Entale

» see entale.co as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Entale's premise was that the phone in your hand during a podcast is doing nothing. So it filled the screen. While an episode played, the app surfaced the article the hosts were arguing about and the book one of them had just recommended. Some of it was hand-curated by Entale's own editors and some came out of a machine learning pipeline that read transcripts and guessed what deserved a card.

Wil Harris founded it in 2017, after running digital at Condé Nast in Britain. It came out of beta in 2019 with a slate of original shows including one made with The Midult, and it picked up a Webby for best visual design in an app. In September 2019 dmg ventures, the Daily Mail group's investment arm, put in two million pounds. For a two-sided problem that nobody had solved, the reviews were good: listeners said the visual layer helped when they wanted to go deeper on something rather than just hear it.

In November 2021 DMGT, the Daily Mail's parent and already an investor, bought the company and the team. The app kept running. That is the odd part of this one, and it is the part that makes the death hard to date.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ still lit in february ~

There is no shutdown notice. The last working capture of www.entale.co is 20 February 2023, and it is a full marketing site, down to the signup box still offering app updates and podcast recommendations. The copyright line at the bottom reads 2021, which is the only thing on the page that admits anything.

The next capture of the domain, on 6 June 2023, is a 404. Nothing in between. Meanwhile embed.entale.co, the host for the episode players Entale had placed on other people's websites, kept answering through to November 2023, so the player outlived the company's own front door by months. A crawler hitting those embeds daily is the only reason the tail is visible at all.

~ dissolved on paper ~

Companies House is the one source that gives a hard date for anything here. ENTALE MEDIA LIMITED, company number 10872547, registered at 40 Bank Street in Canary Wharf, was dissolved on 19 March 2025. That is nearly two years after the website went dark and three and a half years after the team was absorbed, which is roughly how long a UK holding company takes to wind up once there is nothing left in it.

Entale was a British product aimed at English-language podcast listeners at a moment when podcasting in Turkey was still mostly radio people experimenting, so none of this reached me. The part of it worth missing is the part it was best at, which is telling you what the book was called. Spotify and YouTube both sell a version of the screen-during-audio idea now, with none of the curation.

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