We’re excited to announce that we have added support for WebSub and Podping! These are two different methods for discovering when a podcast has new episodes. Instead of polling a feed regularly looking for new episodes, we are now notified straight away. Adding this support lets you start listening to your favorite podcast’s episodes as soon as they are released.
There are many podcast hosting providers that support WebSub or Podping, such as BuzzSprout, Simplecast, Captivate, RSS.com, Transistor, Podigee, and Audioboom. These host some of the top podcasts, such as Radiolab, The Daily, You’re Wrong About, and Hard Fork.
For podcasts that don’t currently support WebSub or Podping, we are improving how quickly we discover their latest episode releases too! You will see these changes happen over the next couple of months.
Here are the geeky details if you want to learn more about WebSub or Podping:
WebSub is an open protocol for distributed publish and subscribe communication. Podcasters add extra tags to their feed XML to indicate which WebSub hub they use. You can subscribe to a podcast at this hub, and when a new episode is released, it lets you know by calling your web server. The most popular WebHub hub used is Google’s PubSubHubbub hub. Say that quickly!
Podping instead uses the Hive blockchain to publish new podcast changes. Podcasters add new episode updates, and you can use their watcher script to monitor for these changes.
Pocket Casts Blog 