Can I use my own player with Dovetail audio?

Of course, you can! While we provide an embeddable player for every episode, you do not have to use it for playback and can absolutely use your own custom player, or you may even have a custom mobile application.

There are a few things you need to do when making or using a player in order to have your downloads and ad impressions follow the IAB standards for podcast measurement:

• Do not allow pre-loading in players and on websites (e.g. preload=none for HTML5, not even preload=metadata is acceptable)
• We do not implement Auto-play. This will result in a bad user experience for the user with audio they were not expecting to hear.
• Make clear download or progressive download requests. For a full download, ask for the entire file in one go. For a progressive download, ask for the file in slices (byte range). That way, a full download can be distinguished from a progressive download.
• Do not modify the enclosure URL when requesting media, don’t add extra parameters.
• Do not cache podcast episodes on your servers. Always download the latest episode from the enclosure URL for every app user wanting to listen.
• Use the GUID (as opposed to episode URL, title, publication date, etc.) to identify new episodes in the RSS feed that should be automatically downloaded to a user’s device. (The GUID is designed to be persistent through changes to hosting environment, titles, etc.)
• Employ an “automatic download unsubscribe” behavior (e.g. stop auto downloads after 5 episodes of non-listens).
• Do not automatically download all episodes (e.g. back catalog episodes) by default. This creates unnecessary drain on the publishers’ servers and consumes users’ bandwidth.
• Use header information to prevent a full download - when possible, check the headers located at the start of the file to prevent a full download when not needed.