Monday, April 29, 2019

Clip Sharing With Overcast

Marco Arment (tweet):

With today’s 2019.4 update, you can now share audio or video clips, up to a minute each, from any public podcast. Simply tap the share button in the upper-right corner.

[…]

For podcasting to remain open and free, we must not leave major shortcomings for proprietary, locked-down services to exploit. Conversely, the more we strengthen the open podcast ecosystem with content, functionality, and ease of use, the larger the barrier becomes that any walled garden must overcome to be compelling.

This is really cool.

Timothy Buck:

Marco also updated Overcast.com’s episode and show pages. Now when you click an Overcast link on any device and you’re not logged into Overcast, you’ll receive a page with links to the Overcast app, Apple Podcasts, Castro, Pocket Casts, and a generic RSS Feed link.

As a podcast creator with 80% of my traffic coming from Overcast and Apple Podcasts, this is a hugely welcome change. This doesn’t solve the link sharing problem entirely, especially for shows who have large Android listenerships, but it will reduce the need for me to tweet 3 different links of the same episode.

Marco Arment:

I experimented with automatic transcripts from Apple, Google, and other various providers during clip-sharing development. But none were reliably usable.

They’re OK for search-indexing, but not for humans to read. Imagine the way your voicemail transcribes. It’s like that.

Marco Arment:

Clips are file attachments to wherever you’re posting them, so they’ll stay exact.

The web links load the file directly from the publisher each time and seek to the specified timestamp, so if they use DAI with variable-duration ads, they’ll be off by a bit. Another DAI problem.

Marco Arment:

I tried sending both the video and URL to the share system to see if various apps would do the right thing and share both, but most didn’t. So I offer separate URL and video sharing buttons.

My recommended workflow is to copy the URL, then share the video to wherever, and paste.

Federico Viticci:

Not only is @OvercastFM’s new clip sharing great for podcast listeners, but it’s also a terrific tool for creators who want to share better previews on social channels. I love this addition to the app.

Nick Heer:

Sharing just a clip is the audio equivalent of a blockquote. And because these things are generated as video clips by default, they work with Instagram and Twitter and all the other typical destinations for sharing. Brilliant.

Previously: Luminary Proxying Podcasts Without Asking.

Update (2019-05-31): Pádraig Kennedy:

Full credit to @marcoarment for bringing easy video clip sharing to podcast apps. I genuinely hate copying features from other apps, but once in a while a competitor does something really fucking cool and you have to respond.

Marco Arment:

I sometimes have the same dilemma. I always try to be original and do my own take on things (as do they; Castro is by far my most innovative competitor), but sometimes, a competitor does something the best/only/right way, and the best choice is to do it the same way.

We’re cool.

Pádraig Kennedy:

Thanks man, try this in the export session exportSession.outputFileType = .mov and you might not need an automatic kicking machine... 💚

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