New podcast features

We're proud to announce one of our largest feature updates yet. Besides a refreshed look for our entire site, this release focusses on an enhanced experience for our podcast publishers.

Publisher features

We've tried to deliver on some of the numerous feature requests we've received and packaged them all in a richer and more consistent publishing experience.

New episode publish sequence

The episode publishing flow received a complete rework and now allows adding icons, links, attachments and more right during episode creation.

Scheduled publishing

Episodes can now be imported to an archived state. They can also automatically publish at a future date. Great for workflows where content is uploaded in advance.

Cover art

Providers, channels and episodes can all have unique cover art. Our cover art requires 1500x500 pixel images - the same 3:1 resolution used for Twitter header images. Episode cover art is included in RSS feeds ready to integrate with your apps and websites.

Channel & episode dashboards

Channel and Episode pages now has admin dashboards for quick access to reporting and management features. The episode dashboard also displays information about the original source file it was imported from and lists dynamic ad campaigns currently running on it.

Country targeted ad delivery

Dynamic ad campaigns can now target one or more countries.

Prioritised imports

Audio file imports are now prioritised based on package type to ensure fast import times for our premium publishers.

Billing details & package upgrades

Account details and usage is now available on the provider dashboard and account owners can easily request package upgrades online. We'll send a confirmation email when an account is upgraded. Each account now has one owner and ownership can be transferred to another person.

Notifications rework

All website notifications are much more consistent and provide better information. Warning notifications are also triggered when approaching account usage limits.

No indexing on Free package

Free packages are excluded from public listing pages, and their pages are tagged to prevent indexing by external search engines. This helps providers that want to setup some demo content on our site without making it widely available.

Public publisher signups

Anyone can now sign up for a Free podcast publishing account. Free accounts are limited in several ways and require 1 new episode to be published every 2 months.

Audio updates

Our backend that imports and transcodes audio content has better performance, provides more information and support additional features:

Loudness normalisation

All podcasts are normalised using the EBU R128 standard to ensure a consistent listening volume over our entire catalog. This also prevents dynamic audio ads from differing too much from their surrounding content. (We use the AES recommended guidelines for online audio and target a loudness level of -16 LUFS, limited to a True Peak of -1.5 LUFS)

Increased bitrates

We've slightly increased the bitrates used for our 'Low' and 'Medium' quality levels. This does increase the file size, but drastically increases audio fidelity, especially for 'Low' quality, which is still an industry-leading ±15mb for 1 hour of content! 'Medium' quality is just below 30mb per hour.

Back-catalog updates

Over the next few weeks all existing content on our platform will automatically be rebuilt in the background to become available using loudness normalisation and the new quality levels. (All back-catalog content will still be fully available)

UI updates

Besides a massive amount of small UI improvements to our entire website, some items are worth highlighting:

Timezone aware

Users can now set their timezone and all date/time values displayed on the site are timezone aware. Auto-detects the correct timezone to start in.

Facebook / Google login icons

Users logged in from Facebook and Google accounts will now use their account profile image.

Let us know what you think!