Publish Content to Spotify

Hi @Frank Roberge, Yes, we have customers who publish videos to Spotify using our MRSS feeds generated by the Social Syndication APIs.  However, if you plan to do this, it's critical that you either disable or extend the TTL tokens for MP4 assets, or you use static delivery URLs for the MP4 links.  Failure to do that will cause Spotify to continually ingest the podcast files resulting in massive bandwidth usage. Hope this helps. 

Awesome, thank you @Andy Hartono for sharing that.

I also wanted to share this document with you @Frank Roberge for RSS Podcast Feed for iTunes if you are considering publishing there as well. Hope this is helpful. Let us know if you have any follow up questions. 

What is the syndication type for use with spotify?

You can use our Syndication APIs to build an MP4 MRSS feed, so long as the account is configured to create MP4s with the ingest profile. Here’s the documentation for it. Keep in mind that the same concerns about TTL tokens apply.

@Varsha Ahir Thank you. I’ll use the universal type then.   Is there any documentation on what to do with a new Syndication now that I have it created?

Hi @Frank Roberge, When you create an MRSS feed with the API, you will get a JSON response with the  "syndication_url":  and that's the location of the MRSS feed.  That URL is what you would give to Spotify.  If you aren’t sure what it is or forgot to write it down when you created the feed, you can make this call to the API and it will return all of their syndications and list the URLs.

But please keep in mind its crucial that you remove the TTL tokens from the MP4 files, If you don't, it will cause massive increases in bandwidth because Spotify polls that feed every X-minutes and each time it hits the feed, you will get a new TTL token, which Spotify interprets as a new updated video and downloads it again- and also downloads every video in the feed again- so it's really important you don't have dynamic TTLs at the end. Please keep that in mind. 

@Varsha Ahir Thank you. I wish there was a way to either confirm we are using static urls or remove the TTL tokens from specific files. I’m continuing to search for a solution. 

@Javier Valenzuela of Brightcove support told me the following and escalated the ticket:

“Regarding your request to extend the TTL (Time To Live) for videos tagged with "spotify" to the maximum duration, unfortunately, there isn't a direct method to extend the expiry for videos with specific tags. The TTL setting affects all URLs for all videos within your account uniformly.

As a clarification, all URLs include a TTL token for content security purposes, ensuring they expire after 6 hours by default. However, we can extend the lifespan of this token up to 365 days if necessary. It's important to note that while extending the TTL reflects the maximum time an asset will be cached by the CDN (Content Delivery Network), it does not guarantee that the URL will remain unchanged until the token expires.

Furthermore, URLs generated by the MRSS (Media RSS) feed can be refreshed simply by refreshing the MRSS feed itself. This means that upon calling the MRSS feed again, the URLs will contain a newer token, thereby refreshing the content's access validity.”   

Hi @Frank Roberge , Support is right- refreshing the feed will give a new TTL token.  It's best to either disable token generation completely or to use the static URL service for the MP4 links.

You may interested to this topic: 

I have posted about Brightcove JWT on that thread to disable the TTL token. 

Updates: still trying to get a Podcast on Spotify to work. I had to use a syndication type of “itunes” to get past a Spotify requirement to include the Cover art, Author, and Email address in the RSS feed.

Using this new syndication feed of type “itunes”, I get an error from Spotify that says “We’re unable to accept podcasts with videos.”  @Varsha Ahir  Any guidance on this issue would be useful. Thank you.

I’m told, by Tier 2 support, that the “universal” type should also work if you create a template that Spotify accepts. The documentation on how to create a template through the Syndication API is not complete and will take time to figure out how to create one. 

Hi @Frank Roberge are you trying to get audio downloads? you will need to add progressiveAudio renditions to your ingest profiles in that case. I will be happy to put you in touch with our Professional services group to help you build the feed. 

Hi @Varsha Ahir, I’m trying to use our videos. I would greatly appreciate getting in touch with the Professional services group to help building the feed. Thank you

Sure. @Erica Wight is just the right person for it. 

Thanks @Varsha Ahir 

@Frank Roberge Im looping in @David Hernandez (your customer success lead) who can help us setup a quick call to align on next steps. 

Thanks @Erica Wight!

@Frank Roberge nice to meet you! I will review your open support cases and help escalate through there to help resolve your blocker.

Thank you @Erica Wight. Thank you @David Hernandez.  I’m hoping to be able resolve this. 

Hi, 

I’m also trying to publish Brightcove content directly to Spotify. 

Following up on any of the posts above if anyone was able to do this successfully? Thanks.

 Hi ​@Charlotte Lopez, it’s a long thread so bringing this solution to your attention. Let us know if you have a follow up question. 

Hi ​@Charlotte Lopez,  we created a Spotify account and uploaded the podcast videos directly. There was no way for us to publish Brightcove mp4 videos directly to Spotify using Brightcove API’s.  I spent many hours building feeds only to find that Spotify will only accept mp3 files to be uploaded and not mp4.  

Thanks for the information ​@Varsha Ahir ​@Frank Roberge.

​@Frank Roberge this is great to know. Did you export your videos from Brightcove? I’ll let you know how our process goes. Currently doing R&D to see if its feasible or any of the steps can be automated through the MRSS feed.

​@Charlotte Lopez We use Brightcove as the archive for our podcasts.  Spotify is pretty good ingesting the original mp4 files.  I’d love to hear if you find a way to use Brightcove as the source. Feel free to ask me any questions on the social syndication template. 

​@Frank Roberge you mentioned you used Itunes as the template for the feed. 

I’m getting a 422 status error code when I used ITunes template here. 

Did you have to modify this template to get it to work? I’m going through this line by line to see which passes and also checking in https://podba.se/validate/.

Thank you.

I recreated the error by starting with “type”: “itunes”.  

If you start with “type”: “universal”, you can update it with the itunes xml.   

When I created my syndications I only used json. The Liquid script certainly gives you more control. I didn’t need it at the time.  

Cool stuff! I learned another new language. 😁

Ignore this: Try to set the Content-Type: text/xml in your PUT request.

You will also need to add the “category”: ??  I used “category”: “Health & Fitness” for ours.

The categories can be found on apple’s site https://podcasters.apple.com/support/1691-apple-podcasts-categories