Comment on This week’s dead Google products: Google Podcasts, basic Gmail, and more!
Nipah@kbin.social 1 year agoI tried AntennaPod because folks on lemmy/kbin/beehaw/wherever have been recommended it, but it was being a bit weird with the only 'podcast' I listen to: Critical Role campaigns.
With Google Podcasts, they'd load in with a "Welcome to the Critical Role podcast" intro by one of the players, then go into the fanfare and then into the game. With AntennaPod, it would load (from the same subscription) with at least one ad right off the bat for some reason. I tried it a few times (granted, with just one episode (campaign 1, session 115)) and even uninstalled and reinstalled, and still had ad(s) at the front... I didn't bother to scrub through to see if it had more ads in the middle bits, because one ad was too many, ya know?
I then tried out Pocket Casts (another recommendation) and the podcast behaves exactly like the Google Podcasts one does... no ads.
Not sure why, but that is how it worked when I tried it at least so other folks may run into a similar situation based on the podcast(s) in question.
moonunit@reddthat.com 1 year ago
I started getting the pre-roll ads for Critical Role when using Google Podcasts maybe a couple months ago. It seems like they’re using a service which stitches ads in when the audio file is served so they can serve more up to date or regional ads. So if you had downloaded a bunch of CR at once months ago on Google Podcasts it might explain the behavior. Not sure why PocketCasts wouldn’t have the same unless they’re Caching episodes on PocketCast servers when they’re first uploaded instead of downloading them from CR servers each time.
Nipah@kbin.social 1 year ago
I'm essentially re-listening to the campaigns during my lunch break so if they all start getting annoying ads going forward I'll just go back to getting audio books from OverDrive I suppose.
The first campaign is still on their old Nerdist/Geek and Sundry listing (the newer ones look to be from stitcher.com), so I'm wondering if once I get through the ones there the newer stuff won't all be like that going forward.