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Anchor's new Cohost feature matches podcasters with similar interests
Less than two months after the the DIY podcasting app Anchor underwent a major revision, the service is ready to announce another notable new feature: Cohosts. As the name implies, Cohosts lets Anchor users quickly match up with others who want to talk about similar topics -- ideally, this will help facilitate group discussions, rather than forcing a podcaster to forge ahead on their own. Anchor was originally built as a community of users sharing audio, so letting those users get together to host a show fits with the app's social audio roots.
Anchor turns itself into a one-stop podcast creation app
Anchor started off as a social network for audio -- the app let users make quick, impromptu broadcasts to their followers straight from their phone. But the company started seeing more and more people using it to make full-on podcasts, so it added features to push Anchor recordings to Apple Podcasts and Google Play last summer. That turned the app into a one-stop shop for amateur podcasting. The success of that feature has led Anchor to fully re-do its app and mission. Its goal now is to remove all the pain points and costs of making a podcast, from start to finish.
The Google Play store is now selling audiobooks
The Google Play Store has sold just about every media type for years now, but there's one more category the company is getting into as of today: audiobooks. As a leaked image revealed a few days ago, audiobooks are now on sale from Google Play in 45 countries and nine languages. As with most other Google services, audiobooks are available on pretty much any device you would want to use: Android, iOS, the web and Google Home speakers. To play a book on your phone, you'll need to download the Google Play Books app, which until now has focused on text-only options.
Anchor lets you record and publish podcasts from your phone
If you haven't heard of Anchor yet, it's an app that lets you record little bits of audio and broadcast them to your followers with minimal fuss. In a lot of ways, it's like Instagram or Snapchat stories, but focused purely on audio recordings -- you can find friends, publications, internet stars and so forth when you sign up on the app and then listen in to whatever they decide to broadcast. These segments can be as brief or as complex as the person recording them wants, but they'll disappear after one day. Given the recent podcasting boom, it's not surprising that Anchor itself has been getting more attention over the last six months or so. In February, the company released a big update that added a "call-in" feature where your listeners could chat with you live, the ability to publish full-length Spotify or Apple Music tracks and the ability to record an interview over the phone and publish it straight to Anchor. But today's update marks perhaps the most significant change yet: Anchor users now will have the option to push their recordings out to the world as podcasts and have them live forever.
