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Cloe.D.Frost
Level 1 (4 points)
Publishing

Q: Podcast not showing up in different regions

I recently submitted my podcast to iTunes. Searching for the podcast and following the provided link works fine. However, the podcast doesn't appear on lists of regions other than the region I was in when I added it. It's not on the recent list of other regions, or even if I click on "All podcasts" it doesn't appear there. It is an english speaking podcast so I'd like it to appear in multiple regions such as Canada, USA, UK & Australia. However, it appears only in the region in which I was when I created the account (which to make matters worse, wasn't even an english speaking region). How do I make the podcast appear on the lists of other regions?
I've searched around for a solution, but no one mentions this problem. I don't know what to do about it.

Posted on May 15, 2016 11:38 AM

by Roger Wilmut1,Solvedanswer
Roger Wilmut1 Roger Wilmut1
Level 9 (78,525 points)
iTunes
A:

The category listings aren't anything like complete - they are 'featured podcasts' chosen by the Store staff as being particularly interesting. It would be quite impossible to show all the podcasts - there would be thousands of them.

 

As to byte range requests, http://castfeedvalidator.com/ flags your episodes as not accepting byte range requests, and a Terminal test of the top episode's media file produces:

 

curl -I -r 200-300 http://aethernea.com/mp3/Episode3.mp3

HTTP/1.1 416 Requested Range Not Satisfiable

Cache-Control: max-age=31536000

Content-Length: 26535532

Content-Type: audio/mpeg

Last-Modified: Fri, 06 May 2016 10:11:37 GMT

Accept-Ranges: bytes

ETag: "2c5ff1ac7fa7d11:0"

Server: Microsoft-IIS/8.5

X-Powered-By: ASP.NET

Date: Sun, 15 May 2016 21:54:01 GMT

Content-Range: bytes */0

 

This is what a successful test looks like:

 

curl -I -r 200-300 http://rfwilmut.net/podcasts/Soundof78s36.mp3

HTTP/1.1 206 Partial Content

Date: Sun, 15 May 2016 21:55:26 GMT

Server: Apache/2.4.12

Last-Modified: Sat, 20 Jun 2015 15:27:15 GMT

ETag: "57a161d-a3939a-518f4acea0eb7"

Accept-Ranges: bytes

Content-Length: 101

Vary: Accept-Encoding,User-Agent

Content-Range: bytes 200-300/10720154

Content-Type: audio/mpeg

 

I don't know about partial requests in Chrome or how that's related.

 

Normally new podcasts which fail this test are rejected, so I don't know how you've managed to get in unless you changed the server subsequently to the original submission. This won't have any effect on computers, but iPhones probably won't be able to access your episodes. I'm afraid the only cure for this is to find another server.

Posted on May 16, 2016 9:37 AM

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Cloe.D.Frost

Q: Podcast not showing up in different regions

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  • Helpful answers

  • by Roger Wilmut1,

    Roger Wilmut1 Roger Wilmut1 May 15, 2016 12:49 PM in response to Cloe.D.Frost
    Level 9 (78,525 points)
    iTunes
    May 15, 2016 12:49 PM in response to Cloe.D.Frost

    Please post the URL of your iTunes Store page and tell us which region you posted it in.

  • by Cloe.D.Frost,

    Cloe.D.Frost Cloe.D.Frost May 15, 2016 1:26 PM in response to Roger Wilmut1
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Publishing
    May 15, 2016 1:26 PM in response to Roger Wilmut1

    https://itunes.apple.com/hr/podcast/aethernea/id1111801701

    I was in Croatia when I uploaded the podcast initially.

  • by Roger Wilmut1,

    Roger Wilmut1 Roger Wilmut1 May 15, 2016 1:50 PM in response to Cloe.D.Frost
    Level 9 (78,525 points)
    iTunes
    May 15, 2016 1:50 PM in response to Cloe.D.Frost

    Your podcast appears in the UK iTunes Store. Where are you looking for it and not seeing it? You are not likely to see it in the listings on the iTunes Store page - very few make it to there (there are thousands of podcasts in the Store). It shows up when searching on the title.

     

    However there is a separate problem, which is that no episodes appear in the Store, though they do when subscribing. Your feed, which is at http://aethernea.com/feed/podcast/ , appears to be OK except that your server does not handle 'byte range requests' - given this I'm surprised it was accepted in the first place as that is mandatory (it's the method used by iPhones to download podcasts).

     

    However the no episodes showing problem is unlikely to be related to that. There have been numerous problems with the iTunes Store failing to show some, sometimes all, episodes. Go to Podcasts Connect, sign in, select your podcast and click 'Refresh Feed'. Give it time - the Store may take a day or two to update. If it doesn't work, contact Support and ask for a re-index: that may solve it. Go to https://itunespartner.apple.com/en/podcasts/overview and click the 'Contact Us' link at the bottom of the page.

  • by Cloe.D.Frost,

    Cloe.D.Frost Cloe.D.Frost May 15, 2016 2:54 PM in response to Roger Wilmut1
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Publishing
    May 15, 2016 2:54 PM in response to Roger Wilmut1

    Thank you for the reply!
    I went to US, Canada and UK store and clicked on the category of the podcast, then I could choose to show all the podcasts of that category. I scrolled down the huge list of podcasts and it didn't appear on the list. Isn't "All podcasts" list supposed to show all podcasts of the selected category?


    The episodes appeared when I added the podcast to podcastconnect, everything seemed to be fine. I didn't expect they wouldn't appear when it went live on the store. And like you said, they appear when subscribing. I don't know what went wrong. I will do what you said and try to fix it. Edit: Refreshed it like you said, and now they appear on the store. Thank you.

     

    Why do you think it doesn't accept byte range requests? It accepts partial requests just fine when I open it through Chrome.

  • by Roger Wilmut1,Solvedanswer

    Roger Wilmut1 Roger Wilmut1 May 16, 2016 9:37 AM in response to Cloe.D.Frost
    Level 9 (78,525 points)
    iTunes
    May 16, 2016 9:37 AM in response to Cloe.D.Frost

    The category listings aren't anything like complete - they are 'featured podcasts' chosen by the Store staff as being particularly interesting. It would be quite impossible to show all the podcasts - there would be thousands of them.

     

    As to byte range requests, http://castfeedvalidator.com/ flags your episodes as not accepting byte range requests, and a Terminal test of the top episode's media file produces:

     

    curl -I -r 200-300 http://aethernea.com/mp3/Episode3.mp3

    HTTP/1.1 416 Requested Range Not Satisfiable

    Cache-Control: max-age=31536000

    Content-Length: 26535532

    Content-Type: audio/mpeg

    Last-Modified: Fri, 06 May 2016 10:11:37 GMT

    Accept-Ranges: bytes

    ETag: "2c5ff1ac7fa7d11:0"

    Server: Microsoft-IIS/8.5

    X-Powered-By: ASP.NET

    Date: Sun, 15 May 2016 21:54:01 GMT

    Content-Range: bytes */0

     

    This is what a successful test looks like:

     

    curl -I -r 200-300 http://rfwilmut.net/podcasts/Soundof78s36.mp3

    HTTP/1.1 206 Partial Content

    Date: Sun, 15 May 2016 21:55:26 GMT

    Server: Apache/2.4.12

    Last-Modified: Sat, 20 Jun 2015 15:27:15 GMT

    ETag: "57a161d-a3939a-518f4acea0eb7"

    Accept-Ranges: bytes

    Content-Length: 101

    Vary: Accept-Encoding,User-Agent

    Content-Range: bytes 200-300/10720154

    Content-Type: audio/mpeg

     

    I don't know about partial requests in Chrome or how that's related.

     

    Normally new podcasts which fail this test are rejected, so I don't know how you've managed to get in unless you changed the server subsequently to the original submission. This won't have any effect on computers, but iPhones probably won't be able to access your episodes. I'm afraid the only cure for this is to find another server.

  • by Cloe.D.Frost,

    Cloe.D.Frost Cloe.D.Frost May 15, 2016 5:03 PM in response to Roger Wilmut1
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Publishing
    May 15, 2016 5:03 PM in response to Roger Wilmut1

    You mentioned that iPhone uses byte range requests to download podcasts. I downloaded the podcasts through iTunes podcasts on my iPhone without a problem.

    I am on a windows pc so I can't do the curl command. However, when I open the file in the web browser, I get a player widget which allows me to skip to a certain time. Which, when monitored, sends a byte range request and gets a valid response exactly like the second example you provided of the valid response.

    Checking the header that you copy pasted, I see you get a 416 code, which is what is sent when the sent range isn't valid. It is a problem on the client side, and I don't know why you are getting it. I've seen people say that it can be caused by problems with the cache of the client. If the server didn't support byte range requests the response would have been 200 code (not 416) because the server would have ignored the sent range.

    When I run http://castfeedvalidator.com/ , it tells me that everything is fine.

     

     

    When I click on Arts->Literature->All Podcasts in Uk store, it shows 2000 podcasts sorted by release date (or name).
    Are these really featured podcasts chosen by your staff? Cause some of them don't even have an art cover and a large amount isn't in English. Ah, I get it. It shows only the first 2000 it finds. My podcast doesn't appear when they are sorted by release date but it does when sorted by name.

    Ok, so that's one problem solved.

     

    However, I am also faced with another problem: how does the search work? When I search for some key terms that I included in the description, my podcast is never returned as the result. At first, I thought the search only takes the title into account, but that clearly isn't the case cause I got a bunch of other podcasts that had none of the keywords in their title. Then I thought, it looks at the author name too, since I noticed people were using that field as if it was a subtitle instead of an author name. But it clearly looks at more than that, since I still found podcasts that didn't have search terms there either.

    What am I supposed to do if I want people to be able to find my podcast? Why doesn't it appear unless I search for my author name or podcast name?
    Edit: I tried changing the podcast name to add a keyword in there. But searching for that keyword doesn't find the podcast. I am very confused.

  • by Roger Wilmut1,Helpful

    Roger Wilmut1 Roger Wilmut1 May 16, 2016 9:37 AM in response to Cloe.D.Frost
    Level 9 (78,525 points)
    iTunes
    May 16, 2016 9:37 AM in response to Cloe.D.Frost

    Screen Shot 2016-05-16 at 07.30.28.jpgCastFeedValidator reports no byte range support (image, right) but if everything is working OK I shouldn't worry about it.

     

    The Search works on title only. The actual 'keywords' tag is no longer supported (and never worked properly anyway), and words in the itunes:subtitle or :summary tags are not searched. Searching on individual words in the title is problematic because the same word may turn up in a very large number of podcasts. I'm afraid the situation is as you've described it.

  • by Cloe.D.Frost,

    Cloe.D.Frost Cloe.D.Frost May 16, 2016 9:37 AM in response to Roger Wilmut1
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Publishing
    May 16, 2016 9:37 AM in response to Roger Wilmut1

    Alright. Thank you for your help.