Stream and Manage Podcasts On the iPhone With Instacast

Do you like to listen to podcasts? Do you subscribe to multiple podcasts in iTunes? If so, you realize how much of a pain it can be to manually transfer your podcasts from iTunes to your iPhone. Perhaps you don’t even sync podcasts to your iPhone to conserve disk space.

Podcasts can take a considerable amount of memory on a device with limited storage, not to mention the time and hardrive space it takes to download each episode in iTunes. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a robust streaming solution for podcasts?

Instacast can best be described as Netflix for podcasts. As a cloud-based podcast streaming solution, Instacast is a fantastic stand-alone app for any podcast enthusiast…

Instacast allows you to stream and download your favorite shows in one totally podcast-focused app. By reinventing the way you normally consume your media, Instacast serves as a much more efficient and on-demand method for listening to your favorite shows.

The app is brilliant because it takes the queueing concept of other on-demand streaming services (like Netflix), and applies that philosophy to podcasts. Instacast is the perfect replacement for syncing podcasts through iTunes because the app also allows you to download content in-app for offline listening/watching. You get the best of both worlds.

That particular feature of Instacast is very important to me because I’m not the kind of person that typically listens to a full podcast episode in one sitting. I stagger my listening between various commutes in the car, parts of the day, etc.

If that’s the way you listen, Instacast can use its multitasking abilities to cache your progress mid-stream, or you can download any episode for playback like a normal file in the iPod app. And if you do plan on listening to a whole show in one sitting, you can of course stream the episode all the way through.

The Instacast online directory offers over 9,000 of the most popular podcasts in iTunes, and more are added daily. You can browse for shows like you would in iTunes; with genres, search, popular, etc. Audio is not the only available format. There are plenty of video podcasts available for streaming/downloading within Instacast.

My only complaint about Instacast is that it’s not available on my Mac. If Instacast was on my desktop with cloud-based progress syncing, I would totally abandon the classic method of downloading podcast files in iTunes.

Caching shows, reading show notes, and using the actual player made me fall in love with Instacast. I’ve subscribed to most of my podcasts in Instacast now, and using the app is a much more hassle-free way of managing and listening to my different shows.

I highly recommend Instacast for any podcast lover. The app is available for $1.99 in the App Store.

What do you think of Instacast? Do you listen to podcasts frequently? Let us know why you like (or dislike) Instacast below!