The Pocket Casts design and development team has been working on an Apple TV version for months. They’ve done an excellent job with this release. The app is slick and I’m so happy that the team is finally ready to share it.

I wrote the public facing documentation for this release. If you notice anything is amiss, have questions, comments, or what have you, please reach out to support.

In short, it’s Pocket Casts on the Apple TV. It connects with your account to keep your podcasts, playlists, playback position, and more in sync with Pocket Casts on all of your other devices. It’s great for throwing on an episode while you clean the house, play a board game with the kids, or just about any other scenario.

And while it’s a great audio podcast player, it really shines with video episodes. Here are some podcasts that publish video episodes that I’ve been watching lately:

• Retro Game Corps on Odysee
• IGN.com – Daily Fix
• Daily Tech News Show
• The Culinary Institute of America
• TechHut on Odysee

I’m sure there are many more that I’m missing. If you have any recommendations of video podcasts that publish using an open RSS feed, I’d love to hear about them.

There are some features that are missing in this initial launch compared to Pocket Casts on other platforms. The one I’m hoping to see added in the future is Files support. I frequently add video files to Pocket Casts using this feature and while I can AirPlay from the mobile app, it would be clutch if I could play them right from within the app on tvOS.

Chapters is another feature that has become an important part of my podcast app experience and is missing in this first release. But I’m hopeful that additional features like this will come in time now that the core feature set is out the door.

I think there’s a bright future ahead for podcasting and I love that I get to be a part of it through documentation and support for Pocket Casts. The team has been shipping some excellent features recently — highlighted transcripts, the tasteful Liquid Glass design refresh, and Dynamic Type support to name a few. Pocket Casts is better than it’s ever been and improving with every release.

Speaking more broadly about the podcasting ecosystem, though, helping to build and maintain that is what keeps me excited about work. Podcasting is a free, open distribution mechanism for media that anyone can utilize.

You don’t have to rely on a single vendor to host and distribute your show. You can pick from a myriad of dedicated podcast hosting companies or host it yourself. As long as you can serve an RSS feed and a media file, you can publish a podcast.

And your listeners aren’t forced to obtain your show from a specific vendor either. They can use Pocket Casts, Castro, Overcast, or choose from hundreds of other clients.

Podcasters get a more direct relationship with their audience and so many people get to build their livelihoods creating software, building hosting companies, and more. It’s a beautiful thing.

We have an old stereo receiver in the living room, tuned to our favorite local radio station. We turn it on almost every day.

And in the car, as much as I enjoy listening to my own music collection and podcasts, there’s nothing more convenient than using the vehicle’s radio. Just set it to your favorite station and leave it — you don’t have to choose what to listen to, navigate menus, manually start playback, or anything. It just works.

➝ Source: donthave2sting.bearblog.dev

From the Pocket Casts weblog:

With version 8.0 of the mobile apps and 6.0 of the web and desktop apps, Pocket Casts introduces Playlists, a flexible and personal way to organize your listening experience. Playlists let you curate, combine, and manage episodes across your favorite podcasts, helping you build exactly the listening flow you want.

The Filters feature remains, but has been rebranded as Smart Playlists. The interface is a bit refined, but all the features from Filters is still available.

What’s new is the ability to curate lists of episodes, which you can add to manually. You can use it to save individual episodes for an upcoming roadtrip, collect episodes that cover the same topic, or whatever you can think of.

This has been our most requested feature for the entirety of Pocket Casts’ time at Automattic. I’m so proud of the team for all the work they’ve put into this.

➝ Source: blog.pocketcasts.com

No longer a Spotify exclusive, The Joe Rogan Experience is available wherever you get your podcasts. The show’s RSS feed is active again with the latest episodes, which means it’s actually a podcast again.

➝ Source: macrumors.com

Matt Hauger:

Faster playback gives listeners time for more podcasts—a welcome perk, since the library of available shows continues to grow exponentially. As the market explodes, faster playback seems like a no-brainer: more great conversations, no additional time commitment. What’s not to like?

My advice? Don’t do it. Keep that playback speed locked at 1x. While you’re at it, turn off clever features like Overcast’s “Smart Speed”, which saves time by cropping out silence.

I completely agree with Matt on this. Just listen at 1x without any silence trimming. If you don’t have time to listen to all of your podcasts, consider trimming your subscriptions or skipping episodes that seem less interesting to you.

➝ Source: matthauger.com

Advertising-based business models don’t work in digital spaces. There are too many incentives to try and abuse the system, which will inevitably break the supply and demand curve.

Some of this can be mitigated with closed systems where there can be a bit more trust between everyone involved. Direct advertiser and publisher relationships, for example, with no ad platform intermediary — but that has its own set of ethical problems.

But the key takeaway is, if you run a business that gets the majority of its revenue from ads, you should have already been thinking of ways to change that.

➝ Source: bloomberg.com

Mike Stone:

What Spotify is doing is publishing an audio program, but it’s not a podcast. What YouTube does isn’t a podcast. What Apple does isn’t a podcast. They’re certainly audio programs, and I don’t mean to take away from their content. If you like those shows good on you, but these platforms don’t adhere to the more open history of what podcasts originally were.

Correct.

➝ Source: mikestone.me

Michael Tsai:

The services apps are all frustrating to use. In may ways, they feel worse than Web apps. I cannot believe how Apple has let them regress so much. I miss iTunes from 15 years ago.

I maintain an old Mac Mini that runs El Capitan and an even older iMac that runs Snow Leopard. iTunes is so much better on those older machines than the current state of the TV app, Apple Music, and Apple Podcasts.

My current pet peeve is the Podcast app’s lack of OPML export or import. What a terrible, user-hostile omission.

I was recently trying to export my subscriptions from Pocket Casts and import them into Apple Podcasts so I could use the Apple TV app to more conveniently playback video podcasts. But, no dice. There’s no way to just import an OPML file. I would have to go through and manually subscribe to every single podcast. I’m not going to do that over a hundred podcasts.

➝ Source: mjtsai.com