Pocket Casts, one of the most popular podcast listening apps, was just purchased by the parent company of WordPress and Tumblr, Automattic. The podcast scene has seen a lot of consolidation lately. There is money to be made and the big boys in the industry are making moves to make sure they get a bigger slice of the pie. This move is intriguing to me to see where Automattic takes the the popular app that is available on both the Android and Apple platforms. Integration with WordPress seems extremely likely and many podcast hosts already use the service when publishing their episodes.
When theorizing what moves could be made, the lack of big time apps for playing podcasts is drawn into sharper focus. The biggest two apps also have directories and exclusive shows on their platform, with Spotify into hosting with their Anchor service and Apple being the long time defacto directory to list your podcast when creating a show. Many other small time podcast apps draw their search directly from the Apple directory. So what does Automattic plan to do with their new toy? There are some obvious seeming moves. And there are bigger gambles that present themselves, like getting into hosting and exclusivity with content. As a user of the Pocket Casts, I am looking foward to finding out.
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