YouTube Music continues on its quest to be the go to Podcasts destination and adds some improvements
YouTube Music appears to be rolling out new features to improve the podcast listening experience. As spotted by a user on Reddit, a new filtering option has appeared on show pages of the app that allows users to sort their podcasts by various criteria.
The sorting criteria include newest to oldest, oldest to newest, most popular, and default. As reported by 9to5Google, this will soon be expanded to also include in progress, unplayed, and played podcasts. This should make it easier to find specific podcasts or prioritize new episodes.
Image credit: u/Igor1550
Another interesting addition is the ability to search for artists by name while creating a radio station. This allows for more customization and control over the music selection within the radio station. These features are currently in the rollout phase, so they might not be available to all users yet.
As new features begin to roll out, YouTube is continually persistent on their decision to migrate podcasts to YouTube Music. In an interview with YouTube Creator Liaison, Rene Ritchie, YouTube Chief Product Office, Johanna Voolich said the below about how podcasts on YouTube are currently viewed:
When I think about how I approach product development, we really try to meet users where they're at, so we think about podcasting in two ways. On the one hand you have the very traditional experience which is RSS, download, episodes, highly productionized listening content. And over the past year we've been spending a lot of time making the YouTube Music app much better at supporting this kind of content. And then the second way we think about podcasts is eyes optional experience so stuff that's great to hear and listen to but also could be great to watch as well, and that's available both on YouTube Music and on YouTube main.
Considering how unpopular the decision to shut down the Google Podcasts app in favor of moving all podcasts to YouTube Music has been, it's difficult to see how all this fits into the big picture. There are still several basic and highly requested podcast features that have not made it into the YouTube Music app, such as the ability to mark an episode as played or to get new episode notifications. Additionally, when asked if YouTube Music will support RSS-out for podcasts, the response was simply: "RSS out isn't on our road map right now, but we do have the ability to support RSS in, so that allows creators to unlock and have access to the two billion users and viewers that are already on our platform."
So, it appears that YouTube is on a mission to redefine podcasts by creating a hybrid experience that can be visual, listen-only, or both. The company is also banking on the discovery tools that YouTube already has and plans to loop that in to podcasts. Let's hope that by rolling out more improvements, as they have promised to do, it won't be too late and YouTube can gain back some of the old Google Podcasts users that have already opted to move to other platforms.
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