Podcast Frequency and predictions incorrect when podcasts change (wrong data?)

  • Unknown's avatar
    joshhoey · Member ·

    Pocket Casts lists the frequency and next episode prediction for its podcasts: For example, “Released Weekly” and “Next episode Tomorrow”. This is usually fairly correct, but runs into trouble when a podcast changes its regular schedule.

    For example, one of my subscriptions was weekly-every-Tuesday for several years, but changed to Fortnightly (every other Tuesday) a year ago. Pocket Casts still says it’s a weekly Podcast and predicts an episode every Tuesday, but the feed has been generating a new episode every other Tuesday for 10+ months now.

    How does Pocket Casts determine frequency? Does it look at the first few weeks/months, or a random sampling in the middle? It should probably look at the last few months to be able to recognize changes in a podcast’s schedule.

  • staff-joey8 · Staff ·

    Hi @joshhoey!

    Our podcast release frequency feature works this out by calculating how often episodes are being published on the RSS Feed.

    Since you mention the one has a new schedule for over 10 months and we are still showing the wrong frequency, would you mind sharing the RSS Feed with us here if its a public podcast?

    If its a private podcast, please let us know so we can email you for more information :)

  • Unknown's avatar
    joshhoey · Member ·

    Hi, thanks for the quick response and sorry for the delay; I’m not getting emails from threads I’m subscribed to.

    The main podcast in question is SciShow Tangents (scishow-tangents.simplecast.com). It ran weekly for several years, then switched to fortnighly in early 2023. The last four episodes were yesterday (Tues Feb 6), two weeks prior (Tues Jan 23), two weeks before that (Tues Jan 9) and two weeks before that (Tues Dec 26). Pocket Casts says it’s weekly and predicts the next episode next Tuesday.

  • staff-joey8 · Staff ·

    Thanks for that, @joshhoey

    thanks for the quick response and sorry for the delay; I’m not getting emails from threads I’m subscribed to.

    It would be worth checking if your email client is marking it as spam, and unblocking it might help prevent this from recurring.

    The main podcast in question is SciShow Tangents (scishow-tangents.simplecast.com). 

    Thanks for sharing this with us. It is being looked into and I will post an update once available.

    Do you have any other examples we should look into?

  • staff-joey8 · Staff ·

    Hi @joshhoey

    We’ve made some adjustments to how this calculation is done, so that the episode release frequency can be more accurate.

    I hope that this helps 👍

  • Unknown's avatar
    joshhoey · Member ·

    Thank you, it’s looking much better now! SciShow Tangents is now properly showing as “Fortnightly” and predicting the next episode (March 5th, after today’s episode came out) according to proper cadence. This is looking good! SciShow’s example was the biggest and worst offender of this. Other podcasts seem to behave fairly well.

    Another example of “bad predictions” are admittedly hard to fix: When a weekly podcast throws out a bonus episode that’s not a part of the regular cadence, like 99% Invisible (stitcher.com), did this week, and will do regularly this year. 99PI releases on Tuesday, but once a month they put out a bonus episode on Friday; this means that after the bonus episode, Pocket Casts predicts the next episode to come out the following Friday, when it’s actually the following Tuesday and no episode will happen on the Friday.

    That’s a strange case and isn’t as serious as the main one I presented, (SciShow Tangents) so I think it’s less of a real bug. But if you want extra examples, you can look at 99PI.

  • staff-joey8 · Staff ·

    Thanks for that confirmation, @joshhoey

    Another example of “bad predictions” are admittedly hard to fix: When a weekly podcast throws out a bonus episode that’s not a part of the regular cadence […]

    I see what you mean and that can affect the way it gets calculated. It does not seem like a major issue, but if more users report this being something we should look into, it will be investigated further :)

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