Adding podcasts to Jam

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0:00 Hello.

0:00 It's been a minute or dare I say more than just a minute.

0:05 Ok. Jam puns aside, we've been busy building, we've been building some new things for Jam and the more we build, the more of a big deal it seems to talk about it.

0:14 And so it goes on and now here we are having built lots of stuff.

0:17 We're really long overdue, so let's just get straight to it.

0:21 Jam now supports longer content or to put it in more specific terms, you can now find, add, and listen to podcasts with Jam.

0:30 I'm excited about this. I'm also very nervous.

0:34 So let's do the nervous bit.

0:35 First, I've long believed that building yet another podcast player isn't going to change much in the landscape of audio.

0:41 Podcast players are effectively commodities.

0:43 Apple and Spotify have the most popular ones because Apple ships its podcast player with its very popular devices.

0:50 And Spotify already had a massive install base because it was a very popular music app and then decided about podcasts.

0:56 Put simply, differentiating to a point where someone's going to overcome the friction of downloading, installing, importing their podcasts into your new player is really, really hard.

1:07 It's a podcast player, after all, just has one job to do. So with that fairly damning indictment,

1:14 Why on Earth would we expand Jam to incorporate podcasts?

1:17 Well, there are two big reasons, I'm excited and actually optimistic and they both stem from the behaviors that we saw in and heard from Jam's listeners and creators.

1:26 First, we're on to something with the short format. As a listener to Building Jam, you won't be surprised to hear this.

1:32 There's clearly room in people's day for short, personal, authentic updates that the short format provides.

1:38 The thing is, they want the longer ones too.

1:41 And once Jam had an app, it started to look and feel more and more like a podcast app that only played short podcasts and that wasn't a great position to be in.

1:49 So in our new playlist design, we've kept the easy access to the shorter content, we're calling them shorts, and they're in a row across the top while we also allow a list of podcasts beneath.

2:00 The second thing that we saw in Jam's usage was the interaction and feedback.

2:04 Hundreds of Jam's listeners used the like and reply features.

2:08 These are notably absent from the podcast ecosystem today and from what we've heard from you among others really need it.

2:16 We think we can extend the social features from short audio into podcasts.

2:20 We create, create tremendous opportunity as listeners can go interact with podcast creators in the same app in which they listen to them.

2:28 Now, this probably provokes a lot of questions for you.

2:31 One of which of course will be, will you still call it Jam?

2:34 If content could be longer than just a minute and there'll be other specs sites, we'll get to them.

2:38 We obviously have lots to talk about.

2:40 In the meantime, please do two things.

2:42 First check that you have the Jam app installed and it's on version 2.0 or later.

2:49 You can look at the version number in the app store. Number two, reply to this Jam.

2:55 Tell me what you think because I missed hearing from you.

2:58 Talk soon.

2:59 Bye.

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