Podcast company one of world's most innovative businesses

The Winter Podcast Upfronts, an opportunity for podcast creators to pitch to ad agencies, was yesterday in Beverly Hills CA, USA. Here’s what Digiday learnt at the event, including some very colourful descriptions of a shirtless comedian. At the event:

• Wondery released their 2019 slate of programming. The company has new partnerships with the LA Times, Bloomberg, and a new documentary from Mark Ramsey, Inside Star Wars. The company h as also just launched One Plus One, about “the world’s greatest collaborations”.

• iHeartRadio announced a new slate of true crime podcasts, starting with season three of Disgraceland. The full press release contains a video trailer, and a note that the season 3 premiere will be played out on iHeartMedia broadcast radio stations the day before release.

• WNYC’s new slate includes a suite of podcasts featuring stand-up and storytelling from emerging and established comedians. They also previewed a new podcast from Gothamist, the hyper-local websites that WNYC purchased a year ago.

• Marvel’s Wolverine: The Lost Trail has a release date: it’ll be exclusively available on Stitcher Premium from March 25, it’s been announced. (Stitcher Premium is US$4.99 monthly).

• WaitWhat, the podcast creator and “media invention company” announced this morning that it has raised $4m in funding. The company was founded by former TED executives June Cohen and Deron Triff, and is responsible for the Webby award-winning Masters of Scale.

• Sonaar have released a new Wordpress podcast theme - CastoPress includes a podcast audio plugin and offers “clean uncluttered aesthetics”, say the developers.

• Google Podcasts has mysteriously disappeared from Android Auto, report a number of annoyed Redditors (and your editor).

• Spreaker has added trimming functionality to its iOS app.

• The New York Times has promoted Theo Balcomb to Executive Producer of The Daily and News.

• What podcast apps are Libsyn podcasts being consumed on? Stats from Libsyn’s The Feed podcast, related to all podcasts downloaded on the platform, are shown above for December 2018. (We wrote these down for a presentation: but thought we’d also share them here.)

• Congratulations to Cadence13, who have been recognised by Fast Company as one of the world’s most innovative companies. They share the accolade with Twitch, Domino’s, and Mozilla.

• Event: Death Becomes Us is a true-crime festival in New York NY, USA from March 20-24. Events include “Creating Serial”, with Sarah Koenig and Julie Snyder.

Podcasts

Bawdy Storytelling is celebrating twelve years as a stage show this week; and the two-year-old podcast has just hit 1,000,000 downloads. It’s a live storytelling podcast - much like The Moth but covering, ah, rather different subject matter. Fans of inclusive, empowering personal narrative storytelling will enjoy this. (Libsyn)

When Life Gives You Parkinson’s has announced a content partnership with the 2019 World Parkinson Congress. The special series starts next week.

Radio Drama Revival, a podcast dedicated to showcasing the diversity and vitality of modern audio fiction, has announced new team members and an upcoming revamp. The new team members are Wil Williams and Elena Fernández-Collins, two popular podcast journalists and critics.

Developer’s question time

• Here’s a podcast episode from January 24th in Apple Podcasts which includes our podcast’s ID (1325018583) and an “i” value (1000428371840), which is related to the episode. You can find this URL using desktop iTunes - but is there a programmatic way to find the “i” value, ideally via the API?