Episode Expiration & Episode Feed Exclusion Options Now Live!

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One of the goals of any software platform is to make life easy for the person using it. And, the only way to do that is to listen to what users are saying and of course, to use the software yourself!

As a podcaster that publishes a minimum of five podcast episodes per week using Captivate and as a team that spends a lot of time listening to the people who use the platform, we’ve always been keen on making life easier for the podcaster – the podcaster like you!

Introducing Episode Expiration

There are often times when you need to say something that is time sensitive, whether that is a holiday message, an announcement or something important that you need to tell your audience but that isn’t always something that needs to stay in your podcast RSS feed forever.

It’s something I’ve needed, that’s for sure – so, we built it!

From today, all Captivate podcasters can set an episode to “expire” from their RSS feed and thus, the podcast directories on a specific date and time. The time settings respect your Captivate timezone settings and each episode with this setting applied is clearly visible within your Captivate episode listing.

Check out how it works:

Podcast Episode Exclusion

We also noticed that there are often times when a podcaster wants to publish an episode but exclude it from their RSS feed and the directories.

This isn’t a private RSS feed, it’s a way to make sure that your episode is only available via a direct share or a web embed using the Captivate embeddable podcast player and so, today we also launched the ability to exclude podcast episodes from your RSS feed at your leisure – nice!

Here’s how this works, too:

Both of these features make life easier for you as a podcaster and can, of course, be used together or independently.

We also released a couple more tweaks to Captivate’s podcast hosting platform today, too – namely the ability to remove podcast cover art from the podcast player (Thanks, Kelvin!) and added the podcast name as an append to the SEO title on single episode web pages – check out the Captivate changelog for a bit more on that.

Stay safe,
Mark

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Mark

Known as "That British Podcast Guy", Mark is one of the United Kingdom's original podcasting experts. He is Managing Director & co-founder of podcast hosting, analytics & monetisation platform Captivate.fm which was acquired by Global in 2020 and is known worldwide as an insightful, thought-provoking and actionable podcast industry keynote speaker. Mark has educated on podcasting and delivered thought leadership at events including Podcast Movement, Podfest, Harvard's "Sound Education" and many more. His focus is on helping people to achieve their own podcasting goals and on improving the podcasting industry for the long-term. Twitter: MrAsquith. Instagram: MrAsquith. Podcast: The Podcast Accelerator.

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