If you have an Amazon Echo product, you can already play audiobooks from Audible, but now you can play podcasts from Apple and Spotify. While you could ask Alexa to play a podcast, by default it would stream the latest episode of a show from TuneIn, and navigating beyond was abysmal and good luck trying to find a 3rd party skill.
Apple currently has over 800,000 podcasts that are integrated into Alexa. If you associate your Apple ID with Alexa, you can even pick up where you left off from your iPhone or Apple TV, you can do the same with Spotify. Spotify already featured strong support for Alexa, with playing music and accessing your playlists, but up until today podcasts had not been available, but this has all changed. You can also tell Alexa to do things like fast forward or play the next episode via both apps.
Podcasting is big business and there is a niche for everyone. 32% of Americans listen to podcasts at least once a month. On average, 45% of podcast listeners have an annual household income of more than $250,000 and businesses spent $497 million on podcast advertising in 2018.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
