People who subscribe to dozens of podcasts may forget that there is indeed a podcast learning curve. For people who’ve never listened to podcasts before, the technology may feel like enough of a hurdle to to induce them to skip them all together. Meanwhile, those who do subscribe to a lot of podcasts know how long that list of unheard episodes can get, coming to seem as unmanageable as an overflowing email inbox.
The French startup Hack the Radio tries to tackle both these problems. On the one hand, it hopes to make podcast listening less intimidating for newbies. (Sixty-one percent of French people have never listened to a podcast, according to research done for Audible earlier this year. The figure is similar in the United States, where 60 percent of people ages 12 and older have never listened to a podcast.) On the other hand, it aims to improve the listening experience for people who already consume podcasts.
“The experience is limited by the RSS model,” said Carine…
