Dear Stitcher Listener,
We have decided to discontinue operation of the Stitcher app and website effective August 29, 2023.
Thank you for giving us the opportunity over the last decade to create the best possible podcast listening experience. The podcast ecosystem would not be where it is today without listeners like you. Please be sure to continue to support all of your favorite shows wherever they can be found.
We realize you may have some questions and, hopefully, the information below will help you understand how this change affects you.
Thank you again for allowing us to be part of your podcast routine. We truly appreciate your support.
- The Stitcher Team
What does this mean for me?
On August 29, 2023, the Stitcher app and web listening experience will be disabled. At that time, you will no longer be able to access your shows, downloads, preferences or listening history. Additionally, the app will no longer be able to be downloaded from the app stores. Most show pages on the stitcher.com website will be redirected to our sister app, Pandora.
Sad!
Stitcher was the first podcasting app to carry any of the NWP/DD/PFA shows.
In early 2010, we received an e-mail from Stitcher, which was then a brand new app. It had a phone number for one of their marketing people. Micon and I called her back on 3-way, and she stated that she wanted to carry DonkDown Radio on Stitcher. I asked her what made her contact us about this, and she said, "A number of our listeners requested we add you."
We agreed, and DonkDown was on Stitcher. We were one of the earliest appearing podcasts there. It quickly grew after that, and soon enough people could add their own podcasts to Stitcher without interfacing with any human beings. That's how I got PFA Radio on there in 2012.
About 2-3 years ago, Stitcher started having issues picking up PFA episodes properly. Their support was shit, and would do band-aid fixes of adding the missing episodes, but not fixing the underlying issue. Finally, after pressing the matter in 2022, I got them to investigate, and they told me that it was failing due to PFA having an antiquated RSS feed. The RSS feed provides the information for podcasting services to pick up the episodes. They were correct that the feed was antiquated and somewhat obsolete, being a built-in feature of vBulletin which hadn't been updated since 2012. However, other services such as Spotify were more robust and were backwards compatible. Stitcher was not.
I put in some hours of work to bring the PFA RSS feed up to 2022 standards. This was more difficult than I expected, as I had to introduce functionality such as PFA knowing exactly how long each episode would be, and including it in the RSS feed. There were many other new things I had to add which didn't previously exist in vBulletin software. Once I completed this task, it started working properly on Stitcher. This also fixed our issues with iHeartMedia, so it was a good use of my time.
Anyway, Stitcher apparently has gotten crushed by bigger competitors such as Spotfiy, so it's closing down.
RIP
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Originally Posted by Dan Druff
