From the fine folks at InsideRadio.com:
The company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Longreads, and Tumblr, has acquired podcast player company Pocket Casts, ending a sale process that began at the start of the year. Terms of the deal were not announced.
“As part of Automattic, Pocket Casts will continue to provide you (users) with the features needed to enjoy your favorite podcasts (or find something new),” the company announced in a blog post. “We will explore building deep integrations with WordPress.com and Pocket Casts, making it easier to distribute and listen to podcasts.”
Pocket Cast co-founders Russell Ivanovic and Philip Simpson will continue to lead the company as part of Automattic – the company that owns WordPress.
“Deep integrations” means users will be able to launch the entire podcast through WordPress soon. It’s a smart idea.
Anchor which is owned by Spotify announced a partnership with WordPress.com in February this year, which allows people to turn blog posts into audio content with a few clicks. That’s been a growing trend for print journalism over the past couple of years. It certainly helps with accessibility for people with vision problems. But I’m not sure how useful that is to the audience as a whole.
It’s always nice to have options. This is another one of those developments that probably won’t cause any exodous from one platform to another. I won’t be moving mine any time soon. But I could see new podcasts leaning heavily on WordPress, since it would allow podcasters to have everything under one roof.
