Popular Podcasts App Pocket Casts Is Up For Sale: Where Did It Go Wrong? (medium.com) 35
James Cridland, editor of podcast newsletter PodNews: Podcast app Pocket Casts is looking for a buyer. NPR, which owns 34.6% of the company, reports their share of the company's loss was $812,000: which could put the company's net loss at more than $2m, though the company denies this.
I've used Pocket Casts for a long time. To me, it has two unbeatable features:
1. A really, really good audio player - the skip-silence and the voice-boost is light-years ahead of anything that anyone else has produced (with the possible exception of Overcast, but I don't use it enough to know)
2. The full Apple Podcasts catalogue (since BBC content is blocked from Google Podcasts). This isn't unique to PocketCasts, but is one reason why I came back to it.
Sadly, those two selling points haven't helped it in recent years. Purchased by a set of US public media companies in May 2018, and subsequently also invested-in by BBC Studios Americas, Pocket Casts has seen its market share shrink.
1. A really, really good audio player - the skip-silence and the voice-boost is light-years ahead of anything that anyone else has produced (with the possible exception of Overcast, but I don't use it enough to know)
2. The full Apple Podcasts catalogue (since BBC content is blocked from Google Podcasts). This isn't unique to PocketCasts, but is one reason why I came back to it.
Sadly, those two selling points haven't helped it in recent years. Purchased by a set of US public media companies in May 2018, and subsequently also invested-in by BBC Studios Americas, Pocket Casts has seen its market share shrink.
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skip-silence and the voice-boost.... (Score:2)
I use Podcast Addict and it does this (as well as I'm sure other do)...
Seemed way better then Pocket Casts
https://play.google.com/store/... [google.com]
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Despite the fact it has way too many options. Or maybe because it allows everything to be configured the way I want it. One or the other.
Too much content (Score:3)
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Not sure you got the point (or not sure I got your point)...
Pocket Casts is a player. That is all. They have no relationship to the amount of content.
They are losing money because the alternative players are "good enough" for average Joe (and some others are also worthy contenders). They own no exclusive content.
Basically they now lose because they don't have enough of a strong market differentiator.
What the hell is a podcast? (Score:1)
A digital audio file with a few people, at least one of whom has a prodigious ego, having a conversation possibly interspersed with some tinkly piano or similar interlude music?
I kind of irrationally hate the word podcast for some reason.
And relatedly, a gif is not necessarily animated or funny. It's an image file/bitsequence encoded in a particular lossless compression format FFS.
Can we have some technical rigour back please?
Maybe that's why the app failed. Va
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I agree the term is annoying. I feel similarly about "googling."
But it's a convenient shorthand. And you obviously know what it is, despite yourself.
At least it's not a corruption of an existing term, like "hacking."
What went wrong. (Score:1)
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You don't have to subscribe. Subscribing gives access to Windows and MacOS versions of the app, themes (meh) and some cloud storage for Podcasts that aren't in their directory. Most of those things probably aren't that interesting to most people, though I'll said I paid for the Windows app before the subscriptions got turned on, so I'm grandfathered in to access to it.
One of the things I like the most is that it works with Alexa and Nest devices.
It also keeps track of where I am in each episode of each podc
I used Pocket Casts for several years (Score:4, Interesting)
It was a mature app, had a great (and reasonably intuitive) interface with lots of useful features. Then at some point (this was still prior to the sale to NPR et. al.) the developer decided to start changing how many of the most useful features functioned and/or were accessed - it became a real mess, in my opinion.
But, in the end, it's just a podcast app. There are lots of others to try. I switched to RSSRadio, which seems decent.
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Most developers are driven by the voices from above and that is why many useful things change. If it is was a useful feature most developers would know that.
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Oh, no, an organization's marketing and sales guys would *never* overstep like that...
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"the developer decided" only if it is a one man operation.
At the time, I believe it was a one-man operation.
Re:I used Pocket Casts for several years (Score:5, Insightful)
This.
It was great just before NPR bought it and just afterwards, the new version was pushed out with a stupid UI.
Stupid things like arbitrary and pointless distinction between archived and deleted podcasts.
It has got less bad since then, or perhaps I just got used to it. It's still not up to where it was before the major update.
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Free vs Paid (Score:5, Insightful)
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Not only do paid apps have a hard time competing with free apps, but apps that don’t come bundled with the OS are going to have a hard time competing with apps that are bundled with the OS.
It’s not just laziness. Bundled apps are generally assumed to be the “default app”. Users assume that it’s the safest, least problematic choice, and often enough they’re right. The fact that the app is bundled often means that it has some amount of OS integration that 3rd party apps
Another big advantage (Score:3)
Pocket Casts works on Windows, on the Web, via Google and Amazon Voice Assistants and its various mobile apps. The reason I moved to Pocket Casts was the ability to move between devices regardless of where I am. Nothing else was giving me that full, neutral ability at the time. In the couple years since I made the switch to PocketCasts, Spotify has added that feature as well, but while I have Spotify Premium now, I don't expect to have it forever, and since I often switch between podcasts and music, it's better for me to keep the two segregated so I can keep my place from one to the other.
I actually did pay for Pocket Casts Windows application and for the premium version of the app, but they definitely made money from me that has to be in excess of my cost to the company. What is it doing that's costing it so much money?
They're not Apple (Score:3, Insightful)
Instead of their app being installed by default on all new Apple devices, it has to be discovered by scrolling for hundreds of pages though Apple's purposefully obtuse App Store. Kind of makes it hard to compete.
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Nah, Overcast and Castro do just fine. I'm sure there's nothing wrong with Pocket Casts, they just decided that there was a bigger market for 3rd party players than there is, so they overextended. Sometimes you just have to stay in your niche rather than pursue unrealizable growth.
I can tell you exactly when it went wrong. v7.0.3 (Score:2)
Podcast failure (Score:1)
Ill-equipped management led to failure? (Score:2)
NPR and other non-profit public media concerns are not run by people who understand how to run an actual business. They were way out of their depth to begin with, and given the content of the bi-annual pledge drives, probably didn't have the operating capital to pull it off. Come to think of it, where the hell did they find the extra cash to buy a software company in the first place?
It was not a good app (Score:2)
For one thing, the app burned through Android batteries. 5 minutes of podcast would cost about 10-15% battery. That's when I stopped using it.