Podcast hosting platform for shows you sell in your own app

You upload the audio file in the admin, add a title, artwork, a description, a language and a category, and attach the artist records for the host and guests. The track gets its own page in the site and apps with a player, the description and the related tracks. Because it is a catalog item like any video, it also carries access rules and country rules of its own rather than inheriting a single setting for the whole show.

Albums group tracks in order. The simplest mapping is one album per show, with episodes added to the end as they publish. Shows with distinct seasons can use one album per season and share the same artist and category so they sit together on the audio home page. The album page shows artwork, the track list and the artist, and a listener can play it from the top or pick an episode.

The artist record was designed for musicians, and it fits a podcast host without changes: name, photo, biography and the list of tracks they appear on. A network with several shows can give each host an artist page, and a guest who appears on three shows gets one page that collects all three appearances. Listeners who like a voice can follow the trail from one show to the next without leaving your app.

Each track has an access setting: free, included in one or more subscription plans, or sold as a pay-per-view item with its own price. A common pattern is the first episode of a season free, the rest inside the plan, and a long bonus interview sold on its own. The setting lives on the episode, so changing a single episode never touches the rest of the show, and a free episode stays free when the plan price changes.

Admin playlists let you publish a curated run, such as a starter pack of the ten best episodes across all shows, on the audio home page. Listener playlists let each account keep its own queue inside the app. Both are the same audio module feature, seen from the two sides of the product. There is no external subscription mechanism, because the listener account itself is the subscription.

The site and the apps include an audio home page that lists albums, artists, categories and playlists. For an operator who runs both video and audio it is a second entrance; for an audio-only operator it can be the front door. Shows, hosts and categories arrange themselves from the metadata you entered, so a new show appears in the right places as soon as its first track is published.

The platform code does not generate an RSS feed and does not submit shows to Apple Podcasts, Spotify or any other directory. Listeners cannot subscribe to a Flicknexs show from a general podcast app. If discovery in those apps matters to you, keep a free public feed on a feed host and use Flicknexs for the paid, extended or ad-free version of the same show in your own app. The two can coexist; Flicknexs does not replace the feed.

Episodes stream from the delivery layer when the listener presses play. There is no download for offline listening in the web player or in the device apps. For a commuter audience that listens underground or on flights this is a real limitation, and you should say so in your own help pages rather than let listeners discover it. Streaming does keep every play inside your access rules and your analytics.

The advertising features in Flicknexs, ad tags and server-side ad insertion, are built for video and for linear channels. There is no dynamic ad insertion into audio episodes and no ad marketplace. If sponsorship is your revenue model, the sponsor read is baked into the file as it is on most shows today, and the money from listeners comes from subscriptions and pay-per-view rather than from ads.

You get player sessions with watch time and completion, device breakdowns, and revenue reports by month from the video analytics module, and they cover audio plays inside your app. You do not get download counts in the form podcast advertisers expect, because there are no feed downloads. Sponsors who want a standard download figure need a feed host; subscribers and buyers are what Flicknexs measures.

The audio module names things albums, artists and tracks. Your listeners see the labels you give the items, so a show reads as a show, but you will work with music terms in the admin. This is cosmetic, and it is mentioned so nobody expects a screen labeled Podcasts. The structure underneath, ordered items in a collection with a creator record, is what a podcast needs.