In an email to users, bCast announced that they will be closing in August 2024. Below you'll find the information of how to move your content from bCast to Hello Audio, and what the experience is for your listeners.
bCast's email to users announcing their shutdown.
Your Hello Audio Account
First, you'll need an active Hello Audio account. If you previously had a Hello Audio account, your content remains archived in your account. You can follow these steps to reactive your account.
New users can start an account with a 7-day free trial here: https://app.helloaudio.fm/signup.
If you're new to Hello Audio, you can find our Quick Start Guide and Frequently Asked Questions along with other help docs here.
An active Hello Audio account with an imported feed from bCast.
Migrating Your Podcasts into Hello Audio
Moving content from bCast is a straightforward process that requires pasting a few links and waiting for episodes to migrate into your Hello Audio account. There are minor differences between private and public podcasts, which you can follow in the guides below:
Imported feeds after they have completed.
Managing Listeners
Folks who subscribe and listen to your public podcast will automatically continue listening without any action on their part once you've followed the instructions above.
Moving listeners of a private podcast is a bit more complicated. The listeners' access links will need to be regenerated as the listeners are added to the feed in Hello Audio. This means listeners will be reinvented to the private content which now lives at Hello Audio.
You can share this doc to help them manage the new invitation, which includes a short 2-minute video showing what to do: For Listeners: How to Manage a Duplicate Feed. Give the listeners a heads up before adding them to the feed so that they'll know what to expect. Tip: Use a modified image or title for the new feed in Hello Audio so they can easily determine which is which.
When you're ready, you can add listeners in bulk by following this process. Doing so will match your Hello Audio listeners with those already in the bCast feed.
You'll need a CSV list of current listeners, which you can export from your email platform, or copy from the table of listeners in bCast and clean up the copied text to only include email addresses. At this time, there doesn't seem to be a way to export listeners from bCast directly.
Adding listeners to a feed from a CSV file.
Moving forward, you can add listeners in an ongoing way with one of the options found here: Adding Listeners.
Once the above steps are followed, you bCast account can expire without interruption for your listeners.