Plex is dropping podcast support, leaving you only 1,385 places to listen to your favorite shows
Everyone has a podcast these days, and if you’re the developer behind a media app, chances are you’ve added support for podcasts to it, too. It doesn’t matter if you’re loading up Spotify or browsing through YouTube — you’ll find podcasts everywhere you go. Plex wants to be home to all of your media, but if you count podcasts among your endless library of stuff, you’ll want to find a new service.
The app is dropping support for podcasts, according to aforum postshared by the company late last week (viaXDA Developers). Both podcasts and web shows will disappear from the service on April 15th, leaving users just enough time to export their catalog of content. Plex has made it easy for anyone to export their subscriptions in OPML format for a new app — and thankfully, there areendless options to pick from these days.
It’s not hard to see why the company has decided to drop podcasts altogether from the app. For one, Plex feels ever-focused on TVs these days — just look at its recently-launched UI for discovering content through streaming apps. At the same time, it’s hard to imagine most people choosing this service to listen to and discover audio shows. Plex didn’t addsupport for podcasts until 2018, which, as we all know, was well after NPR invented podcasts with the debut of their hit show Serial four years earlier. By then, many users had already found themselves drawn to established third-party apps like Pocket Casts or Apple Podcasts. Even Spotify had beaten the platform to the punch.
Most users are unlikely to see this as a big loss — especially considering the overall podcast experience on Plex was buggy and never quite received the attention it deserves. If you’ve been listening for years through the app, now’s the time to get your list of shows out of there for good. Luckily, there’s no shortage of replacements worth trying out.
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