💡Curated Lists. Spotify has their own music pre-curated playlists that are categorised per theme or mood. For podcasting, we could have:

- Featured Show/ Episode of the week like in the App Store.

- Monthly curated episode(not Show) lists per interest.

- Curated show lists per interest.

Update: Spotify is now working on curated podcast playlists.

✖️Too many shows to pick from and not easily ‘browsable’. A podcast’s content is invisible. One cannot preview or skim through it to get a sense of it.

💡Audio/Video Pitch of Show like Movie Trailers.

💡Written Summaries of every Episode.

💡Audio Highlights of Episodes .

💡Audio Summaries of Episodes .

- Can be provided by the creator on upload.

- Can be offered as an add-on service of the app.

- Can crowdsource audio highlights and collate them together.

An example of ‘highlights’. An alternative way to consume the content instead of having to go through the entire 1h lecture.

💡“In an ideal world, I would open my app and get an auto-generated Weekly Summary of the most interesting audio chunks regarding a specific interest I follow. Like in Spotify.”

Indeed this idea of being able to consume select snippets of the episode instead of the entire thing + having access to a curated list of those according to subjects/interests/labels instead of shows the follow resonated with many of the people I talked to.

✖️”Some people I subscribe to are also doing Live Streaming. I wish there was a single app that would host both the livestream and the frequent podcast shows.”

💡Integration with Periscope/Twitch to allow creators to automatically push the livestream recording to a podcasting app.

💡Support Live Podcast Streaming. Real Fans will want to tune in for the raw unedited version. A few days later the edited one can be published.

- Allow Live Q&A session through the app through text or voice messages.

✖️The Filter Bubble Effect. The eternal problem… On the one hand we expect the platform to cater to us new content according to what we listen, follow or like (see Recommendation Engines) yet at the same time we want the app to delight us by surprising us with something we would never expect to have liked. This is a rather big ask and a tough and nuanced problem to crack. That is why most content platforms end up becoming eco-chambers the more they get to know our likes & dislikes (Twitter, YouTube, Amazon Books etc.)

💡Spotify’s ‘Made for You’ playlists are a great example. I find, of catering to the familiar but yet surprising me pleasantly from time to time. This is a very very hard algorithmic challenge. Only with more advanced AI methods can we tackle this challenge through very advanced recommendation engines I believe.

🎧Consumption

✖️No time to listen to everything that is interesting out there; especially when each is on average 45 minutes long.

Some of the people ditched all together shows that had a duration of more than 40 minutes unless they were really interested in the subject. They did not want to commit that much time. The 20 minute mark appeared to be the duration that they were more positive towards.

This is also causing a content monopoly and does not enable smaller creators to be discovered since most people would prioritise the ‘popular’ shows over something ‘new’.

💡Creating shorter content as a creator might be a way to ‘break’ into podcasting since those can act as fillers between the usuals people listen to.

💡“I wish there was a way to pick between a short, normal or extended version of an episode according to how much time I am willing to invest.”

✖️Sometimes people tend to lose concentration.

💡Increase visual stimulation through:

- Auto-generated text on screen. It is not true that all of the people who listen to podcasts do so while on the move or while multitasking. Surely that is a great plus of the medium but a few of the people I have talked to, listen to podcasts while having the screen in front of them.

- Video version.

- Overlay multimedia on top of audio stream using timestamps: polls, images, links, tweets etc.

✖️“Often times I want to revisit something I listened to yet I removed from my Queue. There is no way to do that on Overcast or any other app I know of.”

✖️The shows that are done in a language other than English are rare.

💡Improve Accessibility via Auto Translation in different Languages. Possibly use English Transcript → Turn it into other language → Add text-to-speech on top.

✖️”I wish I could add episodes to my podcast lists in a ‘Bookmark’ fashion straight from the browser. I end up finding something on Twitter or a Newsletter and Add it to my Reading List. I then go through the Reading List and download them all through Apple Podcasts manually. It is a pain.” ✖️💡“Sometimes I go in the Tube and before I recall I have to download an Episode, I am losing connection. Predictive auto-downloading of episodes would be awesome!” ✖️💡“I typically listen at x1.5 speed so music shows start playing at that speed. Overcast lets you set custom settings per show which is great stuff! I would expect every app to allow me to do that; or even better, allow me to customise settings per ‘type’ of show, not the show itself.”

⌨️Interaction

✖️Not possible to skip specific sections or navigate to points of interest. This was one of the biggest ones.

💡Index the Podcast. Cut it down to sections with a start & end timestamp. Add a short title or even an emoji for each.

- Allow community to do the indexing

- Allow community to add comments + transcription of audio → Programmatic Indexing through ML.

- App Offers it as a Service.

- Allow creator to do the indexing.

Using the above; add a skip/next button instead of the +-30 second buttons. For example, in an interview-formated episode, the indexing could be done accouring to Q&A pair where a Skip button would skip to the next question. In a storytelling/narrative episode, it could be skipping to the next story section and so on.

💡Add a fast-forward button. This is so simple since all apps today have a speed control setting yet everybody treats it as a global setting of the app and not something we would want to control over the duration of the podcast. I am surprised nobody has introduced this feature yet. Overcast does have a Smart Speed feature that minimises silence.

💡Enable searching (using a transcript).

💡Use a YouTube-like overview thumbnail but instead of scrennshot of the video, use an emoji or 1–3 word headline.

💡Visualise sections on the progress bar. Visualise ads like YouTube does through the yellow marker.

✖️No way to interact with the podcast. No comments, no ratings.

“The comment section is often times the most interesting part of a blog/video.” 💡“Adding voice comments might be a new way of interacting with podcasts.”

Voice Messages on Anchor

💡Allow people to react to snippets/phrases/sections. Not just the episode or show itself. Can use a Thumbs Up-Down/Heart/Clap/Emojis.

💡Add comments along the track like Soundcloud.

💡Provide a visual reaction timeline through emojis on top of the progress bar.