Castro changes hands again
The Castro podcast app has a new owner. According to Podnews, which spotted the change on the app's Apple App Store listing, it now belongs to Maple Media, a company whose business model is buying existing apps. It is not its first purchase in this field: Maple Media had already acquired Player FM in April 2020, Podkicker in July 2020 and Breaker in February 2022.
Castro had already changed hands in January 2024, when Dustin Bluck bought it from Tiny, a venture capital company. Podnews says it has asked him for comment. He had recently published a reflective piece on the company blog about independent podcast apps, which he himself described as dying.
A shrinking share of listening
The figures support that view. For a keynote at The Podcast Show in London, Podnews analysed podcast downloads in the United Kingdom over three years. The share going to independent apps fell from 38% in 2024 to 36% in 2025, then to 31% in 2026. In other words, listening is increasingly concentrated on the big platforms.
Podnews suggests one way to reverse the trend: giving these apps a cut of podcast advertising revenue in exchange for better analytics. Otherwise, the site argues, their only real advantage over the giants might be the ability to skip ads.
Apple spells out its technical requirements
At the same time, Apple has published documentation on its Apple Developer portal about producing HLS streams for Apple Podcasts. It shows that the service prefers audio in AAC-LC at 192 kbps and 48 kHz, and that it supports 5.1 surround sound. That is significantly better than the 128 kbps MP3 still common in podcasting, a choice that reflects growing listening on televisions and powerful audio systems.
Other useful details: m3u8 playlists served to Apple Podcasts support standard HTTP redirects, which opens the door to third-party measurement tools such as OP3, Podtrac, Magellan AI or Podscribe. Automatic downloads are audio-only by default, and a user agent called Scout should not be counted as a valid playback.
What it means for web radios
Many web radios extend their shows as podcasts. The decline of alternative players reduces the variety of access points and increases dependence on the big platforms, whose rules apply to everyone. Three habits are worth adopting:
- Diversify your presence: stay visible on the major platforms while keeping your own website, your own player and your listings in directories.
- Take care of audio quality: Apple's recommendations show that the bar is rising, and good-quality AAC encoding is becoming a minimum for on-demand content.
- Measure properly: support for redirects makes it possible to use independent analytics tools, provided you exclude technical requests that do not correspond to real listening.
At this stage, Castro's sale says nothing about the app's future. It does, however, illustrate a trend that independent audio producers would do well to watch closely.
Source : Podnews