Pocket Casts—my preferred podcast service—is now available via the Sonos smart speakers in an open beta.

This is good news for me, and it leaves Audible as my only regularly-used audio service that isn’t available on Sonos. Supposedly, that will happen eventually. But let’s focus on this week’s good news.

“We’re excited to announce that Pocket Casts support for Sonos has gone into Beta,” a new post to the Shift Jelly blog reads. “Judging by the amount of tweets and emails we’ve had over the years this is one of your most requested features and we’re excited to finally share it with you.”

Pocket Casts on Sonos is currently in beta, but any Sonos user can access it. To do so, first install Pocket Casts on your phone and sign-in to your account. Then, open the Sonos app and navigate to Add Music Services in the menu and then to Pocket Casts.

As is usually the case, the look and feel of Pocket Casts is completely different on Sonos. (It would be nice if you could just “cast” to Sonos from the Pocket Casts app and other apps.) So instead of the normal podcast-based UI, you get New Releases, In Progress and Starred links, each of which provides a list of episodes across multiple podcasts.

Because Pocket Casts maintains a cloud-based library, however, you do at least get seamless playback. Meaning, you can start a podcast on your phone, continue it on your Sonos, and then pick it up again later at the correct place on your phone again. (Or whatever.)

Shift Jelly says it will be adding more features to this Sonos integration over time.

Pocket Casts is available on Android, iOS, and the web. It’s not free, and you actually have to purchase each client independently. But I recommend doing so, as I’ve never found a podcast app that works this good, and this consistently across platforms. (I’ve purchased the Android and iOS versions.) It’s highly recommended.

Tagged with Sonos, What I Use