Meet Mashcast, for those who just can’t wait to listen to a new podcast episode
It feels like I’m writing about podcast related products almost all the time now. Ok, it’s been just a few times – but there is no doubt the podcast craze has hit big time. Not only are podcasts bigger than ever (in terms of listeners), but developers seem to finally be ready to jump on board too. Opinion, a Swedish creation, who help podcasters capture audio on the go and Acast, a Swedish podcast distribution network are just two examples of homegrown startups who are trying to capture some of that podcast momentum.
Serial, a weekly crime-thriller that is now the fastest growing podcast of all time, has been covered in every media outlet from the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal. Last year, Apple noted that subscriptions of podcasts through iTunes reached 1 billion and monthly podcast listeners has tripled to 75 million from 25 million five years ago, according to RawVoice.
Mashcast, is for those of us who just cannot wait to hear the latest episode of our favorite podcast. The idea is fairly simple – Mashcast “mashes up” music, radio and podcasts. With Mashcast, users of streaming music services such Spotify, Google Play Music and Deezer can now automatically get news and podcast updates mixed their music flow, regardless of what play context they use, as Mashcast controls the music player remotely.
In simple terms, Mashcast will “interrupt” your flow, and inject new episodes of podcasts or radio shows you may subscribe to.
- Streaming music is the future, but the missing piece in the puzzle is to get people who today listen to regular radio because they want to hear news, or their favorite radio segments, to switch to Spotify, and Mashcast will make this possible as we can add in radio or podcast episodes straight into the music flow, Alexander Forselius, CTO of Mashcast says.
A beta build of Mashcast can be downloaded from http://mashcast.fm, and is currently only available for OS X. Builds for other platforms will be available later in 2015.
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