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October 09, 2005

Listen to the Internet With Yahoo! Podcasts

I'm finally able to talk about Yahoo! Podcasts, now in public beta. This new source for online audio programming uses Yahoo! Search to make it easier than ever to find and subscribe to audio content and listen wherever and whenever you want.

Chances are you're already tuned in to podcasting -- sipping from the fire hose of audio programming that's been pouring out onto the Net. From Harry Potter to the President, Coverville to the Bitterest Pill, Fantasy Sports-casting to food and wine reviews, NPR to NASA to Chinese language lessons -- there are podcasts about nearly everything. But with new shows popping up all the time, it can be a challenge to cut through the clutter and find content that's relevant and interesting to you.

Yahoo! Podcasts offers a comprehensive directory of podcast series and individual shows from across the Web, complete with detailed search results, most popular and highest rated lists, editorial picks, and a full collection of tools you can use. These community tools include ratings, reviews, and the ability to tag audio content, or view the tags that other people add. Why waste time on noise instead of signal �Yahoo! Podcasts can help you discover tasty stuff to feed your ears.

Our web-based player makes it simple and painless to listen right through your web browser. An accelerated playback feature (IE only) lets you "scan" a program at 2x speed to get the gist of it faster. You can use Yahoo! Podcasts with aggregators like iPodder (thanks to Andrew Grumet), with desktop media players like the Yahoo! Music Engine (the integration is beautiful!), iTunes, and with the latest version of iPodder, the Windows Media Player and even Winamp. Or, you can download the shows you want to any mp3 player, such as the iPod, iRiver, Dell DJ, Creative Zen, etc.

But wait, there's more ahead� We're already working on personalized podcast recommendations and friendly, easy-to-use tools so that anyone can create and publish a podcast or audio blog and share it with friends, family, coworkers, and the World Wide Web.

Needless to say, we eagerly await your feedback and your opinions. Please stop by and rate the podcasts you already enjoy. If you notice that we're missing something, you can submit a podcast feed URL here. The more you participate, the better it gets for publishers and listeners alike.

Yahoo! Podcasts beta is also available on Yahoo! Next.

Time to put your ear to the ground and listen to what the Internet is saying.

Lee Ott
Yahoo! Podcasts Team

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Comments

Congratulations on the launch of Yahoo! Podcasts. You guys have certainly shaken things up in the podcasting world.

Posted by: TechCrunch | October 9, 2005 11:39 PM

Great! But unicode does not play well. I get garbled results when they include unicode-encoded feeds.

This is very important for non-english feeds!

Posted by: Panayotis Vryonis | October 10, 2005 02:45 AM

I love the idea of this service, especially the potential as yahoo's recommendation engine is well integrated. Nice work kids. Just one question: what's up with the bizzare blue look and feel? Since when do yahoo products look like lycos circa 2001? What happened to clean and simple?

Posted by: Ed | October 10, 2005 04:37 AM

Well, I'm stumped. I don't see any integration whatsoever with Y!ME. (I am a Music Unlimited subscriber, if that helps.) I click a Subscribe button, select Y!ME as the destination, open Y!ME, and see no sign of a subscription, of the word "podcast," or of any indication that anything was added recently.

Works fine with iTunes v5.x -- Subscribing to there opens the program, adds the subscription, downloads the most recent episode, etc..

Does a user have to upgrad Y!ME to get it to work? If so, I would expect a notice today that a new Y!ME is ready for download.

What's this about Winamp integration? I tried that with a subscription ... nothing. I have the newest version of Winamp.

Another question: Is the Yahoo! Podcasts directory/engine going to be entirely integrated in Y!ME, or just subscription links? If the latter, what's the purpose? We already have iTunes for locating and playing podcasts. Yahoo! Podcasts is nice, but not so nice to force users to straddle between a Web page and a desktop application. It has to be fully integrated, and there's no indication of that that I can see.

Sorry for the grouchy questions ... I'm hoping for the best here.

Posted by: Brad Hill | October 10, 2005 01:28 PM

There is no way to sort the results. It is difficult to filter the search results. Overall - two thumbs up!

Posted by: kp | October 10, 2005 02:29 PM

Brad,

You need to install the beta plugin to YME to get Yahoo! Podcasts in YME. Click on the advertisement on the site or go here:

http://podcasts.yahoo.com/install

To get support for Winamp and Windows Media Player, you need to install the latest (2.2 beta) of iPodder Lemon -- available from the developer blog on the iPodder site.

http://www.ipodderlemon.com/blog/

Hope that helps.

Regards,

-Joe

Posted by: Joe Hayashi | October 10, 2005 06:40 PM

Lee,
Congrats on the successful launch of yahoo podcast search! You have made the user experience very intuitive and the search results deliver relevant results. Very nice.

I like the tagging ption as well as the rating and review functionality.

I would welcome the opportunity to speak with you about the publishing aspect as we have developed the technology for publishing podcasts very easily for users. (biz dev opportunity?)

We actually launched this web based podcast publishing service in beta last year and it has been out of beta since may. It is very well recieved by our users. We made it very simple and easy to create a podcast without having to know anything about RSS, and the underlying technology.

Please feel free to contact me at your convience. I would love to hear from you. Thanks.

Rodney Rumford
Founder: http://podblaze.com

p.s. I like the blue color scheme. ;)

Posted by: Rodney Rumford | October 10, 2005 10:28 PM

This looks very nice. I am able to find Eclectic Mix easily. My only recommendation is that you add a handful of random podcasts. This will allow people to explore things they may not have considered, as opposed to blindly following the crowd.

Well done.

Cheers -

george

Posted by: George L Smyth | October 11, 2005 05:39 AM

As a Mac OS X user, I'd like to see accelerated playback for Safari too!

Posted by: John Hood | October 11, 2005 05:39 AM

Hey guys, I just submitted my podcast to yahoo. I hope you guys could check it out and let me know what you think. THANKS :D

www.nerdblurb.com

Here is the RSS.
http://www.nerdblurb.com/Portals/0/podcasts/rss_feed_itunes.xml

Thanks guys

Posted by: The Nerd | October 11, 2005 09:48 AM

Thanks, I like it a lot. I posted a test podcast so I could figure out what I was doing. Is there anyway to remove it? I killed it on the server but now it sits there dead.

Posted by: Anonymous | February 7, 2006 12:03 PM

Hi--I was just wondering if you could help me contact someone to figure out why my feed was removed. My podcast was a featured podcast a few weeks ago, and I've gotten some good feedback from folks who have subscribed through Yahoo.

I'm still able to access my "series" in my personal subscriptions, but searchs of your directory no longer include my correct feed, which is http://feeds.feedburner.com/bleacherguy

I'd appreciate any help you could give me regarding this issue. Thanks.

Posted by: Rob V. | February 24, 2006 07:57 PM

too bad yahoo will miraculously delete a podcast for no reason or warning :(

Posted by: david | June 29, 2006 11:31 AM