iPhone App: This American Life

February 6th, 2010

= 5 stars

Listen to all the This American Life you can handle with this iPhone app.

The Good

• Access to a lot more content than I expected: essentially all back episodes going back years. Bonus for trailers and synopses for the television show. Also keeps up to date with recently aired episodes.
• Episodes are framed with an easy to navigate, organized interface. There’s a content strip on the right side showing years. Once within an episode, you can swipe left or right to find neighboring episodes. There’s even a search feature — a co-worker recommended listening to a Halloween episode and it was found quickly.
• All episodes reside online, in the “cloud” sense. Streaming content played seamlessly over 3G and even Edge. App also remembers where you left off after quitting.
• Digging deeper reveals other cool features: listen to the show live (complete with a countdown clock indicating the next live stream), official blog posts, a station finder with show air times, ability to mark episodes as favorites and share on Facebook or Twitter, and lists of episodes organized by contributor or show host (say you have a thing for Sarah Vowell or David Sedaris).

The Bad

• Streaming content means the episodes aren’t downloaded to your iPhone, therefore you must have an active Internet connection to listen. Every episode sports a link to purchase from iTunes, however.

Conclusion

If you’re okay with the idea of the “cloud” holding all your content, this app provides literally, hours and days of thought-provoking entertainment. For this long-time fan of  This American Life - $2.99 is the bargain of a lifetime.

iTunes App Store Link: This American Life — Public Radio Exchange (PRX)