Twitter has announced today that it has acquired the podcast streaming platform Breaker, for an undisclosed amount. In a blog post, Breaker CEO Erik Berlin said, “the Breaker team is joining Twitter!”. The company would help to improve the quality of “public conversation” on the social media platform and would also help Twitter’s new audio-based networking project, Twitter Spaces.
The CEO also informed that the Breaker application will be shut down on the 15th of January. Breaker, founded in 2016, started as a productivity platform, as Erik Berlin claims, and quickly became one of the best in the class listening platform for podcasts. With features like liking and commenting on episodes, the application attracted a wide array of audience and now the CEO says that they are inspired to go further in “re-imagining how we communicate with each other, beyond the scope of traditional podcasts.”
The CEO also shared his thoughts on why Twitter is a good fit for the company, going forward. He wrote, “Here at Breaker, we’re truly passionate about audio communication and we’re inspired by the ways Twitter is facilitating public conversations for people around the world. We’re impressed by the entrepreneurial spirit at Twitter and enthusiastic about the new experiences that the team is creating.”
Leach Culver, CTO of Breaker tweeted that she would join Twitter to help with Twitter Spaces, which is a new feature that lets users chat in real-time using voice instead of texts. The feature entered the beta stage last month, and is expected to launch pretty soon.
In work news, I’m joining Twitter to help build @TwitterSpaces! 🥳 While I’ll very much miss @breaker, I’m so excited to help create the future of audio conversations. https://t.co/0Y8fkbCIFm
— Leah Culver (@leahculver) January 4, 2021
Breaker also informed that the current subscription holders of the platform will only need to export in an OPML file from Breaker and open that file in another podcast listening app to transfer their subscription. People who host a podcast on the platform can also transfer their podcast to another hosting service by using the RSS feed, whose link can be found on the Distribution tab.
Recently podcast streaming services have seen a hike in activity and thus, it comes as no surprise that Twitter want a piece of the action. Companies like Amazon and Sirius also made moves recently to acquire services like Wondery and Stitcher respectively.
