Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 243, dated January 28, 2020.
Recap. The busyness of January continues. Three stories from the last seven days:
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On Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that Apple is planning to finance original podcasts that would serve as companion media to its slate of programming on Apple TV+. It’s unclear how much these plans are connected to Bloomberg’s other podcast story from last summer, which reported that Cupertino was planning to bankroll original podcasts that would be exclusive to its platform more broadly. (Those plans were contextualized as efforts to better compete with impending podcast rivals, primarily Spotify.)
In some corners of the podcast community, that earlier story kicked up a bit of anxiety about a balkanized future, one that would compromise open podcasting as we know it. If this TV-companion podcast business is all there is to it, then maybe some of the worried can rest easy. Then again, maybe not.
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