If you’re a big podcast listener, you may have wondered whether it would be possible to just pay up instead of listening to one more rambling ad spot for Audible, Blue Apron, or Stamps.com. There’s a growing number of options out there, and the newest one happens to be from Audible, the Amazon-owned audiobook services. The company’s new service, Channels, charges a subscription fee for curated ad-free audio content that the company won’t actually call “podcasts.”
If you’re a monthly subscriber to the Audible service, the Channels service is included. If you’re not, it costs $5 per month. Audible is pitching it more as a selection of short-form (an hour or less) audio pieces for people who enjoy listening to audiobooks.
Bloomberg Technology reports that the service will launch with just a few channels of content, but there are 40 more programs in development.
They’re available only through the Audible app, while an important feature of podcasts has always been that they’re platform-agnostic and you can listen on a computer, a tablet, a smartphone, or even the incredibly old-school way, on an MP3 player.
The wide variety of platforms that people use to get their podcasts is also why it’s difficult to charge for subscriptions, since listeners access podcast feeds in a variety of ways.
Amazon Wants People to Pay for Podcasts [Bloomberg Technology]
by Laura Northrup via Consumerist
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