Facebook to roll out podcast feature next week: Report – Times of India

NEW DELHI: Social networking giant Facebook is all set to introduce a new feature next month. According to an online report Facebook is planning to roll out a podcast feature next week.
As reported by The Verge, Facebook is planning to introduce a podcast feature on June 22. The feature will enable listeners to create clips from their favourite shows. According to an email obtained by The Verge, hosts can link their show’s RSS feed to Facebook which will then automatically generate News Feed posts for all episodes published. The published episodes will then appear under the ‘podcast’ tab.
Facebook also confirmed to The Verge that initially the feature will be limited to a certain number of page owners. “Facebook will be the place where people can enjoy, discuss, and share the podcasts they love with each other,” the company says in the email.
The podcasters who want to publish on the Facebook platform will also have to agree to its terms of service. “It’s a relatively standard agreement, although it doesn’t have clear limits around what exactly Facebook can do with the podcasts distributed on its platform”, mentions the report.
Apart from distributing their show through Facebook, podcasters can also decide whether to enable clips, which will be created by listeners. This will help in increasing visibility and engagement.
To recall, in April this year Facebook said that there are already more than 170 million people connected to hundreds of thousands of podcast pages on Facebook, and more than 35 million people are members of fan groups around podcasts.
Now to tap on this user base the company will be rolling out the support to listen to podcasts directly on the Facebook app — both while using the app or when the app is backgrounded.