Podigee announced that as part of a new agreement with Spotify, Podigee is offering Spotify Passthrough to their customers. With this, Podigee avoids the usual caching mechanism of the streaming service.

As one of only a handful of podcast hosters worldwide – and as the only German hoster – we now cooperate with Spotify to deliver your audio files exclusively from our servers. The feature is called “Passthrough” and means nothing else than that Spotify will no longer make copies of your hosted audio files. In the future your episodes will be streamlined directly from our servers in the latest version. As a Podigee customer you will always have complete control over your content and can use Dynamic Ad Insertion to its full extent.

Previous to Passthrough, Spotify was making one-time copies of all episodes of the podcasts that are registered on Spotify. It then delivers those podcasts to listeners via Spotify’s distribution infrastructure. This means that the podcast the listener accesses through Spotify does not come from the Podigee’s servers.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with that process. Podigee notes that it can result in less load on their own servers, lower latency, and higher availability.

Unfortunately, the disadvantage is that audio files delivered from the Spotify cache do not work in combination with dynamic ad insertion. The change to Spotify Passthrough means that Podigee podcasters will now have more freedom monetize their podcast through advertising.