Netflix's audio-only mode could threaten podcasting

• Move over podcasting - Netflix is rolling-out an audio-only mode to their Android app. The app also has variable-speed playback, and a feature called audio-description, which, on selected shows, tells you what’s happening on screen. The company will hope you don’t listen to a podcast, when you can listen to a movie or TV show instead.

• Triton Digital has released the latest US Podcast Report. The data covers most of November; the top 5 remains unchanged, with NPR at #1. The total downloads from the top ten publishers dropped by more than 5%, in a period that included the US Presidential Election and Thanksgiving. An incomplete ranker, it measures participating publishers only - notably, not iHeartRadio.

• Edison Research has published their 10 for '20, a compilation of their biggest findings from 2020. Expect audio consumption, spoken word, and US election voting.

• Storyboard, an enterprise podcast and hosting platform, has raised $4.5m in funding.

• Bryan Barletta did the first Sounds Profitable Deep Dive yesterday, with Podscribe. It’s free to watch on the Sounds Profitable website.

• ESPN Podcasting had a record year, with 96.5m downloads in October alone, they say.

• Vox Media Studios is to double the amount of shows it makes and plans to bring in $100m in revenue, in 2021.

  
  This link is no longer available, as at Aug 30 2023

• Steve Henn wonders if independent podcasting has peaked. He was formerly at Google’s audio news division, and at US public radio.

• Nick Hilton, too, is broadly pessimistic about the podcast industry. Available content massively exceeds available interest, he claims, and the changes in the industry in 2020 are a long way from what made podcasts special, he says.

• Captivate has launched “show notes snippets”, a simple way to add pre-written snippets to your show notes. (Podnews’s Editor is an advisor).

  
  Aug 30 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

Tips and tricks - with Podpage

• Creating a Discord server for audio drama production (Tal Minear)

• Why your podcast needs a website (Podcast Generator)

Podcast News - with Fable & Folly

Death by Dying The award-winning whimsical dark comedy about an obituary writer solving murder mysteries in the delightfully grim town of Crestfall, Idaho. Season 2 soon to be in production! Ad sales by Fable and Folly.

As Pete Buttigieg learnt he’d been nominated as Transport Secretary, he was doing a podcast with Hillary Clinton: The Deciding Decade.

PodcastOne Australia has lost a show - Em Rusciano’s podcast Emsolation will become an independent production in 2021. She describes her relationship with SCA, who own PodcastOne in Australia, as “an abusive relationship I keep going back to”. SCA also hired her for a short-lived stint on the ailing 2DayFM in Sydney: one in a list of under-invested breakfast shows on the formerly market-leading station.

Crooked Media’s Wind of Change is to be adapted for television, says Deadline.

A sports podcast has crowd-funded over £100,000 (US$135,000) in two weeks. The Tennis Podcast has received funding from nearly 1,200 listeners. It’s been going since 2012.

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