Show HN: Podflix – Like Netflix for Podcasts

The reason why netflix became big so fast is not because of their suggestion service or categories but because they made accessible content that was otherwise not available to them at a reasonable price except from illegally obtaining it. I.e. The content versus the small monthly fee is the power.<p>Ratings are actually something Netflix has proven to be bad at. They even want(ed) to remove the stars system and replace it for thumbs up. In other words, suggestions, while nice, are not why it became so big.<p>In the podcasts land most content is free. The shows are usually already containing the category in their title or else in their tags. This means a simple search works very well in opening a series of podcasts in any category. To know if it&#x27;s any good from your app would be great but again, even netflix sucks at this. Googling for reviews is still your best shot both for series as well as podcasts.<p>I cannot see yet what Podflix brings over using my Overcast app and simply using the search functionality. I&#x27;m already getting all the content I want in a single search and at a great price you cannot hope to beat: free.<p>So I guess my question is: what problem are you solving? I would have a good session thinking about this and than broadcast very clearly on your landing page what problem you solve that I have today. This can be a problem I don&#x27;t even know I have right now. However, it is not availability of great podcasts at a great price. I already have that. Overcast also gives me playlist and downloading for a ride.

Clicked through hoping to find a company that is going all out spending big on a vast array of podcast creators and content with hopes to dominate the space through sheer numbers and low subscription fees.<p>I think we may have differing views of what makes Netflix Netflix.

If you&#x27;re going to appear to change state, save state. Nifty on the fly search is nifty I suppose, but when I click through, then use back arrow, you shouldn&#x27;t take me to beginning, losing all of my search results. Stop breaking the browser people. (this is as much a rant about this same pattern I&#x27;ve seen elsewhere as it is a knock against your site)

Or you can just search any podcast episodes: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.listennotes.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.listennotes.com</a><p>Nowadays I don’t subscribe to any podcasts. I just find interesting episodes and add to playlist — like pocket&#x2F;instapaper — episode-centric, instead of podcast-centric. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.listennotes.com&#x2F;listen&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.listennotes.com&#x2F;listen&#x2F;</a><p>And if you want to build an app, you can use podcast api: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.listennotes.com&#x2F;api&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.listennotes.com&#x2F;api&#x2F;</a>

The feature that I&#x27;m looking for in a podcast service (especially one that calls itself &quot;Like Netflix&quot;) is ad-free content. I&#x27;d be happy to pay a monthly fee not to hear yet another ad for the same darned things over and over and over again on my favorite podcasts.

What I don&#x27;t like about these &quot;discovery&quot; apps in general, is that they tend to show you the best of &quot;topic x&quot; based on some algorithm. The algorithm is usually using some type of user provided data. But they usually fail to take into account my level of knowledge about this topic. So I end up only finding good podcasts in the form &quot;topic x for people who have no idea how x works&quot;. I want the opposite.

Nice idea. Doesn&#x27;t seem to work if the category has spaces in it&#x27;s name though.<p>Works: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;podflix.app&#x2F;category&#x2F;Technology" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;podflix.app&#x2F;category&#x2F;Technology</a> Doesn&#x27;t work: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;podflix.app&#x2F;category&#x2F;Management%20&amp;%20Marketing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;podflix.app&#x2F;category&#x2F;Management%20&amp;%20Marketing</a>

Congrats on the launch! After many, many years of my not being into podcasts, I recently returned, and am loving podcasts. The challenge has been both in finding a decent player&#x2F;client, and discovery of podcasts. I&#x27;m most recently using Stitcher, and so far its not so bad. My favorite feature is the ability to automatically download episodes for offline listening. So...for now, i think I&#x27;ve got a decent player&#x2F;client. On the discovery front, I sure hope your app&#x2F;service begins to grow, because i think it would help in the discovery of new podcasts. Kudos and good luck to you!

That&#x27;s pretty interesting. I think there are some downsides to taking the Netflix-style of discovery. I find it buries obscure content and it creates a limited view of content. It creates a bubble of specific content which has its upsides and downsides.<p>There are several other tools for podcast discovery. There is FluidDATA that has transcribed almost 11 million podcast episodes and it lets your search all of the episodes and channels by phrase or mention. The search page is available here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fluiddata.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fluiddata.com&#x2F;</a>

Pedantically - would rename &quot;best&quot; to &quot;most popular&quot;.<p>Also, your favicon needs to be changed from the Vue.js<p>Great product, best of luck

Congrats of launching!<p>Some suggestions: Would be useful to see the descriptions for each episodes. The save feature you mentioned, as well as some basic history of which episodes I&#x27;ve already heard, would be great as well.<p>I currently use the Stitcher podcast app and my favorite features are the offline-downloads and the &quot;play this next&quot; button for queuing up episodes. I&#x27;ve payed for Stitcher premium once since I use the product daily, but did not find much value added from it - if you can find some ways to offer value beyond what the existing apps are doing, there is a market to be had, though you certainly have some tough competition from Apple, Google, Spotify &amp; the other apps, so I wish you the best of luck!

You realize that &quot;flix&quot; is a synonym for &quot;movies&quot;, right? Have you heard of a chick flick? That&#x27;s why &quot;Netflix&quot; makes so much sense. So you&#x27;re basically calling a podcasting app &quot;pod-movies&quot;.

Interesting thought but while you can listen to the podcasts on the website you still need to use a normal player to actually subscribe to it. So it&#x27;s more like a account-less netflix. I&#x27;d suggest putting subscribe links in for multiple podcast players (Apple, Google, Pocketcast, Overcast). I&#x27;ll take this moment to plug my favorite iOS podcast player: Overcast [0]. Don&#x27;t let the website throw you off, the app is where it&#x27;s at and Marco just released Overcast 5 alongside iOS 12.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;overcast.fm&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;overcast.fm&#x2F;</a>

This site doesn&#x27;t work. Searched for &quot;baseball&quot; and one related podcast was suggested along with 2 non-related.<p>I searched for &quot;film&quot; and 3 mental health podcasts were suggested.

This service seems to promote a very odd consumption of podcasts. Most people don&#x27;t have a problem finding new podcasts to listen to if they want another one to listen to. The much bigger issue they have is finding which of the previous episodes to listen to. It would be much nicer if this let you review each new episode release of a podcast and send you an email if the new episode of a podcast you were kind of interested in is highly reviewed relative to the other.

How do you source the podcasts? Do you consider YouTube interviews as podcasts? A lot of great content on YouTube is functionally equivalent to Podcasts (two people talking, interviews, etc.). I tried looking up the viral interview where Joe Rogan interviews Elon Musk (searched &quot;joe rogan&quot; and &quot;elon musk&quot; separately to increase my chances) and nothing came up in your search engine.

This is pretty awesome. Is there any way to help?<p>By the way, it&#x27;d be nice if you could add Late Night Linux [1], esp. since you have linux luddites, which is their previous show.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;itunes.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;podcast&#x2F;late-night-linux&#x2F;id1189978971?mt=2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;itunes.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;podcast&#x2F;late-night-linux&#x2F;id11899...</a>

Make a PWA webapp of this available on the Windows store, you will find a niche to fill devoid of good podcast apps. Make service workers that allow for download&#x2F;offline sync and i think you will do well. Obviously put it on ios&#x2F;android as well but i think you&#x27;d find a good home with your simple design on ms store. Announce your app on neowin, mspoweruser and such too.

Interesting that Hypercritical is listed in &quot;Best News Podcast&quot; even though the last episode was in 2012.<p>It was a great podcast but slightly mis-categorized.

But I don&#x27;t <i>want</i> another service :&#x2F;<p>I get podcasts on Spotify or Apple Music already. Why should I open another app to get another audio form?

The lack of Categories beyond whats on the main page is the big issue I have. I want to find podcasts for my kids and there is no way to do that other than search - but that returns mostly adult podcasts (&#x27;how to talk to your kid about x&#x27;, &#x27;financial planning for expectant parents&#x27; kind of stuff)<p>That said, I&#x27;ll check back later in the hopes that this improves over time.<p>A great start!

So I have a small content producing company and have three podcasts that I host and track user interactions. Create a lightweight curl (possibly oath) API that lets my server send your server real-time play information and stream refresh info. You will get better data that way, it’s like a Facebook pixel or whatever.

Is there a reason why I can&#x27;t find my podcast there? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jeena.net&#x2F;pods" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jeena.net&#x2F;pods</a><p>It shows up in iTunes search and gPodder search too, but not on that website. I also can&#x27;t seem to be able to find out how to make it find my podcast.

one big flaw. The first page thumbnails do not re-appear with a summary text when I click View More. It seems like the View More view shows podcasts there were not amongst the first page&#x27;s thumnails. What if I want to read a summary about one of those first page podcasts?

Good UI but feature-wise it felt underwhelming because it&#x27;s pretty much what Castbox [1] has already been providing<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;castbox.fm&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;castbox.fm&#x2F;</a>

The search is horrible. I searched for my podcast by keyword and by name, as well as some other podcasts I listen to and none came up even related to any of the shows I was looking for.

Also access Podflix podcasts by voice command: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;is.gd&#x2F;PodcastByVoice" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;is.gd&#x2F;PodcastByVoice</a>

I have a strong appreciation for these types of uber simple designs

I&#x27;ve never used Netflix, so I&#x27;ve no idea what the comparison means. I&#x27;m assuming there isn&#x27;t a subscription fee to access free podcasts, though.

to be the netflix of podcasts the selection surprisingly lacks any fiction podcasts.<p>i wouldn&#x27;t sign up to netflix for news but for movies and tv series, and likewise i expected podflix to give me audio books and audio dramas.<p>for fiction podcasts it is also crucial to keep already released content available (again, like netflix does).<p>i don&#x27;t care much about rating, but i&#x27;d love decent categorizations that make finding content easier.<p>greetings, eMBee.

what index are you using?<p>I can&#x27;t find my favorite podcasts

Personalised recommendations would be outta this world! Even if it changes my perception and make me try new podcasts :-)

I wish there was a way to navigate to weirdly specific categories and have 6+ podcasts on screen at once. Great idea!

Where does review count and rating come from? I didn&#x27;t see any way of rating or adding a comment.

How does this compare to Pocketcast&#x27;s Discover section? I guess being free is a big advantage.

Pagination seems to be broken... I can never get to page 2 of specific podcasts.

Podcast lists don&#x27;t load in Safari and in Chrome -- issue for anyone else?

You should probably change the favicon from the default Vue favicon.

what makes this netflix ish? Just that lists of lists initial UI? That is a very superficial aspect of what makes netflix netflix.

Every page comes up empty?<p>Terms, Privacy, Categories...

So it’s Spotify without music?

the font is awful

exponent is dead

(Pedantic)<p>The &#x27;flix&#x27; in Netflix refers to &#x27;flicks&#x27;, i.e. films.... that is clearly not the case here. Surely the name should have been something more like &#x27;NetCasts&#x27;?

Using fake accounts to upvote things will get you banned here. Please don&#x27;t do it again.