With every music streaming service and their aunt piling into podcasts, we’re interested in some of the innovation coming from startups in that space: as a precursor to future features (or indeed acquisitions) from the big platforms.
So Podz is worth checking out: it’s an iPhone app pitched as “your audio newsfeed”. What that means is it strips out 60-second clips from the podcasts you like and presents them as an ‘infinite playlist’, with each clip tappable on to listen to the full original episode.
“Podz is built on an ML [machine learning] model trained to identify the most engaging 60-second clips of new episodes and present them in a feed that matches your existing subscriptions and interests,” is how CEO Doug Imbruce described it in a post on Product Hunt. “We think of Podz as a savvy friend who scours new podcasts, highlights the best parts, and recommends the perfect clips for you… then, remembers to save the full episodes for later.”
This is something that would work beautifully within a bigger streaming service too. If Spotify and co aren’t building it, perhaps one of them will buy it.
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