Podcasts hit Google Play Music this week

Micah Singleton for The Verge:

Podcasts have finally made their way to Google Play Music, the company announced today in a blog post. Google began recruiting podcasters last October after it initially revealed plans for the service, and has managed to sign up a ton of podcasts, including major shows like Marc Maron’s WTF, Chris Hardwick’s The Nerdist, and Neil deGrasse Tyson’s StarTalk Radio, among others.

I was pretty excited about this announcement but I’ve had a ton of issues getting episodes to actually play. Also, there’s no ability (as far as I can tell) to mark episodes as played and I’m also not entirely sure how/if you’re notified when new episodes are available for listening.

Overall, this feels like a soft launch more than a fully developed release. It reminds me a lot of when Google initially launched Drive back in 2012 and people complained about the lack of features compared to services like Dropbox, which had been around for quite awhile at that point.

I’m sure Google’s take on podcasts will get there, it’ll just take some time to catch up. In the meantime, i’ll be sticking with Pocket Casts.