Twitter acquires social podcast breaker

    

Twitter has acquired the social broadcasting app Breaker, and the deal sees the social broadcasting app team join Twitter to help improve the health of public conversation across the service, as well as work on Twitter's new voice network project, Twitter Spaces.

However, breaker will be closed on January 15, 2021, and the social broadcasting app announced the acquisition via his blog, explaining why he believes his team will be well suited on Twitter.

Erik Berlin, CEO of Breaker, wrote: We are passionate about voice communication, and we have been inspired by the ways in which Twitter facilitates public conversations for people around the world.

Breaker was founded in 2016, and the app was launched at a time when podcasts were still seen as audio feeds and podcast apps as production tools, rather than experiences around which a community could be built.

Breaker helped change this perception by introducing an app where users can like, comment on episodes, and discover new podcasts by following friends and sharing favorite programs across social media platforms.

The app team joins Twitter, focusing on Twitter Spaces, Twitter's voice-based social networking product and rival to Clubhouse.

Twitter Spaces allows platform users to chat in real time using audio instead of text.

The new product entered the pilot phase in December, and Twitter is currently trying to address technical and feature-related errors, as well as more complex problems arising from live audio hosting.

Breaker says it will close within days its applications and services that it has built over the past years, and app users can export an OPML file to transfer their subscriptions to another streaming app.

Breaker recommends apps, such as Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, PocketCasts or Castro, as an alternative.

The acquisition follows other podcast content deals in recent weeks and months, including Amazon's $300 million acquisition of Wondery, Sirius's purchase of Stitcher for $300 million, not to mention all content deals recently acquired by Spotify.