Play podcast episode via iTunes from web - itunes

I want to make the podcast player on our website register plays with iTunes, to get a better ranking on iTunes. I figured this could be possible if iTunes provided an iTunes URL for every episode, but I cannot find one. I've tried looking at the search/lookup API, but it seems to me it doesn't output individual episodes.
Anyone know if this is possible? Registering/tracking plays to iTunes.

iTunes does not provide usage or download statistics. See their explanation from http://www.apple.com/itunes/podcasts/specs.html#tracking :
Please note that iTunes does not provide usage statistics, because we do not host feeds or episodes. Some podcasters have created
mechanisms for tracking the number of times that each episode has been
downloaded.
If the goal is to get better ranking, encourage your podcast listeners to subscribe, review, and rate for your podcast. Those things are more visible in the iTunes store and to potential new listeners & subscribers.

If you are using a CMS like WP there are plenty of plugins that will give you the analytical data that iTunes (stitcher et al) dosn't provide.
of course, all itunes does is provide a nifty UI for listeners to find your cast; it PLAYS off of your site. I wasn't satisfied with the "popularity bar" on my 'cast...cuz the what is it popular relative to? other casts in same category? all of them? ...
anyway I was already using "seriously simple podcasting" - a wp plugin to properly config my 1400x1400 jpg, my cast and all its meta-data so itunes could
crawl & play it.
make no mistake, this is not a plug; just the way I found that works easy; they have a tracking plugin as well - it tells me number of unique downloads and whether the users are using mobile or desktop to access (not much but way better than nothing) - number of downloads was mainly what I wanted to know.
As for improving your ranking; max-out quality and quantity, make it something people (not just in your specific peer group) would WANT to listen to. Same deal for blogs, be funny, be informative, be creative, be unique, be scandalous, above all BE INTERESTING or your newest listener won't rate, subscribe, or even comeback. QUALITY is the only legit SEO for pages, 'casts, etc.

Related

Sonos Cloud API: audioClip synchronised playing in group

Will it be possible in the future to be able to play a audioClip for a whole group?
Now one should iterate all players manually, by which the triggered audioClip is not being played in sync.
Is it planned to be added to the groups (or even the households) API as well?
https://developer.sonos.com/reference/control-api/audioclip/loadaudioclip/
Thanks for your interest in the platform. We're excited to see what our developers are building. We can't comment on future plans, but we'll take your suggestion back to the dev team. We can share that we're adding the ability to play audio clips on bonded players. Keep an eye on the Sonos developer portal blog for updates.

Advertising Platform

I'm 100% sure that this isn't the right form to post a question like this, but I hope someone on here has the answer to my question.
Is there advertising platform that sends a true or false response dependent on if the user finishes the ad video to the server so I can add points to the users account.
(I don't need help adding points, or creating a point system, just an advertising platform that would be easy to integrate with the videos on my site)
I understand if this isn't the right forum for this, if someone could point me in the right direction. Before you say anything, yes I have googled, just can't find anything that suits my needs.
You need a video player that supports the VAST protocol
VAST provides a common protocol that enables ad servers to use a
single ad response format across multiple publishers/video players
This format allows to specify the so-called tracking elements - URIs that would be called once a particular events occurs. You can manually provide a VAST xml response with a tracking element for a video completion event.
Also consider using DFP to serve your video ads - it's free up until a certain traffic volume and would track everything you might need

Streaming movies from my server

I'm playing around to make an app that lets people stream cartoons that I make. It's a very simple app, one ImageView is just loading in a html-homepage in a UIWebView. Witch contain links to .mov files. So if you tap them a movie will start playing. This is because I just want to update the html-file with new cartoons every week.
Is this an "ok" way to do things code:ing-wise? Or am i obligated to us some Objective-c streaming functions?
Is there a specific file-type that i have to use in the movie-files on the server?
Is the HTML static in your app, or does it point to a server? If it's the former, you may be able to get the app approved doing it the way you suggested, depending on the reviewer. If it's the latter, you're unlikely to get it approved by apple.
They tend to frown upon web sites bundled into apps, and will tell you to simply make your website usable with the phone. See section 2.12.
My suggestion is to spend a bit more time and offer iOS users a better - and more immersive - experience than is available via the web. As I'm sure you've found, there are many built-in ways to stream movies and to present them in a manner that surpasses a web-page-like experience.

How to make a Tag cloud app that post on a website?

I want to make an app where the users can post messages that will be displayed on a website. The users would need to create a username and password to be able to post.
The app would be like a twitter, but only be able to post through the app and read the last few posts and not be able to write private messages.
The website would function like a huge cloud of thoughts where everyone could go and read what others have written. Once the post hit the cloud, they can't be deleted. Only me could delete posts.
All posts would have different color and font size, it would look like a huge tag cloud on the website.
How do I make an app and a website like this?
David H
The tutorial application for Google Application Engine is an unstyled version of what you describe. They'll even host it for you for free (up to a non-trivial level of usage).
The tag cloud creation is not so very hard but without knowing your preferred language it is hard to point you to helpful libraries (there are plenty out there).
Getting people to use it will be the hard part.
added in response to comment:
Good luck on your endeavor. I would be surprised if you weren't able to learn everything you need to know and have a working web app by the time school starts. I found a simple stand alone web cloud creation library that explains what it does and will run on GAE. So now even that part is in place for you.
I'm tempted to make some pathetic reference to the sorts of computing that I did prior to high school, but I expect that you probably have SD data cards have more computational power than I had available to me. Kids these days! ;)

Get list of podcast subscriptions and downloaded AppStore applications from iTunes

So, I'm trying to implement a solution to a problem that I posted on superuser.
What I'm trying to do
I want to write a (Windows) application to synchronize podcast subscriptions in iTunes (and possibly iPhone/iPod touch apps, though I'll ignore them for now) between multiple computers that are using the same iTunes account.
How I'm planning on doing it
My initial thought was to do the following:
1) Grab the list of all podcast subscriptions from iTunes on computer A
2) Do some synching, giving new podcast urls to a program on computer B
3) Subscribe to the new podcasts in iTunes with computer B
I think I could do all this by parsing the ITL file, which is where subscription information seem to be stored. I haven't been able to find any documentation for this, though.
Maybe I'm going about this wrong and using the iTunes COM interface would be a decent way to grab the list of subscribed podcasts (step 1) and then subscribing to them (step 3). Is there a smarter way to go about doing this?
Summary
Before I reinvent the wheel, is there already a solution for synching podcast subscriptions among multiple computers?
What is the most appropriate method for grabbing a list of podcasts that iTunes is subscribed to?
What is the most appropriate method of subscribing iTunes to new podcasts?
As a note, I e-mailed Apple's Developer Support with pretty much the same questions, but apparently asking questions about documentation/API doesn't count as technical support.
Thanks,
On OS X there is no way to get iTunes' list of podcasts. You can ask for podcast tracks (and kind of arrange them by album name), but iTunes will not tell you anything about the actual podcasts themselves (URLs, status, name etc.).
I have zero experience of iTunes on Windows, but I'd be very surprised if the API were more comprehensive than the OS X one.