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Pocket Casts acquired by NPR

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Re: Pocket Casts acquired by NPR

#171

Post by scrooched_moose »

icebraining wrote: post #137
drb91 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should be afraid. I went podcasts only as quickly as I could because the local reporting was so low quality.

But we're talking about NPR affiliated stations. Doesn't their news reporting come from NPR?

A good example is Morning Edition, which cuts back and forth between the national feed and local reporting.

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.

Re: Pocket Casts acquired by NPR

#173

Post by tomw2005 »

crispinb wrote: post #12

This strikes me as potentially bad news. PocketCasts is a great little app, with the characteristic advantages of being produced by a small indy outfit with no agenda beyond selling a good quality product for cash. I'll keep an open mind, but it's hard to imagine it maintaining its current user-focus and content neutrality while under the thumb of content-producers. [Edit: there's a blog post on the topic from Shifty…

There's also Russell discussing it on the Material Podcast (https://www.relay.fm/material/149). That gives me hope (but it is a shame to hear he won't be on the podcast as often).

Re: Pocket Casts acquired by NPR

#174

Post by paule89 »

synchronise wrote: post #102
m_fayer wrote: 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…

I did use antennapod and compared it to pocketcasts. Antennapod provided chapter support much earlier and for more file formats. But the main feature of PocketCasts is that the server syncs the feeds for you. The app instantly knows if something new arrives, but you download from the normal servers like in antennapod. Overall what antennapod lacked is the dedicated focus on quality which PocketCasts provides. It just always worked. Always. Antennapod crashed for me. Often times. And I am on the PocketCasts beta and nothing is amiss. On antennapod beta should be called an alpha, and even the normal client has its problems. The UI ux is also much worse. U intuitive. A few sprinkles of color would also be great and make it easier to navigate and set everything up. So yeah. Definitely PocketCasts. I would also love to use the desktop/browser version but the paid subscription for it wasn't even worth it for me. My smartphone is enough for that. And also it is a paid app. Support all the devs. Best 5 bucks spend on a podcatcher yet.

Re: Pocket Casts acquired by NPR

#176

Post by tudelo »

sverige wrote: post #100
jccalhoun wrote: post #79

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…

Well, they are not neutral in many cases. But, they are not always presenting political shows. Also, do you think ABC, CBS, CNN, or Fox are more factual? Clearly, none of them are neutral. Neutrality is impossible but fact-based reporting is possible. I accept that they cannot be neutral but still support.

Re: Pocket Casts acquired by NPR

#177

Post by smtpserver »

"Thanks to the mission-driven nature of this partnership, and of public media overall, we'll put the needs of producers and listeners at the heart of everything we do with Pocket Casts" == We are going to add useless features, bloat the app and switch to SaaS model.

Re: Pocket Casts acquired by NPR

#178

Post by corobo »

erlend_sh wrote: post #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.…

It took me about a year or so before I found this functionality. No idea why it's not with the rest of the settings but heyho

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

Re: Pocket Casts acquired by NPR

#179

Post by corobo »

ascorbic wrote: post #144
mort96 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"What's best for the podcasting space" is more scary than it sounds tho imo. A lot of business people would consider web-like analytics "the best for the podcasting space", even though it would be horrible for podcast listeners.

Would it though? I'd be happy to podcasters to have aggregated figures on listens, skips, pauses etc, as long as it's not linked to me. It could improve podcasts, ads, and probably increase their revenue, which I'm all in favour of.

One of the stats could be "How many ads can we cram in per 30 minutes before people stop listening"

Re: Pocket Casts acquired by NPR

#180

Post by dangoor »

mintplant wrote: post #97

> Pocket Casts is an enormous opportunity to improve discovery for listeners, provide podcast producers with better insights 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:…

This is the exact opposite of what Marco just did with the recent release of Overcast. They even spoke about it on Accidental Tech Podcast this week. He's actively working against allowing people to track podcast listeners more than what they can get from straight HTTP downloads of their shows.
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