Deezer announced it acquired Sticher, the San-Fransisco based podcast and talk radio programming aggregator.

In an effort to switch up its game and battle for more differentiation, Deezer is clearly working on building a higher profile in the U.S. before their launch.

Bringing together a catalog of 35,000 radio podcasts, Sticher’s content comes from over 12,000 providers including NPR, BBC, Fox News, Wall Street Journal, This American Life, Marc Maron and CBS Radio News.

Sticher users will still be able to access the service through the Sticher iOS and Android apps and website and through embedded links.

Deezer’s bigger plan is to offer Sticher’s audio content through Deezer’s existing platform under a free service called Talk.
Another interesting part of Sticher’s service which Deezer is hoping to leverage is in-car audio service.

Stitcher is integrated already into 50 car models from BMW, Ford, General Motors, Jaguar and Mazda, and was an official launch partner for both Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.

In the past month, some 39 million people in the U.S. have listened to an audio podcast. Yet a lot of that is very fragmented listening across a number of different platforms, or via other third-party aggregating services like Apple’s own iTunes. Right now Stitcher is the number-two app in the iOS store for podcasts, while iTunes is number one; it claims the number-one spot for Android.
Deezer believes that by coupling Stitcher’s talk programming with its music offering, it could introduce the music platform to more of the talk-show crowd, and also recommend talk programming alongside music to extend the engagement of Deezer’s music user-base.

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