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Pocket Casts acquired by NPR

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Re: Pocket Casts acquired by NPR

#151
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like Marco Arment and I admire his convictions, but I've avoided Overcast on principle because of a) his initial willingness to burn cash in order to gain as many users as possible (at the expense of third-party apps like Castro), and b) the app's gratuitous subscription model. I hope he keeps up the good work, but I also really hope that PocketCasts continues to be a worthy opponent.

What's the principle involved here? Not liking something being a business?

I'm uncomfortable with the fact that Marco would frequently proclaim his support for indie development, but was also willing to outright lose money in order to undercut his competition and dominate the podcast market. (In his own words.) Yes, if you have a lot of money, you can acquire tons of customers by releasing your app for free and using a half-hearted "patronage" model. Most developers don't have that option. It might make good business sense, but doing it while saying you care about the indie scene strikes me as hypocritical. (I concede that this is perhaps a petty and uncharitable interpretation of events, but it really miffed me when it was happening.)

As for subscriptions, I simply hate that business model with a passion and will do almost anything to avoid it.

Re: Pocket Casts acquired by NPR

#152

I think I've tested all the major podcasts app out there, paid for their subscriptions etc... The one that was clearly over the others has always been Pocket Casts. I'm also a subscriber of https://play.pocketcasts.com , their web platform. I just love them. I'm really happy that they've made the money they deserve (or I hope they did anyway). That being said, I don't feel confident at all that NPR will now respect m…

I'd give Downcast a shot. It's been my go to podcasting app for years and it's regularly updated. It has never asked me login or any other information. It's not a silo either: you can import and export podcasts lists.

Re: Pocket Casts acquired by NPR

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NPR isn't really a government agency. They only get about 20% of their funding from the government: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPR#Funding And regardless, it was not solely bought by NPR but by a combination of NPR, WNYC, WBEZ, and This American Life (two independent radio stations and a program producer). I also wouldn't call NPR's app spyware by any means unless you call the vast majority of apps and websites sp…

> They only get about 20% of their funding from the government 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…

NPR had $208 million in revenue in 2016. Even if you assume that 100% of funds from member stations and universities were really from the government, less than $67 million of their funding came from the government. The actual estimates are that around 11%, or around $22 million comes from the government.

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.

Re: Pocket Casts acquired by NPR

#154
I love Pocket Casts! Here are my top feature requests (I’m on iOS so some of these features may exist already on other platforms)

- 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.

Re: Pocket Casts acquired by NPR

#155
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's that vanishing breed: designed well but not overdesigned, technically solid, no hidden agenda or ecosystem to push, all for a fair upfront price. Hope they don't mess it up.

I've never seen the appeal of Pocket Casts or these almost-a-service podcast apps. 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 overh…

You are describing the exact same use-case as other people are using the apps for. Antennapod + gpodder.net is your podcast-as-a-service solution, where other people are using Pocket Casts.

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.

Re: Pocket Casts acquired by NPR

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never seen the appeal of Pocket Casts or these almost-a-service podcast apps. 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 overh…

Podcast players without server-side crawling can get really annoying when you're subscribed to more than just a handful of feeds. 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 who…

I used to be rage against the serverside ("ugh it takes so long to refresh when I know there's an episode out!") until I realised that of my 20 or so podcasts I subscribe to almost all 20 of them have their entire back catalogue in their RSS feed

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

Re: Pocket Casts acquired by NPR

#157

I love Pocket Casts! Here are my top feature requests (I’m on iOS so some of these features may exist already on other platforms) - 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.…

The playback speed is a feature in the Android version (pretty much the deal breaker with other podcast apps for me) so hopefully that's in progress for the iOS one too.

Re: Pocket Casts acquired by NPR

#158
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's that vanishing breed: designed well but not overdesigned, technically solid, no hidden agenda or ecosystem to push, all for a fair upfront price. Hope they don't mess it up.

I've never seen the appeal of Pocket Casts or these almost-a-service podcast apps. 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 overh…

The server side crawling in Pocket Casts means it's always instantly up to date with my 50+ feeds, and perfectly synced with its web client. Seems like a full service to me.

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.

Re: Pocket Casts acquired by NPR

#159

I love Pocket Casts! Here are my top feature requests (I’m on iOS so some of these features may exist already on other platforms) - 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.…

There's an option to set playback speed on iOS as well. It's there in the bottom left corner of Now Playing screen.

Re: Pocket Casts acquired by NPR

#160
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question with Overcast, is whether it will be able to compete in the open market with Marco's almost quixotic desire to avoid any form of tracking whatsoever. He won't even track stop/start/listen actions, and now he's eliminating tracking pixels ( https://marco.org/2018/04/27/overcast42 ) - all very admirable, but by foregoing all the obvious revenue opportunities, will he be able to make it up by attracting a l…

He also runs ads in Overcast, so he’s not relying on subscriptions alone.

And a popular podcast that makes him $5500/week in sponsorship revenue (x3 ads per show but /3 hosts).
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