Pocket Casts acquired by NPR

I&#x27;m so glad to see the team behind Pocket Casts find success. It&#x27;s one app I&#x27;ve never been disappointed with and supported right from the beginning.<p>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.

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&#x27;ll keep an open mind, but it&#x27;s hard to imagine it maintaining its current user-focus and content neutrality while under the thumb of content-producers.<p>[Edit: there&#x27;s a blog post on the topic from ShiftyJelly: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.shiftyjelly.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.shiftyjelly.com&#x2F;</a>. It&#x27;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]

&gt; Pocket Casts is an enormous opportunity to improve discovery for listeners, provide podcast producers with better insights<p>Translation: we&#x27;re going to start tracking listeners&#x27; behavior.<p>&gt; 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<p>Translation: the podcast ecosystem being built on open, decentralized standards limits what we can do (see above), so we&#x27;re going to use the market position we just acquired to &quot;extend&quot; it with proprietary features.

I think I&#x27;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&#x27;m also a subscriber of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;play.pocketcasts.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;play.pocketcasts.com</a>, their web platform. I just love them. I&#x27;m really happy that they&#x27;ve made the money they deserve (or I hope they did anyway).<p>That being said, I don&#x27;t feel confident at all that NPR will now respect my privacy as much as Pocket Cast, the company. I&#x27;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.<p>Despite the blog post where they announce that nothing will change, I hope Pocket cast&#x27;s team will continue their good work and resist the pressure of a media company.

I&#x27;ve been frustrated with many free podcast apps so I paid for Pocket Casts and I&#x27;ve been happy since. I think it&#x27;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.<p>NPR has the NPR One app but I guess not enough people are using it. They&#x27;ve been open about what data they&#x27;re collecting and I honestly don&#x27;t mind NPR knowing about my podcast listening habits.

So is this basically a confirmation they&#x27;re giving up on NPR One? It hasn&#x27;t been updated for 7 months, after about 24 straight monthly updates.<p>If so, I wonder if they&#x27;re going to cram livestreaming into Pocket Casts. That&#x27;d be enough for me to switch to something else, I much prefer apps that do a single thing extremely well.

I really hope they don&#x27;t fuck this up. I use this app every day.

&quot;Pocket Casts users will continue to enjoy: A wide variety of podcasts from hundreds of national and international producers;&quot;<p>I hope this is just an unintentional underrepresentation of how many podcast producers are out there (many thousands, not just hundreds) and doesn&#x27;t mean they&#x27;re limiting which podcasts can be listened to in Pocket Casts.

The Apple podcast app has gotten continuously worse over the past few years, I&#x27;m excited to see that 3rd parties are picking up the slack, but I&#x27;m still pretty disappointed that Apple has neglected one of the most important aspect of the phone (for me, anyway).

&gt; Audio veteran Owen Grover will serve as CEO of Pocket Casts. Grover previously served as Executive Vice President and General Manager at iHeartRadio, and before that as Vice President of Programming and Marketing at Clear Channel Music &amp; Radio. Pocket Casts will operate as a joint venture, with founders Philip Simpson and Russell Ivanovic in leadership roles and the existing staff and developer team remaining in place. To ensure development aligns with the mission-driven ethos of public radio, the board will be comprised of representatives of the public media leaders.<p>Well, that sucks.

I just have to say it: This is one GOD DAMN good app. I&#x27;ve been using it for years and the only issue I have with it is that I&#x27;ve got to pay again to download it on my iPhone after switching from Android.<p>In a world full of free stuff, this is the only piece of paid software that makes my day better. They deserve this.

The comments in here (and the article title) make it sound like it’s just NPR involved.<p>Important to note that it’s not NPR per-se, but a group including NPR.

&gt; Pocket Casts will operate as a joint venture, with founders Philip Simpson and Russell Ivanovic in leadership roles and the existing staff and developer team remaining in place.<p>&gt; “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.”<p>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.

I use this app every single day. Hope NPR doesn&#x27;t drive down the &#x27;NPR one&#x27; road. Not too glad about this, tbh.

From the same company that has also created arguably the best and most accurate weather app for Australia.

I was quite happily using the Podcast iOS app until iOS11 where they completely ruined it. Someone recommended that I buy Pocket Casts and I&#x27;ve been using it ever since.<p>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 &quot;Played&quot; so it&#x27;s hard to go through and listen to them in order as I forget where I&#x27;ve gone to.<p>Any solution for stopping the app marking these old podcasts as played?

The podcast app I really want:<p>The perfect syncing and playback (speed + silence) of Overcast, with the fast (older) web UI of PocketCasts, with the searching abilities of CastBox.<p>Someone please make this.

How does M&amp;As work for non-profit? Like, obviously from this, a non-profit can acquire a for-profit but can a for-profit acquire a non-profit?

I look forward to trying something besides the horror of the npr one app. I don&#x27;t need a netflix tile for every show. I need relevant information on the show. Not a mini billboard with no information.

I sure how they don&#x27;t cram in a requirement to also be a local station supporter to use certain features in the app. I think that&#x27;s a big misstep of the PBS app.

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)<p>- 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.<p>- please let me set playback speed.<p>I also have a faint hope that this acquisition would allow Pocket Casts to go open source.

&quot;Thanks to the mission-driven nature of this partnership, and of public media overall, we&#x27;ll put the needs of producers and listeners at the heart of everything we do with Pocket Casts&quot; == We are going to add useless features, bloat the app and switch to SaaS model.

My favorite podcast player + my favorite radio&#x2F;podcast station = Future Greatness! (I hope)<p>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!

Is there any chance this will lead to being able to listen to old TAL episodes via RSS? It&#x27;s kinda strange that TAL is buying a podcast player company but they don&#x27;t want us to listen to their podcasts...

I purchased PocketCasts app a couple of years ago but recently switched from android to iOS and never re-downloaded it. I&#x27;m sure I&#x27;d have to re-purchase it, right? or is there a way around that.

The storytelling format podcasts shows have replaced evening television in my household. I guess we&#x27;ve reverted to the time of old fashioned night time radio shows.<p>Good old fashioned entertainment in 2018.

I hope they stick to their roots and keep the ridiculous change logs!

Pocket Casts representative will say:&quot;Now we going for new subscription model - every month only $3.99 and you can listen to unlimited podcast with CD quality!!!&quot;

Then it will probably be made free for iOS soon (as data collection will probably be their model).<p>Time for me to start looking for another podcasting app...

I love NPR, I love Pocket Casts.<p>But it feels weird to me knowing that I donated money to NPR, and that money might be used to purchase a private company.

This is the first time a product I use daily has been acquired that didn&#x27;t leave me with a sinking feeling. Congrats to the team!

I am so glad my donation to NPR went to good use!

Up to this point Pocket Casts has been an excellent app, but I&#x27;m not sure how enthusiastic I am about this news.

Love Pocketcasts. Though I hope this mean they&#x27;ll need to make the web app accessible

This is adorable. I like this. Good for Pocket Casts, I&#x27;m glad to be a user.

This was my go to podcast app on Android, excited to see how NPR does with it.

Hope they don’t lose the funny update notes.

How does Pocket Casts compare with Breaker?

Time to look for alternatives?<p>Call me a cynic but I have a feeling their bias (and questionable tech capabilities) will drive it down to the ground.

Have been using Pocket Casts for my go-to for past couple of years. Deleting today.

i use pocket cast everyday.

While I am happy for Russell and the rest of the Shifty Jelly team, this acquisition does worry me. Historically, NPR hasn&#x27;t been the most unbiased source of information, and allowing them direct access to who can and cannot be seen on the discovery feed could easily kill the diversity of views that the platform enjoys right now.

And now they&#x27;ll &quot;adjust business strategy&quot; and make it a bloated Ad ridden pile of crap most likely. These aquisitions never end well.