Swedish audio streaming and media services provider Spotify has finally acquired Podz, a podcast discovery app. The company has not revealed the amount for which the deal has been made. It is expected that the integrated features will be rolled out by the end of this year to be used by the users.
According to the streaming giant, acquiring Podz will lead to better research and development as the start-up has a team of experienced engineers, entrepreneurs and designers. This will help in making the platform more user-friendly and will help in providing a seamless experience to all the Spotify users.
What is Podz? Podz is actually a start-up that is aimed at generating and previewing clips of podcasts from huge audios with the help of machine learning technology which helps in eliminating the hassle of creating the clips for podcasts manually. By Podz and Spotify integration, Spotify believes that users will be able to listen to short preview clips and then they will be able to decide whether they want to listen to the full version of that audio or not.
This move is being seen as the one in which Spotify is trying its level best to compete with other contemporary podcast platforms like Clubhouse and Apple’s podcasts which were rolled out recently. By providing new features like the podcast discovery, the company is making sure that it garners the attention of a whole new range of audience interested in listening to podcasts.
The music streaming giant in an official statement said, “We believe that Podz’ technology will complement and accelerate Spotify’s focused efforts to drive discovery, deliver listeners the right content at the right time, and accelerate growth of the category worldwide”. It will be interesting to observe the reaction of the users to the integration of Podz’ podcast discovery feature with Spotify’s 2.6 million podcasts.
