:59 PM UTC

jlkuester7 wrote: post #118

Why anyone would use a proprietary podcasting app is beyond me! (Particularly one from Google with basically had a 100% chance of getting canceled....) https://antennapod.org/ is incredible! 10/10, highly recommend!

Sync between devices. I guess Pocket Casts does that too, but it was also proprietary (and paid) when I started to use Google Podcasts.

Re: Google Podcasts to shut down in 2024

#143

Post by KMag » Tue, Sep 26, 2023, 6:08 PM UTC

dylan604 wrote: post #60

delecti wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was an annoying and janky migration, but Youtube Music has a better interface than Google Play Music ever did. Though conceptually it's still just weird. A video that I like on youtube because of the video component isn't necessarily a song I want to listen to as music. Also it really needs the ability to block music from certain artists.

I get that different products would be pretty siloed within their corporate structure, so I know that they weren't just going to use the YouTube code. However, why are products that are released well after plenty of other apps have forged a path so that the new app can research what works and doesn't work, what do people like/not like, and all of that type of basic information just so abysmally ignored so that this "…

I've been out of Google for over a decade, but my understanding is that their advancement metrics are still rather broken in incentivizing people to reinvent the wheel and call it new and innovative, rather than link some other team's code and contribute patches back.

Re: Google Podcasts to shut down in 2024

#144

Post by cglong » Tue, Sep 26, 2023, 6:29 PM UTC

yrro wrote: post #76

cglong wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the latter: > The company notes that all users can listen to podcasts on-demand, offline, in the background, and while casting

Yeah, for now. I used to be able to split my screen and have YouTube running in the background while in other apps, until they took that away in an update.

As a free user on Android, I'm able to use YT in PiP mode with any non-music video. Also FWIW, I doubt YT Music will ever have enough monopolistic control over the podcast industry to take away such fundamental functionality.

Re: Google Podcasts to shut down in 2024

#145

Post by ghusto » Tue, Sep 26, 2023, 6:59 PM UTC

izacus wrote: post #104

ghusto wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Google Podcasts to shut down in 2024" isn't misleading, that's exactly what's happening. The fact that they're trying to force people onto YouTube Music isn't relevant for me.

That's an utterly strange response - it's a difference between UI just moving somewhere else and losing service availability. It sounds like you just want to rant?

Google Podcasts, the app (and website?) is shutting down. It will no longer exist. Re-framing it as its UI moving somewhere else is a bit like if WhatsApp was to be shuttered and moved to Facebook Messenger, and you said "it's not becoming unavailable, its UI is being moved to to Facebook Messenger".

Re: Google Podcasts to shut down in 2024

#146

Post by dirtyid » Tue, Sep 26, 2023, 6:59 PM UTC

jack_riminton wrote: post #46

TIL Google had a podcasts app

They had one of the OG podcast apps, Google Listen from 2009, year after first Android phone release. Probably part of someones 5%. Which was surprisingly functional, and of course they killed it 3 years later.

Re: Google Podcasts to shut down in 2024

#147

Post by dirtyid » Tue, Sep 26, 2023, 6:59 PM UTC

fourseventy wrote: post #100

We have gone full circle. I started with Google Music which had both music and podcasts at the time. Then they took podcasts out of Google Music and made me install a second Google Podcast app just to listen to my podcasts. Then they shut down Google Music and forced me to move to YouTube Music. Now they are shutting down Google Podcasts and integrating that back into YouTube Music. Like WTF.

Full circle is splitting it off again to Google Listen. Either way I wanted to migrate to podcasts for a couple years but they never had opml support. I just hope they might take it slightly more serious now, add some playlists and transcription since it's part of youtube. But knowing Google.

Re: Google Podcasts to shut down in 2024

#148

Post by iteratethis » Tue, Sep 26, 2023, 7:49 PM UTC

Google drastically needs portfolio management. The qualifications for this position should be very low, some very basic common sense would do.

I suppose they can get away with all of this because the concept of competing for a customer doesn't really exist at Google. They can toy around without any consequences because they have a money printer.

Also, at Google's current size, anything producing less than 1B in revenue per month is frankly not that interesting. Small stuff.

Re: Google Podcasts to shut down in 2024

#149

Post by rickdeckard » Tue, Sep 26, 2023, 7:52 PM UTC

tantalor wrote: post #108

rickdeckard wrote: post #89

Off-topic: Would be great to have a way again to simply share links to podcast-episodes which work regardless of the used app. Before the podcast-hype one could simply share the direct-link to the audio-file. Now all you get are links which require Google/Apple/Spotify to open. (But realistically, I don't know who would be willing to drive this. It would need backing from at least Google/Apple/Spotify to maintain a c…

I would assume that's not too hard given most podcasts use RSS or similar for distribution. Whether each individual episode is a separately entity (like, with a distinct URI or whatever) within that format, I don't know.

It's not that trivial to do as an end-user. If I listen to a podcast on Spotify which I'd like to share with you (who doesn't use Spotify), I would have to Google that podcast and try to find a RSS-Link for it, which becomes more and more difficult as most pages now link directly to Spotify or Apple and provide no RSS-url.

Ideal would be an URI like podcast:// which apps could simply register for on OS-level, but I frankly don't know which entity would actually want to drive such a standardization.

Re: Google Podcasts to shut down in 2024

#150

Post by rickdeckard » Tue, Sep 26, 2023, 7:58 PM UTC

pcthrowaway wrote: post #65

xnx wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a paid Google Music from way back. The best thing about the move to YouTube Music was opening up all kinds of independent tracks and mashups that weren't available in official music catalogs.

I've been on Google Play Music (and now YT Music) for ~8 years. YT Music has a different catalog (by my estimation it's less complete than GPM's was) and also lets you pull up songs/videos from youtube (which can't be downloaded for offline listening like other songs, and are just kind of mixed in with everything else). Artist and album descriptions are largely gone, and so is the ability to view your listen count of…

I can confirm that the catalog is less complete in YTM because back when they shut GPM I took the effort to migrate my playlists and I lost quite a few songs of them in the progress, and even more then within a year (of which YTM can't even tell me the title anymore, it's just an unavailable item)