For a long time Spotify has allocated a significant amount of resources to enhance its podcasts. The most recent is the acquisition of Podz, a startup that created a technology that will help streaming service users to find new podcasts more easily .
According to the announcement, Podz has created a state-of-the-art machine learning based system that creates high-quality clips with key moments from an episode . Thus, the public can discover and listen to new podcasts, based on a preview of the content they offer.
Spotify plans to incorporate the technology acquired to enhance the tools related to its catalog with more than 2 million podcasts. In addition, it promises to start rolling it out with new features that will reach users before the end of the year .
We believe Podz technology will complement and accelerate Spotify's focused efforts to drive discovery , deliver listeners the right content at the right time, and accelerate the growth of the category worldwide.
Spotify
Spotify adds technology to power its podcasts
Photo by Agê Barros on Unsplash
The acquisition of Podz and the incorporation of its technology are not arbitrary decisions on the part of Spotify. The announcement comes just hours after knowing the future landing of Facebook in the world of podcasts. This is because the social network will present an option for the public to generate and share clippings of up to one minute , in order to expand the visibility of their favorite shows.
This means that Spotify and Facebook will not only compete to have the best catalog of podcasts. They will also do it by providing the most complete experience in discovering titles.
In any case, the music streaming platform already has a very important infrastructure dedicated to podcasts . In the last time it added the option to share timestamps of an episode, and will soon offer automatic transcription of them. But that's not all, since it recently improved the dynamic filters of its apps to find music and podcasts faster. In addition, it offers a paid version with exclusive content for subscribing listeners.
