Why Castcore
Built by broadcast engineers, not a hosting startup.
Each of these is a deliberate choice we can defend in technical detail, and explain exactly why we made it.
01 · Audio
What national broadcasters do. For your podcast.
No podcast hosting platform measures your episode with R128 methods, runs it through a real dynamics pipeline, and stores it at a precisely calculated loudness target with a true-peak ceiling calibrated for each platform's boost. National broadcasters do this, because they have engineering teams who build it. Castcore does it because we are those engineers.
Every episode is encoded with Fraunhofer AAC above the floor bitrate, stored at −18 LUFS with a −5 dBTP ceiling, and served so each platform's normalization lands exactly where it should — no clipping, no guessing, no fixed gain nudge.
Every track is processed to a consistent loudness range — so your catalogue holds together. If your audio already hits 7 LRA or below, the loudness stage is skipped.
02 · Publish timing
No lag between scheduled and live.
Schedule a release for 06:00 and it publishes at 06:00, the moment you picked. Not whenever a nightly batch run gets around to it. There's no gap between the time you set and the time it goes live. Your release window is a commitment, not a suggestion.
03 · EU data residency
Every byte stays in the EU.
Your audio, metadata and images are stored in the EU and kept there. GDPR-friendly by architecture, not by a policy checkbox bolted on afterwards. Castcore is a Finnish company — EU law governs by default, not by contractual workaround.
04 · Real-time analytics
See what's happening now, not yesterday.
Play confirmations land in the analytics pipeline as soon as we receive them, not in a next-day batch report. Watch a release climb live, and see which episodes earn re-listens while the moment is still yours to act on.
The data we collect is GDPR-compliant from the moment it lands. The things we log — approximate location, device type, and the platform used — are so anonymized that we couldn't identify a single listener from what we hold. And even then, everything is stored in the EU.
05 · Collaborators
A team model, without per-seat fees.
Shows support multiple co-authors at no extra cost. Collaboration is a property of the show, not a per-seat line item. Invite your producer, your editor, your co-host, and just get to work. Your collaborators don't need to have an active subscription.
06 · Standard output
A feed every app already speaks.
Castcore produces a standard RSS 2.0 feed with the iTunes namespace. Listeners don't change their podcast app; the show just moves under the hood. Nothing proprietary, nothing locked, nothing your audience has to do.
07 · Clean migration
Import does the work, not you.
Point the import tool at any RSS feed and it onboards the whole catalogue with no manual work by the owner. Leaving is just as easy. You can export your full catalogue and move on whenever you want, with no lock-in by design. That's the point.
08 · Business model
We earn nothing from your audience.
Most hosting platforms run programmatic ad networks. The more downloads you get, the more valuable their inventory becomes — so they aggregate listener data across their whole network to sell it at a higher CPM. You get a rev share, but the platform owns the advertiser relationship and sets the terms.
Castcore's only revenue is your subscription. No ad network. No listener data sold or aggregated. No incentive to care about your download count except that growth means you're happy and less likely to leave. Your audience belongs to you — that's not a privacy policy, it's the business model.
IAB certification exists to give advertisers confidence in download counts. We'll never pursue it — there's no advertiser to certify for. That's the point.
In writing
The numbers we commit to.
Convinced, or want the receipts?
Choose from two tiers. The technical guidelines tell you exactly what to hand us.