Connections

Gracenote Audio On Demand Launches for Podcast Search, Discovery

Nielsen has launched a new search and discovery offering for podcast, offering streaming music platforms, MVPDs, automakers and consumer electronics companies the ability to search more than 37 million podcast episodes across digital platforms.

Gracenote Audio On Demand leverages descriptive data and unique IDs to help users create personalized listening experiences, opening the way for podcast and talk radio fans to connect to a broader range of personalities and topics, the company said.

With the audience for podcasting growing by 20% on average over the last six years, Nielsen said it believes the time is right for the service.

“A big challenge for podcast listeners today is the ability to easily navigate all the audio-on-demand content across different platforms and services,” said Greg Gentschev, SVP of product management for Gracenote Music and Auto at Nielsen. “This is due to the sheer volume of content and lack of descriptive metadata and identifiers used to power search and discovery algorithms.

“With Gracenote Audio On Demand, we are applying the same rigor, methodology and approach to podcasts that currently underpins next gen search and discovery of today’s TV shows, movies and music.”

At launch, Gracenote Audio On Demand will include standardized podcast titles, descriptions and imagery for more than 900,000 podcast series, with each series assigned a popularity score to help surface popular content. Top series will leverage more descriptive metadata, including Category Hierarchy and Celebrity Links, Popularity Score and more.

Daily checks of the system will remove duplicate submissions and eliminate encoding issues, and standardized classifiers for series and episodes will aim to surface more relevant content.

Each podcast series will also be given a common Gracenote ID to support identification and cross-media linking.