Back in June 2018, Music Ally wrote about a startup called Scout·fm, which was launching a ‘voice-first podcast curation service’.
It had an Alexa skill that would ask people questions to understand their interests, then provide a radio-style stream of podcast episodes.
The next we heard of it was early this year, when Scout·fm joined a startup camp for voice-focused firms run by Betaworks.
Now there’s some big news though: Scout·fm has been acquired by Apple. In fact, the deal happened earlier this year, according to Bloomberg, although Apple subsequently shut down the startup’s service.
Apple isn’t saying what its plans are for Scout·fm, but clearly its technology and team could be useful for the next evolutions of the Apple Podcasts service. Long the dominant distribution platform for podcasts,
Apple is now facing competition from Spotify, with Amazon Music, Deezer and other music services also pushing into spoken-word content.
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