Broadcasting app Anchor, which helps anyone record and share audio, is relaunching its app today with a new focus on serving the larger podcaster community... Of course, there is one concern for professional podcasters migrating to Anchor’s platform – and that’s whether it will be around in the long-term. For now, the company isn’t generating revenue – it’s living off its funding. Podcasters who pay for hosting or self-host don’t generally have to worry with whether they’ll one day have to quickly migrate elsewhere because the company is shutting down or being acquired – and that’s always a concern with startups.
It also makes me wonder why an app like this, which has some great and useful higher end utility, doesn’t offer its production service as the product? Sure they can offer the hosting and other bits to the general public, but for the professionals who are already out there, why not give them inexpensive access to the root production service and then allow immediate export so that the company could host the end product on their own website? This would amount to a very solid PESOS service. In fact, they could probably offer the production side for free for the big players for the advertising leverage to gain the smaller players in the space.
I’ve noticed some very large publishing concerns, notably The Atlantic Interview recently, who are sadly relying on third party services to host their podcast content. For large companies that actually have a team that manages their presence to at least some extent, there’s really no reason that they should be relying on a third party to be holding the URLs to their content.
I’m curious to try this out now for my own too-often-neglected microcast. Having a simpler and more straight-forward production flow would certainly help lower the bar for making it even despite my already low requirements for making it.
