Snapcast: Apple Announces Apple Podcasts On The Web

We've wrapped things up at Podcast Movement just in time to get a recording in! Check out the new Apple Podcasts on the web and let us know what you think by tapping the link to send us a text.

Read "How to install Apple Podcasts on Android" by Podnews.

Don't forget to tell us if we should keep making "snapcasts" for our next sound-off segment!

Transcript

Jordan: 0:00

All right, we're coming to you live from.

Alban: 0:02

What does it really mean if it's coming to you live I?

Jordan: 0:05

know we're always live.

Alban: 0:06

Yeah, we are live. We're live, we're recording live, but you're not listening live, so it's not really live.

Jordan: 0:11

So we're coming to you from the past in Kevin's hotel room at Podcast Movement. It's the final day of Podcast Movement.

Alban: 0:20

And we are toast. We are toast. We've all done about three 14-hour days of talking to podcasters, which is day one, very invigorating, day two, you're kind of tired and day three, you lose the ability to talk. So we are amped up. We listened to some rock music to try to get pumped.

Jordan: 0:41

What's happening on podcasting? So one of the cool things is that apple has released apple podcasts for web and if you go to podcastapplecom you can see that, and we'll be talking about that on the next episode of buzzcast yeah, what I noticed is if you go in, like if you have an iphone and you go in safari, it will jump you right into the apple podcast app.

Kevin: 0:59

So you need to have like a different browser, like chrome on your iphone or firefox on your iphone. If you want to see it on an iPhone, you can definitely see it on a desktop. I don't know if Apple podcasts on the desktop would launch if you did it from a Mac, in Safari might as well.

Alban: 1:13

Yeah, so for people who are listening to this, I mean, my first thought was why would they do this? What's the value? I mean they're going to sink. So if you do find a podcast, this, is my theory, which is my theory.

Alban: 1:24

It's my question and my theory, which is the answer to that question. All right, let's go. It's round two. So Apple Podcasts has been on the web for a long time, but they're mostly these landing pages. I'm sure everybody's seen these for their own show. If you search Buzzcast inside of Google, probably one of the top three after our webpage is going to be Apple Podcasts. There's Apple Podcasts listing page and you can always click, play and listen to those episodes straight through. But now, if you're logged into your Apple account, it's going to sync over to your account and, at least for me, I think the one way I'm going to use this a lot is, when I'm searching for a podcast, that I can now add it to my Apple podcast follow list, and so it will now show up on my phone.

Jordan: 2:11

Yeah.

Alban: 2:11

In the past I'd find it listen, go, this is good, and then, kind of separately, go pull out my phone and search for it.

Kevin: 2:17

Yeah, yeah. And if you're on a device that is not an Apple device, I imagine it can get annoying that every time you find a podcast page, like the first big button on there is the Apple podcast button and every time you click it, you can't really do anything, it's just you know.

Kevin: 2:32

I don't know exactly what that experience was, but it's not a full podcast listening experience. This solves that problem. So I don't know that. Android customers I don't know what the goal is to get them all to like, add this as their to their home screen as a progressive web app or anything. Them all to like add this as their to their home screen as a progressive web app or anything. But it does solve the problem of if I click through an Apple podcast link on accident.

Alban: 2:54

I now have a full podcast player in my web browser. Yeah, I noticed. A friend of the show, james Cridland, wrote a piece on how to get Apple podcasts onto your Android device as a step-by-step tutorial about how to add a webpage to your device. One of the things he noticed that I didn't was that Apple podcast subscriptions the paid, premium podcasts are now available on the web, and so I could see that making sense. I mean, this would be nice for somebody who's selling a subscription. They don't want to have to also run a Buzzsprout subscription or a Patreon or a Supercast or something else. They can now tell maybe the smaller side of their customer base that's on Android and wants some sort of premium content. It is possible for you. It may not be perfect, but it's definitely possible for you to go get that content.

Jordan: 3:41

And it widens the audience that you can reach too, because it's available in 175 countries, the audience that you can reach, too, because it's available in 175 countries. And so now you can potentially reach more subscribers than you were able to in the past.

Kevin: 3:53

Right. So is that the play here? You think, if you run an Apple podcast subscription for your premium content, you don't need a third-party service like a Patreon or even Buzzsprout subscriptions anymore. You can just run it all through Apple podcast subscriptions, because even if you don't have a Mac or an iPhone, you could still get it.

Alban: 4:10

It seems like an ancillary benefit. I don't feel like that's the primary one. My theory of the case maybe this will change by the time we record again is that Apple has these listings. They were already ranking for everything and it probably was not a great feeling for the Apple team to see somebody land on the page and know discovery is happening through Apple podcasts. But that consumption would often bounce over to Spotify or another app on Android, at least for people who are not Apple people didn't have Apple devices.

Alban: 4:40

If I was somebody inside of Apple, I'd be like oh, let's move on the web and eventually I'll get some data to take to the higher up and say maybe we do need to have an app over here on a windows, because everybody on windows is using iTunes. Maybe we should have an app over here on Android so we could try to hold on to and grow our market share in podcasting. Well, we'd like to hear your thoughts. I mean I would. You can click the link in the show notes and send us some fan mail and let us know what you think about Apple Podcasts on the web. We still need people to reach out to us and tell us their thoughts about Snapcasts. Tell us about very sleepy Saturday Snapcasts like this one. Yes, we're all about ready to go take a nap. Yeah, what else do we have in store for us, jordan?

Jordan: 5:28

Yeah, so next week we're also going to be talking about some other Apple news that is going to affect Patreon users. There's some new rules coming out with the Apple App Store and it'll affect how subscriptions are done with Patreon. So stay tuned for that and we will see you next week. Until then, keep podcasting.