WordPress.com and Tumblr owner, Automattic has bought popular podcast app Pocket Casts.
Pocket Casts is a very popular app with podcast enthusiasts who prefer it to other apps that have podcasts like Spotify.
The announcement kept everything hush but Automattic said that it will “explore building deep integrations with WordPress.com and Pocket Casts”
Pocket Casts has changed ownership since 2010 when it was bought by NPR. In January this year, the app went up for sale.
Pocket Casts launched Pocket Casts Plus in late 2019 as a subscription service and made their app free to download on Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
Pocket Casts has a clean user interface and powerful playback features. You get to play around with other features such as offline listening, easy discovery of podcasts(under lists like this one), publishers, and hosts or dive deeper with episode search, playback controls, audio effects like trim silence and sorting, cross-platform sync and dark mode themes(Dark, Extra Dark and Light).
The podcast app has gotten really competitive with the likes of Facebook also wanting in. WordPress already has a partnership with Spotify-owned Anchor that lets writers make their posts to audio content using text-to-speech tech.
