Here's a holy shit idea I have. Sort of.
(a) Imagine apple watch exists and is iterated on and is widely used etc.
(b) imagine apple watch has the ability to accept morse-code-like tap patterns from users without requiring them to unlock the screen first. So basically, I could do what Lando Calrissian did when he slyly sent a message to this bald friend to arrange a stormtrooper ambush.
(c) Okay, imagine apple watch is cognizant that I'm listening to podcasts, and what episode I'm listening to, and the current timestamp.
(d) imagine if I tap a certain pattern while a podcast is playing (e.g., triple-tap to denote this pattern is for the Podcast app, and then long-short-short taps to denote _this means drop a flag / timestamp / star / bookmark at current timestamp of current episode.
(e) imagine lots of poeple do (d) for the various podcasts they listen to. Also, imagine users can "manually" do this via web or mobile UI if they don't hve the watch. so either way, timestamps of note are collected en masse.
(f) this is where the Pandora, simple UI/UX (of "next song".... "next song..." "next song...") comes in – if these hot /popular/recommend spots of epsiodes are known by podcast app creator X, they could literally drop users who want a good few minutes of something to listen to right now into / at the beginning of one of these hot spots and let the user listen. Listener wants something else? Make the uX for changing to the next hotspot (of a different show or wahtever) as easy as flipping to the next channel, or flipping to the next Pandora song.
My next web project plan to emulate this via... the web. Basically I'll manually curate a list of ~20 timestamps from as many episodes, and with what I am pretty sure is possible with JS audio controls, I can basically make a user who clicks "next" have another audio file loaded and jump to the timestamp I denote. So basically a one button UI (where that button changes to the next "station" / timestamp / episode) drops users off at a guaranteed 'good' part of a podcast.
My MVP will be limited by the timestamps all having been chosen by me, but hey – it's a start.
I think the key is the act of deciding what show to listen to, and then waiting to get through the intros + etc is kind of exhausting and not what non-nerds / normal people want. Normal people want to turn on the TV and immediately be droppped into something. And they (used to) click "channel up" to get to the next in-the-middle-of-something. Reepat until they find something. Or they're lazy and go with the first/whatever thing they land on.