Standard Podcast Consumption (SPC)
Yes, your podcast episode was downloaded - but was it played?
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At the Podcast Movement Evolutions conference in Chicago last week, the topic of podcast app consumption stats (i.e. “listens” vs downloads) came up multiple times. So often, in fact, that the idea of a standard definition for aggregate playback metrics was kicked around, and thoughts about how good-faith apps could securely let podcasters know how their podcast is doing on their platform.
Ideally this would be a simple, secure, uniform API using a standard spec that could be implemented by a podcast app of any size, instead of the current method of relying on unsupported scraping of the handful of portals provided by the largest apps, ignoring smaller apps altogether.
After integrating a bunch of these ideas, I just published a one-page proposal on how this might work with the absolute minimum development/policy lift for apps. I’d love to see an existing podcast app take it up as an early adopter.
No need to wait for RSS feed changes, SPC requires no new tags!
👉 https://github.com/skymethod/spc