Podcasts, say hello to Recast
Simplecast launches Recast™ beta, a listener-driven podcast sharing and discovery tool
Update: June 14, 2018
We’re making Recast beta available for all Simplecast-powered shows! If you don’t yet see this option in your Share tools, hop on over to your Dashboard support chat and let us know - we’ll get it flipped on for ya. As a publisher, you will access your Recast settings via any episode’s Share page, where you can preset the sharing color & artwork options for each episode. Recast will be publicly available, without request, alongside the launch of Simplecast 2.0.
If you’d like to play around with Recast as a show’s listener, here’s an episode of Mozilla’s IRL podcast. Jump right into the editor, or launch it yourself from Mozilla’s Simplecast web player. Easy-peasy. We’d love to hear your thoughts!
WNYC’s inception of social audio with the audiogram can be found just about everywhere in the podcast universe these days. Why? Despite it being 2018, audio is still not well-supported on most social media platforms. While our new Simplecast embed player does play beautifully when embedded in a tweet, the likelihood of someone listening to an entire show on their social feed is slim. Enter the audiogram — a short video whose sole purpose is to deliver short audio clips with a striking visual component on social media, blogs, and even messaging services like iMessage and Slack.
For the past nine months we’ve been reinventing Simplecast from the ground up, and now, it’s nearly ready for you. While creating what we’re confident will be the most powerful, feature-rich podcast hosting and analytics platform available, we’ve held true to our core values. We call them our 2R’s: (1) Does XYZ feature help a creator grow a show’s Reach, and/or (2) does XYZ tool help a creator find and grow Revenue? Each new feature has to pass this test or it goes into the project backlog.
Discoverability of podcasts — the podcast’s reach — is miles away from perfect, and while we have big plans here too, we began simple: What if podcasts and retweets had a baby? They did! We named it Recast™.
Recast is the Audiogram, Personalized
When we began mapping out our flavor of the audiogram, we wanted to focus on making Recast a personal, intimate experience for the listener, as this experience is what makes audio so inviting in the first place.
Most audiograms floating around social media today are created by the podcast creator or the show’s producer. While they create some wonderful things, this format prevents the listener from sharing their favorite segment, joke, or tear-jerker. We believe putting listeners in control of what’s contained in an audiogram will increase the joy of sharing, thereby increasing the desire and willingness to share. Recast is the industry’s first, fully listener-accessible audiogram sharing tool.
Take a Look (And a Listen)
For anyone who has has interacted with our beta Embed Player, you’re likely familiar with the mysterious scissor icon in the Connect drawer. It has a purpose, and Recast is it!
Over the next few weeks, we will be beta-testing the Recast engine with a small group of podcast creators and publishers. Once we’re confident it’s road-ready, and will not flinch at the load of generating thousands of Recasts a day, we’ll begin enabling the public listener-accessible Recast button for those same podcasts. Thereafter, we’ll be rolling it out to all Simplecast customers as 2.0 launches in the spring – making Recast available to each and every one of your listeners.
I truly hope seeing the thought and care we have put into Recast excites you for what is to come. We can’t wait to reveal the reimagined Simplecast, which we believe will carry podcasting (and the infrastructure powering it) into the future.
P.S. Check out a Recast video in action, below, and also on our new Instagram feed here.
To Be Continued…,
Brad & Team Simplecast
🎙
