Info for Podcasters

Overcast works with the open, standard world of podcasts. It’s the kind of podcast app that used to be the only kind.

There’s no terms to agree to, no rights to give up, and no loss of control over your podcast or its distribution. Overcast parses your RSS feed, downloads episodes directly from your servers to each listener, and doesn’t interfere with your stats or content at all.

Inclusion in Overcast

There’s no separate submission process to be included in Overcast. Simply submit your podcast to Apple Podcasts, and it will typically show up in Overcast’s search within 1–2 days.

Overcast listeners can always subscribe to any public podcast feed by entering its URL as well, but URLs not known to be in Apple Podcasts won’t be included in search or recommendations.

Featured podcasts

Overcast does not feature podcasts via human curation or editorial selections.

Overcast lets users “recommend” episodes with a star button. The categories in the Add Podcast screen show the top-recommended podcasts recently for each category.

If you’d like to rank higher in these, feel free to encourage your listeners to recommend your show in Overcast at a reasonable time, such as when asking for ratings or reviews in other apps.

Advertising your podcast

Overcast offers display ads for podcasts on the Now Playing screen and in the top “Ad” slot in each directory category.

Linking to your show page

Overcast’s web URLs for known shows in Apple Podcasts always take the form:

• https://overcast.fm/itunes123456789

…where “123456789” is the iTunes ID for your podcast. Simply look for the corresponding number in your iTunes/Apple Podcasts URL to construct your Overcast URL.

Icons for “subscribe” buttons

You may use or adapt Overcast’s icon and/or logo to create “Subscribe on Overcast” buttons that link to podcasts’ pages on Overcast.

Payment button (“$”)

Overcast displays a currency-symbol button that opens a payment, membership, donation, Patreon, etc. URL when present in the currently playing episode’s HTML body (“show notes”).

Use the rel="payment" attribute on a standard HTML <a> link in an episode’s HTML body, e.g.:

• <a href="https://your-payment-url.com/" rel="payment">Support our show</a>

Overcast does not involve itself with such payments in any way — it simply opens your payment URL in a browser window. The rest is between you and your listeners.

Chapter support

Overcast displays MP3 and M4A chapter markers with titles, images, and/or link URLs.

You can easily add chapter markers to your podcasts with Forecast.

Private and password-protected feeds

Overcast specially handles feeds it recognizes as private:

• URLs with HTTP Basic Auth credentials, e.g. http://user:[email protected]/…
• Feeds containing the <itunes:block> element

Private feeds are given the following restrictions:

• They are excluded from search and recommendations.
• They do not display Share or Recommend buttons in the app.
• Their pages on the Overcast website are only shown to logged-in users who have entered their exact URLs in the “Add URL” screen (and therefore know the username and password, if present).

Crawling your feed

Overcast uses server-side crawling, centrally fetching your RSS feed for all Overcast listeners to deliver new episodes faster and save bandwidth. (Note that episode downloads are still done individually from each listener to your servers.)

Please ensure that these servers are not blocked:

• crawl1.overcast.fm
• crawl2.overcast.fm
• crawl3.overcast.fm
• crawl4.overcast.fm
• crawl5.overcast.fm
• crawl6.overcast.fm

They update feeds at varying intervals from a few minutes to 24 hours, depending on their popularity. Standard HTTP caching headers are obeyed.

Subscriber counts are reported in the HTTP User-Agent string, e.g.:

• Overcast/1.0 Podcast Sync (123 subscribers; feed-id=456789; +http://overcast.fm/

To protect privacy, no other statistics, analytics, or usage data are provided.

Prohibited content

Since Overcast is a one-person company that can’t possibly review and monitor all known podcasts for spam, adult content, hate speech, and other problematic, controversial, or illegal material, Overcast uses the human-reviewed Apple Podcasts directory as its filter for what should be included in search results and recommendations.

In rare cases, a show may be included in Apple Podcasts that does not comply with its content requirements. If I’m notified that Apple’s guidelines are being significantly violated by a show that is (but should not be) in their Podcasts directory, I may manually remove it from Overcast’s search results and recommendations.