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Google Has A New Podcast App. It Also Hopes To Diversify Podcasting. (buzzfeed.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Google now has its own podcast app called, well, Google Podcasts, and if you have an Android phone, you can head over to the Play Store and get it right now. Google Podcasts does most things you would expect a podcast app to do. It lets you subscribe to and download podcasts; it learns from your listening history and suggests new ones you might like; and, if you're a podfaster, it lets you speed shows up. Most of these have been things you can already do right from within the Google app on your Android phone -- but now you get a shiny new app to do it with. For Google, the app represents an ambitious goal: to double worldwide podcast listenership. [...] Google is working with an independent global advisory board and industry experts to bring in more creators from underrepresented backgrounds such as women, people of color, and people from other countries into podcasting. Other players in the space such as Spotify and WNYC have already made efforts to spotlight these voices in the podcasting ecosystem. As part of this new program, Google will create curriculums to teach people podcasting basics, develop training programs, and also lower barriers to entry by helping out with equipment like microphones. Details about the program and specific plans to diversify outreach were not yet available. Google says it currently has no plans to release the podcast app to Apple's App Store.
To Google (or the subset of the company in charge of this) those words are synonymous. They apparently seem to believe that the color of a person's skin is more important than the content their podcast.
I doubt this will have much of an effect in the grand scheme of things. You can't sell a product that no one in the market wants to buy. If there were more demand for the things that Google were trying to push, people would naturally move to fill in that demand and Google would need to do very little beyond making sure that they weren't damaging the market through their own actions. At most they might identify and help to address a supply side issue, but that assumes that one must exist to be solved.
I also think that most of these efforts are halfhearted at best anyways as it isn't really about solving problems, but having the appearance of doing so in order to appear virtuous. It's essentially just another mega-church that neither feeds nor clothes the homeless. Perpetual failure to remove the problem simply means you can continue to proselytize about it ad infinitum.