Is my idea shitty or viable?

who knows?

how would you get creators to allow you to use their podcasts? revenue share? that could work.

one way to validate it could be to approach several popular podcast authors and set up an agreement with them where you give them x%, then slice up the podcasts for some popular creators.

Then build a simple website to consume them. Charge $x per month to access all podcasts snippets a la spotify, or let people buy access to specific slices with a refill model a la the starbucks mobile ordering app. Or monetize with web ads, or better yet audio ads you sell yourself.

The challenge I see here is that youtube is already letting content creators do this. I see for instance comedians like Joe Rogan, Chris Delia and Tom Segura already posting their podcasts to youtube, then they and fans are both slicing them up.

Dave Cunningham from ViperChill did exactly that. If you google, you should find a case-study about it.

To chime in late here: Think about the economics and costs of your project — to add new value to your product, somebody has to listen to the podcast in full and then cut it up in a studio. This is a huge cost which can only be offset by really high user fees. (Also, you should definitely make this an app if you make it — I don't think many people listen to podcasts on websites).

This model works with Blinkist, however, which is interesting because the cost to read an entire book and summarise it must be pretty high. Reasons why I think your product is different from Blinkist:

• Books have a much higher lifespan. Ben Franklin's autobiography has value forever, while your favourite episode of This American Life may not. You'll have to be constantly adding new episodes of all your customer's favourite podcasts before they give in and listen to it anyway
• While you'll have the same sizes of your bites (Blinkist's are approx. 10 minutes as well), Blinkist's summaries save far more time because books are larger. So you're adding less value to the customer's lives.
• Further, a lot of podcast listeners already save a lot of time with tools that cut silence and speed up their podcasts. So this adds less value to those users.
• Some podcast formats allow for podcasts to be split into chapters and topics (I think most of Relay.fm's podcasts do this, at least in the Pocket Casts app). If this protocol takes off, then your app probably adds less value too (Blinkist doesn't suffer from this problem because their summaries are different to the original content).

All that said, if you have strategies for minimising the impacts of these problems (especially if you think that your app might grow the podcast market), it sounds like a good idea!

Some podcasts have associated show notes, which are parts of a podcast that are note worthy. Sometimes, they even include a timestamp to that particular part. If there was a way for podcasters to streamline that, maybe it could solve the problem you are mentioning.

Yes, please. A podcast is great to learn, but sometimes that annoying blabbering, get to the point. It would be sufficient though that people could "tag" points like SoundCloud or Udemy to get to the good bits and to have a reference point to turn to, if you need it. Maybe a Google Search for podcasts?

Thanks everyone! I agree with most everything stated. Doesn't seem like the possible opportunity is worth the headache / execution.

Continuing to think on new projects!

I'm sceptical there's a viable business model but one point I think is important - the added value of the snippets may be enough that people will pay for that who would not pay for the original podcast.

Scott Hanselman interviewed https://www.hanselminutes.com/563/speech-to-text-in-2017-with-signlfm about their transcription service.

They are now https://gretta.com/
See their article https://medium.com/matter-driven-narrative/signl-fm-on-making-a-social-media-interface-for-podcasts-9e1d16667f1 which will give you a good idea of the HUGE amount of work required to achieve something in this space.

Offer a Pod Blitz product whereby you generate abbreviated versions of podcasts for each creator and split ad revenue with them. Aim to provide a blitzed version of each major podcast episode out there.

(No idea if the creators would go for this though.)

Think the idea is good and viable. I think it can be marketed as "Cliff Notes for Podcasts" The difficulty I see is in the discovery of what each person wants from a particular podcast. Why did they subscribe? What are they looking for? Each person will have a different reason. Because of this the client profile must be very detailed. Also I think that the feedback on each snippet must be fairly detailed, constant and still easy. It is sort of like a custom newsfeed or news letter but for podcasts. Some sort of rating or tagging system would need to be created so the delivery of the content is what you claim it to be.

domain name: podbite.io

It's a good idea. Seems like Blink for podcasts. The challenge would be in curating the right podcasts and the top snippets from those. Some podcasts can be very long as well with a lot of waffle, whereas others have nothing but solid content.

I say pick a few podcasts, manually get snippets (with permission of course) and see if there's interest.