Stitcher Becomes Part of Deezer Streaming Company - The UpStream

Stitcher Becomes Part of Deezer Streaming Company

posted Sunday Oct 26, 2014 by Scott Ertz

Stitcher Becomes Part of Deezer Streaming Company

Over the last few months, we have worked to get our shows into Stitcher. If you don't know what Stitcher is, it is essentially a centralized podcast marketplace. One of the things that makes the platform unique is its growing range of devices on which you can access its content.

Over the past few years at CES, we have seen Chevy and Ford add Stitcher support to their vehicles, among others. With this kind of support, you would expect a successful company. Unfortunately for Stitcher, a lack of support on some big names has been surprising. For example, not supporting the Microsoft platforms has been disappointing, especially considering the stats many of us get from Zune, even today, years after the software has been abandoned by Microsoft.

If you are in the podcasting community and you're intelligent, you have been keeping track of Stitcher's business. They have not been financially viable for a while, and some sort of big change was inevitable. Even their internal stats stopped updating for publishers, which pointed to a transition of some sort.

This week we learned exactly what that transition would be: a purchase by music streaming service Deezer. If you are a North American reader, you have probably never heard of Deezer, but if you are in Europe you might as well subscribe to their service. Adding podcasting and radio to their existing platform makes them a real competitor to iTunes.

The thing that separates them from iTunes is their HUGE range of devices. From Windows Phone to LG televisions, almost any device you might own has access to Deezer. If they apply their philosophy of wide range access to Stitcher, there is the possibility of gaining a huge following.

The question becomes, how does Deezer monetize their acquisition. Stitcher was not able to pull it off themselves, so can their new parent company? There is the possibility that the playlist/station concept might end up hidden behind a paywall; its a pretty natural way for a paid streaming service to go. There is another option, however. It is possible that, like iTunes, Deezer would use the podcast offering as their loss leader - offering it for free to tempt people into the Deezer family and converting them to paid subscribers of their music service.

Only time will tell how it plays out, but for now, it looks like it will be business as usual.

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