On last week’s edition of the Digital Sport insider, it was a case of the podcaster chatting to the podcaster.

Whilst radio has been around a long time, the relatively new phenomenon of podcasts are in some ways the on-demand arm of traditional radio programming.

Whilst the medium has taken off in a big way over the last few years, and although modern technology has allowed pretty much anyone to record and set up their own show, podcasts are essentially producing the same sort of content as radio, albeit with (ideally) a less time-sensitive focus.

Last week, Dan McLaren chatted to Kurt Edwards of Love Sport Radio about being ahead of the curve when it comes to technology and how live radio as well as the more evergreen content that podcasts rely on can work with emerging mainstream tech.

Within five minutes of the end of the football fan shows produced by Love Sport, they are available on Amazon Echo and Google Home – or Alexa and Google Assistant.

????NEW POD ALERT: @DanielMclaren and @Edwards_Kurt talk about how Google Home and Amazon Alexa are the technologies of the future for radio and podcasting

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— Digital Sport (@DigitalSportUK) May 25, 2018

For the moment, numbers of listeners to radio stations or podcasts on those platforms are perhaps low, but as with all new tech that’s still fighting its way into the very middle of the mainstream, these things take time.

“By being in that space early we can make learnings, we can see what utterances people are making and what their user journey is on that skill and how long people are listening for,” said Edwards.

Whilst smart speakers may not be for everyone at the moment, they are taking off as advertising campaigns grow and podcasts as well as music subscription platforms like Spotify are well established and merging that with a host of other services with the help of the likes of Amazon Echo and Google Home will surely help.

Getting ahead of the game when it comes to technology is always the smart technique. But when it comes to podcasts, where analytics are often still sketchy as to how long people have listened for and whether they skip ads, using smart speakers to gain an extra insight will help producers to better understand their listener base.