71–80 of 204 posts
So is this basically a confirmation they're giving up on NPR One? It hasn't been updated for 7 months, after about 24 straight monthly updates. 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.
Is there any chance this will lead to being able to listen to old TAL episodes via RSS? It's kinda strange that TAL is buying a podcast player company but they don't want us to listen to their podcasts...
Good luck with that reading comprehension.
So is this basically a confirmation they're giving up on NPR One? It hasn't been updated for 7 months, after about 24 straight monthly updates. 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...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seconding Overcast - it has traditionally traded blows with Pocket Casts as the best 3rd party podcast app on iOS, but I like it better for the smart speed and voice boosting features.
Overcast is continuing to go against the podcast industry grain by making privacy a distinguishing feature ( https://marco.org/2018/04/27/overcast42 ). Good move. It's not useful to me as I have Android as well as iOS devices, but if I was Apple-locked, I'd be having a serious look at Overcast.
So is this basically a confirmation they're giving up on NPR One? It hasn't been updated for 7 months, after about 24 straight monthly updates. 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.
So is this basically a confirmation they're giving up on NPR One? It hasn't been updated for 7 months, after about 24 straight monthly updates. 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.
NPR One was toxic for NPR (the national company) in their internal politics. Smaller local stations fought back against having to promote the app on their broadcasts out of fear it would drive their local listeners away. http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/03/npr-decides-it-wont-promote...
I've been frustrated with many free podcast apps so I paid for Pocket Casts and I've been happy since. I think it's a smart move by NPR et al. What they want is the usage data like where they pause, where they skip, etc. These data were traditionally not available to podcast publishers because podcast is really just an mp3 file uploaded to some server. NPR has the NPR One app but I guess not enough people are using i…
The only caveat to this is their insight into advertisements. Lets say a podcast runs ads during its first 5 minutes, they can now tell exactly how many people are listening or skipping those ads and may be incentivized to start putting ads in the middle of podcasts, or implement some sort of non skip-able interruption.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also love Pocket Casts, particularly with the "skip pauses" feature. Often podcasts are full of short pauses... to date, I have saved 9 hours of time with the feature enabled!
I’ve saved 18 hours, and over 2 days by playing at 1.5x speed! Whoa. I listen to podcasts more than I thought!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, it wasn't acquired by a for-profit publishing house or media company (e.g. a music label, Netflix, Amazon, etc.), it's NPR. They aren't for-profit, and they generally have pretty solid products (or at least content) in my experience. 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…
As I wrote, I'm keeping an open mind. But in the absence of information more specific than Russell's rather fluffy & evasive blog post, it's entirely reasonable to be suspicious. Don't forget that for most humans, NPR isn't just a non-profit: it's a foreign government agency (and a very corporate-infected one compared to the best public broadcasters like the BBC or ABC). @peterjlee's other post here also suggests als…
I also wouldn't call NPR's app spyware by any means unless you call the vast majority of apps and websites spyware too.
Good old fashioned entertainment in 2018.