Blubrry and StreamGuys partner for podcast streaming

Podcast company Blubrry and technology firm StreamGuys are today announcing a partnership which turns Blubrry podcasts into internet radio streams. The option, which is offered to all Blubrry-hosted podcasters, is called Podcast2Radio.

If that name sounds familiar, it is because last December Blubrry collaborated with internet radio platform Live365 to create the same sort of podcast-to-streaming conversion, also called Podcast2Radio. One week after that announcement the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) delivered new webcaster royalty rates for 2016-2020, and by the end of the month Live365 had laid off its staff. The company formally went out of business on January 31.

Podcast2Radio is conceived as a way for podcasters to grow their audiences by putting their shows into an alternate delivery mechanism — pure streaming. Podcasting is traditionally a download format, where programs are stored locally for listening offline. That heritage comes from podcasting’s beginning as an addition to RSS feeds, which did not have streaming built in. Today, most podcast apps allow streaming while retaining traditional subscribe-and-download methods.

“As more content producers adopt on-­demand podcast distribution, it becomes harder for podcasters to be discovered and grow their audiences,” said Jonathan Speaker, COO of StreamGuys. “With the Podcast2Radio service, podcasters can massively increase their distribution and multiply their exposure without any additional effort.”

The new platform includes listening analytics. Podcasters using the Blubrry hosting platform can opt in to Podcast2Radio, and the rest happens automatically.

The concept of putting podcasts into a pure streaming environment gained some prominence when Pandora partnered with Serial to be its exclusive internet radio platform. After that, Pandora made a similar deal with This American Life. Along the same lines, This American Life has been streaming on iHeartRadio in a 24/7 rotation of its program library for over two years.

Seventy-nine percent of podcast users stream their programs at least sometimes, according to Edison Research and Triton Digital, as revealed in the The Podcast Consumer report released in May. Only 15% of respondents in that study claimed to use the subscribe/download method of consuming podcasts.