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Reminder: No action is required from you until you receive an invite to set up your Transistor account. Once you do, new metrics will be visible in your dashboard as of the date of your show’s transfer.
A bit of background
- Earlier this year, Apple announced support for video episodes, which is rolling out in a phased manner with a review process for each show.
- A few months prior to that, Spotify announced a new integration allowing platforms to publish video episodes on Spotify, previously unavailable to third-party platforms.
- We’ve been following Transistor for some time. The company started in 2018 and has built a robust, forward-looking podcast platform. One of the biggest shows on Transistor is Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal’s Acquired.
- Transistor has already launched support for video episodes on Apple Podcasts and an integration with YouTube in a staggered roll out, with support for Spotify video coming soon.
- We have tested the publishing of video episodes to Apple Podcasts with Transistor over the last couple of weeks, and are excited to bring this to more shows over the next couple of months.
- Until the Spotify integration is complete, we will manually publish video episodes to Spotify’s back end.
- This change also brings with it a centralised dashboard for the first time, where you will be able to see YouTube views alongside data from the podcast platforms
- A separate video views metric on Apple Podcasts is already available today, with YouTube metrics coming in a few weeks
- Transistor also supports additional features such as having manually corrected transcripts in the show feed, a feature supported by platforms like Apple Podcasts but isn’t supported by Megaphone or Spotify.
- And finally, this also removes a level of platform lock-in that came with Spotify’s purchase of Megaphone a couple of years.
The process
Here’s how the transfer process will actually work for your show:
- We’ll first import the show’s episode audio and metadata into Transistor.
- Once the import is complete, we’ll activate a feed redirect, which tells platforms like Apple Podcasts and Spotify to start receiving new episodes from Transistor.
- This redirect takes a few minutes to activate, but individual platforms may take a few hours to update this information.
- There will be no downtime or any interruption to the show’s listeners, but we will be staggering this process around any upcoming episode releases.
- Once this redirect is active, you’ll receive an invite to set up your Transistor account and be able to see new metrics in your dashboard.
- A request has already been submitted to enable your show for video episodes on Apple Podcasts. This is current under review with their team and we expect this to be enabled for all shows within the next couple of weeks.
- All dates are internal targets and will ultimately depend on Transistor’s platform rollout and Apple Podcasts’ review process.
We’ll be communicating with you individually as we make progress for your show. If there any questions that haven’t been addressed, please feel free to reach out to us.