YouTube Music will soon host i podcasts, the news has already been official for a few weeks and now we are starting to see the first signs of the imminent debut. We will start from United States (to be followed by other countries) with the aim of making Google’s music streaming platform a environment in which to host all the contents “unifying audio and video experience“. The version that heralds its arrival is the 5.48 for Android.
9to5Google has identified a series of strings in the code which correspond to as many functions. We have summarized them in the following list:
- Possibility of add podcast episodes to the queue or to play them later, exactly as it already happens with music tracks
- Possibility of limit podcast streaming only if there is a WiFi connection
- you can switch to audio-only version video podcast (if available)
- podcasts will appear in the Library tab
- The downloaded episodes will appear alongside the downloaded music
- the function Near within YouTube Music will allow you to find all content, including podcasts: Search for songs, albums and artists will be replaced by Search for songs, artists and podcasts
- the sleep timer will support a multi-hour countdown to accommodate longer podcasts
To ensure that the podcast catalog is well nourished starting from day one, Google has made a series of accessible tools available to creators from YouTube Studio. The Mountain View company has been working for some time on the implementation of these functions, as demonstrated by the numerous tests detected in the past weeks.
Podcasts are one of the tools Google intends to focus on this year to make YouTube an increasingly successful platform both on the user side with unpublished content and for creators with greater monetization possibilities.