Amazon in Exclusive Talks to Buy Podcast Startup Wondery
Amazon is in exclusive talks with podcast startup Wondery about a potential acquisition, reports The Wall Street Journal. Rumors earlier this month suggested that Wondery had also held talks with Apple and Sony Music Entertainment as it shopped for a buyer.
Wondery is said to be looking for $300 to $400 million, and it is known for popular true crime podcasts that include "Dirty John," "Over My Dead Body," "Dr. Death." Apple's discussions were in the early stages in November, but if Wondery is in exclusive talks with Amazon, Apple is likely out of the running.
A Wondery purchase would have provided Apple with a library of original content along with a source for ideas that could be turned into TV shows in the future. Wondery is already working on TV shows based on podcasts, including a WeWork series that will premiere on Apple TV+.
It's possible that Wondery's price tag was too high for Apple, but if Wondery is purchased by Amazon, Amazon will be another serious competitor in the podcasting space alongside Spotify. According to The Wall Street Journal, Amazon is aiming to push further into podcasts.
Apple too has been aiming to better compete with Spotify when it comes to podcasts, and rumors have suggested that Apple is looking to buy original podcasts. Apple has been looking for podcasts that could be adapted into Apple TV+ content, and it also plans to create podcasts that will augmnet its TV shows.
Apple has already purchased podcasting companies. In 2017, it bought Pop Up Archive to improve search, and in early 2020, it bought podcasting service Scout FM, which turns podcast shows into radio-style stations.
Popular Stories
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
Top Rated Comments
Shoulda known it wouldn’t last ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm for Open Access Podcasts.
I sometimes listen to the Conan O'brien Pod and while many of the guests are full of their own sh*t and peddling something, some of them have funny stories and it's good for a laugh. And having a laugh in these times is just what is needed. But I've noticed recently that the ads on it are out of control. We are talking about 5-6 mins of wall to wall ads. What they don't realise is that Siri is capable of skipping ahead the number of minutes you tell it to! Hazzah! Let's just see how long before that funtion is disabled or if the FF button is taken off us. You'd like to think not, but I wouldn't be surprised...