James Cridland: 0:00

It's Friday, the 17th of November 2023.

Announcer: 0:04

The last word in podcasting news. This is the Pod News Weekly Review with James Cridland and Sam Sethi.

James Cridland: 0:13

I'm James Cridland, the editor of Pod News. Back in Heatwave Alert.

Sam Sethi: 0:17

Australia, and I'm Sam Sethi, the CEO of PodFound, still shivering my little backside off in Little Britain. It's wet, it's cold, it's dark, but good morning to you all.

James Cridland: 0:27

Well in the chapters today how rsscom became live and lit from Mexico. Youtube adds more support for RSS and lots and lots of good podcast trends being reported Plus.

Alberto Betella: 0:39

I'm Alberto Betela, co-founder of RSScom, and I'll be speaking about the live item tag at Podcom MX.

Ainsley Costello: 0:46

My name is Ainsley Castella. I'm a 19 year old singer-songwriter based in Nashville, tennessee, and I will be on later to talk about two very exciting new events coming up.

James Cridland: 0:54

They will. This podcast A Beacon of Inspiration for Podcast Enthusiasts, a treasure trove teeming with fresh insights about the evolving universe of podcasts. Imagine the podcast world like a bustling city, each story its own skyscraper, every episode a window peering into another reality. It's sponsored by Buzzsprout. Last week, 3,008 people started a podcast with Buzzsprout. Podcast hosting made easy with powerful tools, free learning materials and remarkable customer support. And read Pod News on Monday for more information about all of that. From your daily newsletter, the Pod News Weekly Review.

Sam Sethi: 1:32

I will. I will, yes, what was that all about? Anyway, let's crack the show on, james. Last week we talked about Podcom MX, the event that you did in Mexico with the wonderful guys at RSScom. Remind us quickly what the event was about.

James Cridland: 1:49

Yeah, so it was basically lots and lots of podcasters from Mexico. All yeah, it was a good conference day in Mexico City and super enjoyable. I ended up doing the keynote, which was the last speaker, because that's apparently how you do things in Mexico during a massive thunderstorm, but the thunderstorm finished just in time for beers on the roof, so that was a good thing. But yeah, it was a fantastic day.

Sam Sethi: 2:14

Well, they also managed to live broadcast the whole event, and they did that using the live item tag, and they did that so that podcasting 2.0 apps could actually then either have their people listen or watch it, and that was great as well. We caught up with Alberto, who's the co-founder of RSScom, and asked him how they came about to broadcast live the first ever event through a podcasting 2.0 app and what was the challenges they faced.

Alberto Betella: 2:47

It was called the Podcon MX and it was last week on Thursday so November 9th, 2023. And it was one of the biggest, or perhaps the first, podcasting only event in Mexico. We did it in Mexico City in collaboration with Radio Formula, and Radio Formula is the first speech radio in the country, taking into account that Mexico City alone has 30 million inhabitants population, so it's pretty big and, yeah, very exciting. Venue was great and we did a lot of contacts and networking. So, yeah, we were there a couple of days and we are coming home even more excited about Mexico and emerging markets.

Sam Sethi: 3:33

One of the things you said before the event was that you were going to broadcast this live, and you did so. Tell me more. How did you broadcast it and what happened? Give me the background.

Alberto Betella: 3:43

My co-founder, ben, had the idea. So just a few days before the conference, before flying to Mexico City, Ben said let's use the live item tag and stream it live in video. And initially I was a bit skeptical, perhaps because I always think about Murphy's law. I thought, ah, we're going to declare, we're going to stream it. Something is going to go wrong, we're going to look bad. But then I thought, OK, it should be fun and let's try so.

Alberto Betella: 4:13

Together we worked on real world implementation of the elite in a podcast which was dedicated to our conference. We didn't know what gear and what tools radio formula had in the venue. They are professionals, so they have their cameraman, they have their team, but how do you really stream their video and audio feed if you don't know what they have until you land in town? So really we set up everything the day before. We woke up at 6 am and the conference started at 9. And by 9 it worked. So it was very exciting Ben's idea. It pushed a bit the boundaries, our limit with our product, because we were not ready at the time, and now we feel we nailed it. At least we can say that we showcased perhaps the first conference that also streamed in a podcast live, allowing the audience, remote and in the place, to interact with the speakers through Bustagrams and also through value for value.

Alberto Betella: 5:18

We reached out to MasterDone and we spoke with you as well. We announced this live streaming and we had Mitch from Podverse doing I think he did a no lighter because it was there fixed an issue and in the end, podverse, like Podfans, worked very well, especially the web version. So it was a common effort. When you organize an event, it depends on your budget, on the partnerships. We were lucky. In our case we had a team from one of the biggest radio groups in a country with four people really dealing with the signal capturing and streaming it to our RTMP server. That's the best case scenario I can imagine. Podcast movement or any other big conference like Podcon MX, they would do that.

Sam Sethi: 6:06

Yeah, we've spoken two years ago, even in LA, about the fact that I used to run River Radio and River Radio was a podcast first radio station. So we did 40 live podcasts a week and we then used a piece of software, which I'm only saying it because we used a platform like Q. I had never built something like this, so we use something called but B U T T. It's a free piece of open source software and it stands for broadcast using this thing and what it does is it captures anything that comes off your laptop or out of a video stream or out of a microphone, because it's just going through your laptop and a mixer. And so we had a road road desk. We had a Mac laptop and mic and but running on the laptop and it captured everything. So if you were using StreamYard or Zoom, you could even capture that. That would all go through the RMTP server and then we then had that going out to the web mobile and eventually DAB the you know in car radio and it all works. And so this is what I love about what we're doing.

Sam Sethi: 7:12

Two, three years ago, lit didn't exist and now it does, and so now you can do so much more All the bits that you had to do in the past were, you know, sort of a clutch, and now you can start to I professionalize and productise this sort of solution, which is lovely. The last thing I'd say with lit, I think is really clever and prescient for whoever put the spec together probably Dave is that it also has the alternative enclosure inside so you can have a split audio and video stream. So, again, it's something that probably wasn't planned because you had three days, but that can be done as well, which is totally amazing. So you've got streaming, boosting video, audio live across apps, magic magic. Now that's done. Now you've got your learnings. What's the plan from RSScom? What do you want to do with this?

Alberto Betella: 8:07

Is it a one off and that's it, never to be done again, or Well, in regards to live events, I think that now we we set a recurring tradition, so we look forward to a podcast and a mix 24. And, of course, we have to live stream it. So, in terms of live events, I guess it's now a tradition. And again, I just want to be clear here we we are not the first, in general, to stay at the obvious. We have Todd has been streaming thought from. Blueberry has been streaming Is the new middle show for a long time in video as well. But we are just talking about the niche of events. In person events. This is very interesting because it changes the paradigm, but besides that so that's a tradition Live events by RSScom or where we are partners, we need to live stream them through the lead tag.

Alberto Betella: 8:56

And, regarding our platform, we have been supporting podcasting 2.0 since the very beginning. This is a factual statement, it's not just a promise. We already support the play throughout tags. We are part of the PSP and, yeah, these experience showed us how a minimum viable implementation of lead looks like. So what we launched this week is our support for lead and this week is going to be very easy.

Alberto Betella: 9:24

At the moment it's going to be. You have to reach out to us. So we're going to help you setting it up, because we don't have an end user interface yet, but we're going to build it very soon, so, yeah, so, if anything, this conference gave us the encouragement and the push to support lead as well. On top of that, we already support fully with interface for and for the end users, value for value and value splits. That's why we wanted to in some way teach what we preach and if we did it, we want to allow our users. They're not going to be many initially and that's why we wanted to do with this wide glove treatment. We are going to help them enable lead in their shows and we are looking forward to release lead at scale for all our users in our interface in a month or two, to be defined. Amazing.

Sam Sethi: 10:10

Now you're also helping a music artist, one of those being Ainsley Costello. She's going to be doing a couple of live events I've introduced you to, julie, and so what's RSScom going to be doing there?

Alberto Betella: 10:26

So, yeah, so that that's where the idea of an article stemmed from, because we, you know, we want to help anyone who wants to do the same in live events and we did it so to kill two birds with one stone, as they say. We are going to write an article, share with Julie and, of course, in an informal, in a free fashion, we're going to help them if they have any questions. So the hope is that the article itself is going to help anyone who wants to broadcast through in a podcast, through the lead tag, a live event is going to find all the resources. The article comes from my experience when I didn't have a lot of time and I was pretty naive on the choices. So I think it's an article for dummies, like in quotes, which means from the ground up you don't have, we don't have crazy acronyms that nobody understands. Like it's really.

Alberto Betella: 11:20

That's what we did. We use that product, we use this product. If you have a meetup and you have budget, you can do that product. So if you visit RSSlive, it's going to be a forwarder to the article. It's an easy URL in the description. It's a forwarder to the article. It's an easy URL, you know and we own it, so why not. We're going to use it and in the future we imagine to do something even funnier on RSSlive, which will be intertwined and tightly coupled with the lead tag.

Sam Sethi: 11:46

I can imagine it's a page with lots of conferences that you can go to.

Alberto Betella: 11:49

No, I'll just get it Exactly. One of the ideas. Yeah, it could be one of the ideas. Yes, Brilliant.

Sam Sethi: 11:55

I'm paying for it with value for value and streaming stats Excellent. Now that you've got that in place, will you be offering our customers the ability to just go and get a service from you and boom, they're live?

Alberto Betella: 12:08

So the idea just, you know, ideally, yes, it's very difficult to commit a month before when you have a packed roadmap, as you know, all of us in the industry have. It's all a trade off. What should I do next? And everything is super exciting, you know. So, so, so, yeah, so, ideally, yes, it would be a natural evolution of the lead tag. Well, we do need an interface. That's a basic. We need to, really, and we look very much for to release it to our users. But, yes, eventually we could cut or remove the middleman by just instantiating our own RTMP rails and stream key and just in a transparent way, adding them to the RSS feed so that there's nothing there that complicates the user's journey. So, yeah, it looks like a natural evolution. It would be exciting. I hope that we can release something like that in 2024. It would be very exciting.

Sam Sethi: 13:06

Excellent, albert. Thank you so much. Well done for doing PodCon MX, well done for live broadcasting and, yeah, we catch you soon, hopefully in podcast movement Evolutions in LA and, if not, certainly in London.

Alberto Betella: 13:20

Absolutely sounds like a plan.

James Cridland: 13:22

Alberto Batella, the co-founder of RSScom I was out there on their dime and very much enjoyed that Ben Richardson as well, of course, and Memo Nunez, who was a really helpful guide to us. Really interesting as well going around Grupo Formula, which I think I mentioned a little bit last week, but seeing the way that those radio stations put together their stuff as well. So, yeah, it was a super interesting time in Mexico.

Sam Sethi: 13:51

Yeah, as Alberto said, if you want to read about what they've put together, they've put a very handy document at the website rsslive and you can go and see all the tech and software they use to put it all together. Fancy Now, james. Youtube, them, them. That don't tell us much. Youtube have been doing more with RSS. Tell me more.

James Cridland: 14:15

Yes, so they've rolled out their RSS ingestion tool. So if you are a creator, you can ingest your podcast into YouTube and YouTube Music and that will do a jolly good job for you. Some of the problems are that you can't have any advertising in there because YouTube sells the advertising for its own hosted stuff and all of that. But yeah, so the RSS ingestion tool is done and seems to be working quite nicely. If you want to see what it looks like, then go to the Pod News Daily, which we use the YouTube RSS ingestion tool for. But what they've also started doing last week is they've started rolling out their support for playing podcasts via RSS feeds on the YouTube Music app. So if you are following a podcast that you love, you can listen to that on the YouTube Music app, which is all good and it's a proper RSS podcast app. You know it plays shows directly from the podcast hosting company, it pulls in the images and the artwork and all of that, and seems to do a pretty good job. So it's quite an impressive thing. And, of course, the YouTube Music app, which is their audio app, is pre-installed on every modern mobile phone from Google and from Android, so that's a good thing too.

James Cridland: 15:40

So I thought, well, wouldn't it be interesting, given that you can add RSS feeds to the app using Android already or using the web and it's coming soon to iOS, but you can play them back on iOS already? I thought, wouldn't it be interesting to write a simple one-page website which allows listeners to find RSS feeds of their favorite shows and then helps them through the process of adding it into YouTube Music. So I've ended up doing that, which is quite fun to do. It's a one-page website. You'll find it at the impossible to read out RSS number 2, ytm. That's RSS to YouTube Music, see RSS to YTMnet, and you'll find it there. And yeah, and you can play around with that to your heart's content. You can use a little bit of YouTube Music for free, so worthwhile giving that a go.

Sam Sethi: 16:32

Very nice, well done. Now, why do they have YouTube Music and YouTube Normal? I mean, why, in typically Google fashion, do they have multiple messaging services and why do they have multiple audio and video services from the same company? Why can't they smash it all together?

James Cridland: 16:50

So two things there, I think. Firstly, it makes perfect sense to have an audio. You know a music app. I think that allows you to do things which is specifically for audio, that you couldn't necessarily do with the main YouTube app. So I think I can kind of, you know, see that that works quite nicely. As for why they have added, you know, support for RSS feeds as well as ingesting podcasts, that's a bit weird. I don't think anybody was really expecting them to support RSS feeds natively within the YouTube Music app. That seems a very strange thing, and when they told me that they were going to do it at podcast movement earlier on in the year, I was kind of oh wow, that's definitely a thing. The user interface is pretty poor, but it works really well. Once you've imported a RSS feed in, it seems to work pretty well, I think.

Sam Sethi: 17:48

Oh well, I mean, I don't use YouTube Music, Should I? Should I try it?

James Cridland: 17:54

I mean, I think personally I find it better than Spotify in terms of some of the algorithms it's got, and certainly its catalog is much, much wider. It's got all of the weird and wonderful live recordings that you don't get in Spotify and the weird mixes and stuff. Some of them are probably not entirely legally put there, but nevertheless it seems to work quite nicely. So you know it's not about Music app. Should you use it to listen to podcasts? No, I believe that there are other podcast apps out there. Pocketcast is very good, podfansfm is very good too, so you should probably end up using those, I think.

Sam Sethi: 18:33

Oh well, I would say I haven't agreed with that last statement. But so what is the long what, what? Pocketcast? Yeah, absolutely. And I have a correction, actually, because we got told off last week from Pocketcast there is a free version of Pocketcast, although they do have paid versions. There is a free version, so that's.

James Cridland: 18:51

There is a free version. You're absolutely right.

Sam Sethi: 18:53

How do?

James Cridland: 18:54

I know this Because my wife uses it. That's how I know it, right.

Sam Sethi: 18:57

There we go, and I did invite them on to come and tell us that and talk about their platform, but they haven't come back to us yet. So, anyway, the offer is always open Pocketcast. Let's move on to other trends then. In the industry. You've been busy writing about a lot of trends this week. Let's cover a few of them. One of those was Spoken Word. Audio is now more popular than ever, according to data from NPR. Tell me more, James.

James Cridland: 19:21

Yes, both the audience size and listening time are the highest they've ever been for Spoken Word content. Of course, that includes radio and audio books as well as podcasts, but podcasts are a big, big part of that. It's annual data from NPR and Edison Research, and it's very useful to end up seeing that Spotify's megaphone published Podcast Trends as well, showing significant growth in podcast listening by older listeners. So, for example, in Italy, people aged 55 to 64 are listening twice as long as last year. In the US, they're listening 50% longer than last year and over 65s as well, listening by almost the same amount. So that is real growth, I think, of podcast listeners that we haven't really had before of that sort of age group. So I think that's pretty good to end up seeing. Yes, that's my age group.

Sam Sethi: 20:15

Wonderful, excellent. Finally, I've spread the word to my friends and family. Got it? Well, there you go.

James Cridland: 20:24

And that's not just the only piece of data from Spotify, that data from Megaphone Spotify only the previous week published its fan study 2023. You wonder why they published those separately, but anyway, let's not go there. They are talking about a lot of consumption data from the Spotify app, including the interesting content app. Including the interesting thing that day times, people listen to audio podcasts. Night times, people watch the video versions of those podcasts. According to their consumption data, that also says that 54% of people find new podcasts by hearing about them on a show that they already listened to, which we kind of already knew. But it's nice to end up seeing all of that too.

Sam Sethi: 21:11

Yeah, iheart Media has also been posting their financial results, james, and they seem to say that they're growing rapidly as well. Rapidly, 12% year on year. But that's a pretty decent return actually.

James Cridland: 21:23

Yeah, that's a pretty decent jump Podcast revenue up to 102.7 million. And it's good that podcast revenue is increasing because total revenue for that company their own thousands of radio stations in the US is down 3.6%, so podcasting now representing 10.7% of the company's revenue. If you compare that to Odyssey, who also released their financial results, then they again are showing their digital revenue is up 3.3% year on year. They didn't break out podcasting, but podcasting's in that number. Total revenue for Odyssey is down 9.4% and that's a company which, if you ask me, is going bankrupt fast. But you didn't ask me, so that's probably okay.

James Cridland: 22:07

Iheart Media interestingly, something came out earlier on this week which in fact we had the first look on. The UK's largest radio and outdoor media company, global, signed an exclusive platform distribution and ad sales deal with iHeart Media. So basically Global and iHeart Media are going to sell each other's shows in their country, which is, I think, very bright of them. It turns out that Global owns about 15% of iHeart Media. They got special dispensation from the FCC to buy into iHeart Media. So who knows, at some point in the future we might see iHeart Media and Global merging as companies, which should be really interesting, and Global is decidedly not Global. It's only really in the UK, although they do own DAX, which is a podcast sales house in the US, and I'm not quite sure how this affects that. But that was interesting to end up seeing as well, and a bunch of other things going on, including Magellan AI and Sounder announcing a partnership to offer brand safety and suitability At the Podcast Marketing Academy publishing its Podcast Marketing Trends Report.

James Cridland: 23:21

That's the thing that Jeremy N's has put together with tons of information about how high growth podcasts make their additional audiences. They use pitching podcast services, people like Tink Media and those sorts of people and paid advertising, apparently, and there's a company called Pod Pros. Alex Sanfilippo, who is talking about the number of podcasters who make it to eight episodes, increased a bit, which is nice, up to 48.6%. That is, more than 6,400 additional independent podcasters making it to eight episodes or more. So lots of good news, I think, coming out of the podcast industry there. Yeah.

Sam Sethi: 24:04

I think it's the overall. I think the reason why we wanted to group all of that together was because so often it's woe is the podcast industry. It's going down the hill. There are less our podcast, the advertising's dying, blah, blah, blah, and I think that becomes the story or the background story, and I think sometimes it's good just to group everything together from lots and lots of different independent sources and say look, hey, everybody, things aren't going backwards, they're actually growing and it's a very healthy position we're in for 2024.

James Cridland: 24:36

Yeah, no, absolutely. I think there's some really good news stories coming out of the podcast industry, which is nice. There's also some quite scary stories coming out of podcasting as well.

Sam Sethi: 24:48

Yeah, caveat emptor. I would say here, james oh, listen to you with your latter. Hey, public school, that's what we were? I doubt it. Sadly, that's about the only thing I learned from that scene. But that said, there was a scam going on on Facebook. Somebody's offering seemingly free money to be guests on the shows and then doing naughty stuff. What are they doing, james?

James Cridland: 25:11

Yes. So a man called Johnny Jett, who is a travel blogger I'm not sure that Johnny Jett is his real name, but anyway he was hacked. Basically, somebody promised that they would pay him $3,000 to be a guest on their podcast, and part of that they said oh, we just need you to set up a live event from your own Facebook page, just so that the sponsor gets the coverage that he's looking for. Can I help you with that? And so Johnny Jett said yes, which was a foolish thing to do, because the bloke went on to Johnny Jett's Facebook page, remotely controlling Johnny Jett's computer, basically hacked his way into it, and now he owns Johnny Jett's Facebook page and has been posting all kinds of crypto nonsense on there and everything else, and that's a very bad thing. So basically, yeah, there's a lot of this sort of Facebook page scamming going on, not just Johnny Jett, but I have now heard of two other very large podcasters who have fallen for a similar scam.

James Cridland: 26:20

In September, in this particular case, both of them were promised $2,000 to remotely speak to a conference, which reminds me I'm remotely speaking in a conference tomorrow, not earning $2,000, but still, there we are and I should probably write that. But anyway, two of these large podcasters doing much the same sort of thing. They were offered right. Okay, we need to set up a live event from your Facebook page. And again, they've clearly found a bug in the Facebook page system and they've managed to get control over these particular shows. So if somebody comes up and gives you a tonne of money in return for being a guest or doing a speaking gig or something, then if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is, so be careful there.

Sam Sethi: 27:12

And if it says it signed off, Nigerian Prince, really be careful. That's all I would say. Yes, indeed. Now onto a more serious story.

James Cridland: 27:22

I see what you did there Serious, yes, very good.

Sam Sethi: 27:27

Keep up, keep up. Now the National Association of Death and SeriousXM are in a court case, or they have been for a while negotiating a settlement for the case. What's the case about, james, and what do we?

James Cridland: 27:41

expect. Yeah, so the case is from the National Association of the Death. They're saying that SeriousXM is not producing transcripts, which they should by law for the podcasts which are carried on well, on Stitcher, as it was and they basically said that because they are not producing transcripts, they're against the American Disabilities Act law, the ADA, and they are, and that's why they've ended up taking them to court. Now there was, this case has been going now for, I think, two years. A judgement is now expected by January 31st.

James Cridland: 28:18

But what the latest data from that court case is is that apparently, the National Association of the Deaf and SiriusXM are in a room and are negotiating a settlement, which is a good thing. Now SiriusXM has just revealed its new app. It comes out in the middle of next month. We're promised improved podcast listening, which is nice. So who knows, maybe that will be part of the plan and maybe that will have a few more transcripts in there. I wonder whether or not they're using the podcasting 2.0, you know, the new podcast namespace transcript tags, which I've been pointing out for a long time or whether or not they're just going to run their own service instead. It will be interesting to find out.

Sam Sethi: 29:06

Assuming that the settlement is positive for the National Association ie they win anyway and that, assuming the app does include transcripts, what is the implication for every other app?

James Cridland: 29:19

Well, I mean, I guess the implication for every other app is you better get the transcripts in there pretty quickly, because otherwise the National Association of the Deaf is going to come after you as well, and that's particularly true of Apple that has no transcripts in there at all. Spotify is producing transcripts, but only for its own shows at the moment, although you do actually sign away the possibility of Spotify producing transcripts for your shows if you get your show onto Spotify. So perhaps that will come as well. But I think, yeah, if this court case is won or is settled quite conclusively, then I think that that does mean that everybody else has to move, and what I hope is that they respect the creators and take creators transcripts if a creator has produced a transcript. That's what I really hope, because if they don't do that, then that's going to be a little bit concerning. I don't really want people producing transcripts that I have no control over, because who knows what they might put in there.

Sam Sethi: 30:26

Well, yeah, and also I'm just trying to work out is this not the onus for the creator to have to do it and therefore to push back on, I don't know, maybe the host that they're working with or go and get the service from a third party? Why is the app responsible? What Apple, spotify or any app responsible for having to put that transcript?

James Cridland: 30:49

in. Well, there's the whole definition of what a publisher is and who makes this stuff available. If you remember, a couple of years ago TuneIn, which is a big radio app they ended up being taken to court in the UK because they weren't paying music licensing fees. Now, that's a really weird thing if you think about it, because actually the companies that should be paying the music licensing fees are the radio stations, but because of the weird way that the law can sometimes work, the platforms also get taken to court as well. So I think it makes an awful lot more sense for the National Association of the Deaf to be taking the platform to court and getting the platform to sort this out, because the platform, you would have thought, will then put a bit of pressure on to creators such as you and me to actually make transcripts and make those available in the RSS feed, hopefully, yeah, well we will watch this space.

Sam Sethi: 31:51

January 31 is the judgement day. Okay now.

James Cridland: 31:55

Yes, indeed, and if you read the Pod, the North newsletter, catty Law is also asking in there why can't I access podcast transcripts on the apps? And I would just mention to Spotify and Apple there is an open standard. It's been open for the last two years. Come and join the party and please put transcripts and captions into your apps as well. It's an easy job to just turn around and say, oh, the device can do that, and maybe the device can do that if the creator hasn't put transcripts in. But please use the transcripts that the creator has produced, if they exist. Just use the open standards. Spotify and Apple, that would be lovely, thank you.

Sam Sethi: 32:41

Now we're talking about some good trending news. There's some good deal news as well, james. What's been happening?

James Cridland: 32:47

Yes, lots of interesting deals. Airwave has signed with Motley Fool Money and is looking after that particular podcast. That's a big show. It achieves five million downloads per month, which is quite a thing, although it's one of those shows that comes out every single day. The Athletic has signed a deal with Global for podcast ad sales in the UK and Ireland, which is nice to see, and Acast has signed with Proximate by ComScore. Now, this is quite interesting.

James Cridland: 33:14

Acast, of course, does some of its targeting by using cookies on when you click through and look at apps and things like that. It does some sort of cookie type targeting somehow, some way. Anyway, the cookie is going away, of course, as we know, and so Proximate by ComScore does something else to help advertisers target. They're called privacy friendly contextual signals. Now, amusingly, I tried to go to the Proximate website to learn more about how Proximate actually works, but my ad blocker actually blocked me from going to have a look. I can't actually see it, but still. But there we are. But Acast seems to be doing a lot of work in terms of making sure that it can still target when things like cookies go away. I would like to know whether Proximate by ComScore actually works with IP addresses because Google are doing things, apple are doing things which will hide the user's IP address to people like Acast, so I'm curious to find out whether that's going on as well. But certainly worthwhile keeping an eye on.

Sam Sethi: 34:35

Now, james, let's move on Job news. What's been happening? Who's moving and grooving?

James Cridland: 34:40

Oh, lots of people. Michael Fisher, who I worked with at RAIN some time ago and also worked at Triton Digital and Aircast, has been hired as VP of Business Development at Soundstack. Soundstack do an awful lot of good stuff in terms of dynamically injected audio and that sort of thing. Ryan Hatoum, which I might have pronounced wrong he used to be ComSlead at Acast for more than three years. He was the person that I was sending grumpy emails to about their email plans. Anyway, he has. He left the company a while back. I think he was a victim of some of Acast's cuts. He has popped up as global thought leadership communications for Dolby, the folks behind Dolby Atmos and that button on your cassette deck. So we will hear more from Ryan in terms of the audio world.

Sam Sethi: 35:38

You're going to have to explain what a cassette deck is to the under 30s.

James Cridland: 35:41

Yes, just have a look on YouTube, I'm sure that you'll understand it. And Gweno Tull has also been named as the new director of sales at the podcast exchange, or TPX in Canada. She joins from Quebeco media. If you're looking for a job, pod news has podcasting jobs across the industry and across the world on podcasting's largest jobs board, and they're free to post as well. Podnewsnet slash jobs is the place to go Now.

Sam Sethi: 36:08

events and awards. There were some awards last week. It has been the awards season. The winners of the Association for International Broadcasting Awards were announced. Who won? James?

James Cridland: 36:19

Well, lots of public service broadcasters, because that's this sort of event the ITV, no ITV, the BBC, rte, rte and Project Brazen, as well as a bunch of other things. But Nikki Wolfe ended up winning the Audio Presenter of the Year award. He was the presenter of the sound mystery of Havana Syndrome, but it's quite a long running conference and awards ceremony the Association for International Broadcasting. So I think Michael Palin won the television presenter of the year award, if my memory serves me correctly, or at least did something very important in that. So, yeah, it's a good awards. To take a peek at Pod-ez or maybe it's pronounced that way, maybe it's pronounced in a different way I just called it the Festival of Portuguese Podcasts in the Pod News Daily that takes place this weekend and there is an exciting thing going on. If you're a fan of music, if you're a fan of value for value, if you're a fan of the booster grand ball, tell us about this, sam, because I know very little about it.

Sam Sethi: 37:35

OK, so we have been talking on this show for several months now about how music artists are getting a little bit tired of Spotify's lack of royalties and Apple's lack of royalties.

Sam Sethi: 37:48

They've sort of been putting their music independently into RSS feeds, and companies like LNBs and Wave Lake have been helping them do that, and more recently RSS Blue, and then that's evolved, so now we've got independent music artists I think about 10,000 in the podcast index who are earning money directly from fans using value for value, which is all very exciting.

Sam Sethi: 38:12

Long story short, we talked about earlier in the show today how RSScom did a live broadcast of their event over the live item tag and used podcasting apps 2.0 podcasting apps to actually allow users to watch or listen to them. Well, we've extended that further. Ainsley Costello, who's been one of the artists who's been leading the charge in this V4V world that we want to live in, has announced she's going to be doing two live events, and those live events are going to be broadcast as well over the podcasting 2.0 app. So you'll be able to watch Ainsley's concert December the 20th and 21st, and you'll be able to stream and pay sats or you'll be able to boost. So, yes, very exciting. It's the first live event, a big live event, falling on the back of the first conference live event.

James Cridland: 39:09

So yeah, all very exciting, very cool, and you spoke to Ainsley Costello directly and asked her more.

Ainsley Costello: 39:15

I am so excited about this, I'm so ecstatic about it.

Ainsley Costello: 39:19

Ever since it kind of started to just be theorized a couple of months ago, I've been, like, so excited about it.

Ainsley Costello: 39:25

So it's the day that we are talking is Tuesday, november 14th the week before Christmas in December, next month is.

Ainsley Costello: 39:32

So me and my band we're going to Minneapolis and we're going to be doing, to my understanding, what I think are two of the first lightning enabled value for value shows, live shows, and I'm so excited about it. We're going to first Avenue in Minneapolis, which, if you're familiar with the music or if you're not familiar with the Minneapolis music scene, that is a revered, iconic venue because Minneapolis is the late great princess stomping ground and that's a venue that he played a lot, and so it's so exciting to get to be able to kind of pioneer and kind of get to trailblaze a little bit and by combining these two worlds that I love and I'm so interested in this crypto web three world, but then also like getting to do what I am at my core of my best at, which is being a singer, songwriter, performer, musician, and getting to mesh those two worlds is so exciting. So, all in all, we're doing two shows in Minneapolis next month. I believe we're the first kind of lightning enabled, value for value shows, live shows, and I'm so, so pumped about it.

Sam Sethi: 40:30

They are. They are indeed so congratulations. Another first day in sleep, Another first now.

Sam Sethi: 40:35

Thank you. Now this is piggybacking on the tech that was demoed at by RSScom in Mexico last week, which is great. So lots and lots of good stuff happening, and it was great to see all the podcasting apps as well that now are enabled that can actually allow you to watch or listen to, you know, the event and also stream or boost that. So, again, it's all just coming together, which is really nice. End of 2023 and all of the hard work from a lot, a lot of people suddenly forming. I think you know there's going to be massive interest in your event because, again, you know, yours is, as I said, sort of that culmination of a lot of people's hard work that resulted. Now, you wanted to say a few thank yous to a few people, didn't you as well?

Ainsley Costello: 41:22

Oh my gosh, absolutely. I mean just everything thus far in this new crypto Web three world has like would not have been possible without so many people, and especially these two shows coming up in Minneapolis. So like, first and foremost, the guy at Wave Lake, sam Leans and Michael Rhee, like you guys, are the reason why I'm in this space. To begin with, mike Kailene, who's the CFO of First Avenue, who first introduced this idea to me and my team a couple of months ago. Adam Bunch and Brandon Quintim from Swan, and there's, just there's. And Sam Sethi, of course thank you for having me on and being a trailblazer, and your own right for kind of leading the charge on this and there's. And, of course, like Adam Curry, dave Jones with the whole podcasting network. It's just, it's so exciting and I'm so grateful to everybody who's kind of allowed and lifted me up to kind of be doing what I'm doing in this space.

Sam Sethi: 42:14

So yeah, I know you're very welcome, ainsley, and again, you know you've been doing a lot of the promo work for a lot of us. You know banging the drum in the. You know I hate calling it X, I really do. I still can't do that. So, no, the Twitterverse X first. It doesn't work right. Anyway, yes, we've been doing a lot of that, so that's great. Now, look, 2024 was around the corner. What can we expect from Ainsley Costello?

Ainsley Costello: 42:38

Yes, absolutely New music, lots and lots of new music. This year has been a little, you know, for lack of a better term this year's been a little scary for me because I haven't released any music this year, and part of that was because I kind of needed to catch up to my own music making. I needed to write and get ready to put out more singles and an album, maybe, but I was also finishing college, so that was part of the reason why I didn't release anything. The last song that I traditionally released on all of like the main music industry outlets like Spotify, apple Music, amazon, whatever, was cherry on top, and, of course, that was the first song I put up over in this new world.

Ainsley Costello: 43:15

But yeah, lots and lots of new music. I've just been writing, like writing up a storm since the beginning of this year and so right now we're probably like there's about 10, 11 songs that are like in the can, ready to go for next year. So right now it's kind of just okay. We're plotting, we're scheming, we're thinking of, like ways to market it. How do we do it? Do we do an album? Do we do singles? Do we do something else that we haven't thought of? So lots and lots of new music this year. I've kind of just been saying, oh, get ready for new stuff. But that was I was just in the process of writing, so there wasn't really a time stamp on it. But you can absolutely expect a lot of new music from me in 2024.

Sam Sethi: 43:54

Excellent and all of it streamed. All of it was sat hopefully as well behind it.

Sam Sethi: 43:59

Yes absolutely Now one of the things. Your mum has been also a massive champion of all of this. So well done to Julie. Oh yeah, and she's also been very instrumental in trying to. You know, form, I guess, some of the elements so we call them the music tax on in the music categories and the licences. There's still some of the challenges that we're seeing and I think they're now forming around some very clear idea. So, just in case you hadn't mentioned her in the hat tip, well done, julie as well.

Ainsley Costello: 44:30

Absolutely.

Sam Sethi: 44:31

We love you, Mama, so quickly right at the end here then Ainsley remind us what's the event, where can we get tickets, and obviously there will be links and we'll be promoting those on pod news nearer the time to watch it as well. Though, if I am in the area and I'm close by and I want to come and see you live, how do I get tickets?

Ainsley Costello: 44:52

Yeah, absolutely. So we have two events. One of them is at First Avenue, 7th Street entry, and then we have another one, which the name is escaping me right now, but it's a distilling company. But both posters are now on my Instagram page and I'm sure they're going to be on all of my other social pages, like Facebook and Twitter X I still call it Twitter, I don't care, but yeah. So we have two posters on all of my social media platforms that give you all the information. You can probably get tickets directly from me on my website or you can go to the First Avenue website that's going to have tickets. I'm actually opening up for this really like insanely cool artist called Just Loud and he, like I'm so excited about it because I get to once I get off stage, I get to go be a fangirl and just be what I am at my core, which is music fan. So, yeah, go and check out all of the details. All of the links are going to be on my Instagram page, facebook, anything that you can think of.

Sam Sethi: 45:45

Excellent Thanks. Thank you so much and good luck for those events I'll be watching.

Ainsley Costello: 45:49

Thank you so much, Sam.

James Cridland: 45:58

Ainsley Costello, and there are more events, both paid for and free, at Pod News virtual events or events in a place with people and if you're organising something, tell the world about it. It's free to be listed at podnewsnet slash events. The tech stuff On the Pod News Weekly Review.

James Cridland: 46:16

Yes, it's the stuff you'll find every Monday in the Pod News newsletter. Here's where we do all of the tech talk. Pod rolls are the thing. It's not something that you get at your local Vietnamese. It's a way of recommending podcasts and it looks as if Pod Roll, which was announced last week by Buzzsprout. It looks as if Pod Roll is coming to Triton Digital's podcast platforms it's an omnistudio as well as Triton itself. According to a rather cryptic maintenance note that we ended up finding out and I do like Buzzsprout They've written up their implementation in a blog. They call Pod Rolls linked by us, not an algorithm which I've stolen, so you'll now find that on the podcast pages as well, where a Pod Roll exists. And, yeah, it's pretty exciting to see Pod Rolls actually appearing and being able to promote new and interesting shows that our audience might quite like.

Sam Sethi: 47:19

Yeah, and I think we were only at the beginning of seeing how these are going to be used, because I think, again, we said, yes, you can put your other podcasts if you have them. But Tink Media and Aery on this and that have talked a long time about doing podcast swaps. I think people will start to promote other people's podcasts in their Pod Roll as well, not just their own ones. So I think you know, again, we need better ways for discovery. I think we talked about it earlier today. You know, one of the trends is that you can hear about a podcast on another podcast and that's how you get discovery. I think now Pod Rolls, when it starts to roll out, people go, oh, I like this artist or I like this host. What else do they do? Oh, they also recommend this one. Well, maybe I should go and have a listen to that one as well.

James Cridland: 48:04

Yes, I wonder whether I should be adding Pod Rolls to the new podcast trailers podcast and indeed, if I was to do that, I think it lists 20 trailers or 30 trailers. I think it might now list 30 trailers. If I was to do that, what would happen if I put 30 Pod Rolls in?

Sam Sethi: 48:21

Nothing, they would break no.

James Cridland: 48:24

I wonder whether that would break anything, but I should probably add that that would be a five minute job and that would be quite fun to do and thank you to Buzzsprouts Buzzcast. That's the official podcast of Buzzsprout. They are, of course, our sponsor. They have added the Pod News Weekly Review into their Pod Roll, which is really kind, and we are, of course, linking back to oh no, we're not. We should probably do that. That would be a good idea. So thank you to the folks.

Sam Sethi: 48:58

I've warned you, don't say those things out loud.

James Cridland: 49:02

Yes, they haven't signed yet for next year. The podcast person feature as well appears to be coming to Antenna Pod. They appear to be working on translations of the job titles, which is interesting, and they should hopefully be showing host names, host images and all of that kind of stuff. Antenna Pod very good open Android podcast app. It's well worth a peek as well, and you have done something to the person tag as well.

Sam Sethi: 49:33

Yeah, one of the things with the person tag is it uses the podcast taxonomy. That was designed a couple of years ago as a Rolodex of titles that you can have, and that's great, and we support that and think other apps support that as well. What we've found, though, is that it's limiting as a tag. For example, with this show, james, you might be host and editor, I might be host and producer.

Sam Sethi: 49:58

In terms of the person tag, it only takes one attribute, and that means that I can only put host and co-host down as our roles or whatever they may be. It doesn't extend. So what we've done is we've honored the RSS, the font of all truth. So the primary person tag within PodFans is still whatever you have chosen in the person tag if you use it and support it, but we've offered, in the creators dashboard, secondary and tertiary tags so that if you want to put those in, and then they appear in your podcast page and those then become clickable, so they're like keywords. So now I can say, oh, I want to find all other editors, or I want to find all other producers or other titles that somebody might have for their person tag.

James Cridland: 50:43

Can I argue against that? Of course you can. Why wouldn't I just add myself again under editor, for example? So I have one tag which says that I'm host and then one tag which says that I'm editor. That then becomes a UX thing to obviously de-jupe that. But would that be a way of doing it within the spec.

Sam Sethi: 51:09

It could be yeah, and all I'm trying to do is push, I guess, or nudge people to look at the person tag again and say, look, it's great, it had its role, but it's now limiting, and we need to look at it as a group and say what can we do to push it forward.

Sam Sethi: 51:25

And if people then say, right, no, we're going to have the person tag multiple times added, so it's just person tag editor, person tag producer Fine, and then the UX is not a problem, yeah, de-juping the avatar on the front, but it's also a good way of discovery. So, with musicians we're talking about let's use Ainsley Costello, as we often do she's a singer and songwriter, so there's two person tags there, and so we need a music taxonomy of titles, but also we need the way of being able to label her beyond just being a singer. And so that's where I think we're going to start to see the person tag either having to evolve within the standard, which I would hope would be the way forward. But in the absence of that happening, we decided that we would try and experiment and that's what it is with the idea of multiple attributes to the person tag and then making those clickable so that you could search for other people around those keywords.

James Cridland: 52:26

Very good. Well, I ended up putting in a proposal to get rid of a podcast namespace value altogether or a podcast namespace feature altogether. Remove podcast images, which is simply not being used. It's a waste of time, it's not being used by apps, it's not being used by podcasters, it's limited to square thumbnails, so it's actually not fit for purpose anyway, and it's a duplication of an existing specification which is being used by more than 9,000 podcasts. So I put that in three days ago Please remove podcast images. Hear the reasons why, and not a dickie bird, not a piece of no one has either leapt to the podcast images features defense or has agreed with me either.

Sam Sethi: 53:25

Okay, well, I'm going to do I disagree with you this time. Excellent, because pod fans does support the images tag and with Pod News Daily, for example, you have round images, you have smaller sized images and you have larger images. We have ingested all of those for you and we do use those. But I was talking to Tom Rossi a couple of weeks ago about pod roles and I was just asking him one question, which was why don't hosts not just bus brown, but all hosts do image compression of the cover art and chapter art, which they don't seem to do? And he was like oh well, we support this, that and that was fine. And then we talked about the image tag stand and he wasn't aware of it and he's going away to look at it. So I'm just wondering whether, given the response to let's remove it, and no one came back to does, anyone actually know it exists actually other than a few people.

James Cridland: 54:24

There's an awful lot of that as well. I mean, I would challenge you to find the new podcast namespaces documentation from the front of the podcast index website or indeed anywhere else. I always find it really difficult to end up linking to it. I seemingly find myself linking to my own website, podcast namespaceorg, and maybe that's the thing there, but yeah, it's a peculiar one. Anyway, you want to talk about a tag of the week, don't you?

Sam Sethi: 55:00

Yeah, I one of the. Are you sure about this? We'll find out next week. It won't be in, but we'll try it, let's give it a go Tag of the week.

Sam Sethi: 55:08

The reason why I wanted to talk about it is the alternate enclosure tag, which is, I think, a really good one. Now, you've said in the past, everyone should have a tag that they champion. Well, if I'm going to have a tag to champion, it's this one, because I've been banging the drama on this for a little while now, which is can we combine audio and video within one app using the alternative enclosure, so that you only have one feed? Now, todd Cockrum, friend of the show, and he does a very good job of doing live audio and live video and he and I have had a back and forth for a little while. It's been an amicable back and forth, but what it's basically is hey, todd, why won't you put video in the alternative enclosure for your audio and why won't you put audio in the alternative for your video? And then you can still keep two feeds and you will please the Apple Paymasters because they don't support the alternative enclosure, but you'll also please all the podcasting 2.0 apps who could then support you and provide them users with a switch to go between audio and video.

Sam Sethi: 56:20

And hey, we just heard Spotify said during the day, it's audio and during the 90s video. Hey, any app you can lean back and watch Todd and, during the day, listen, lean forward and listen to him. But this tag is really important and, given what RSScom did with the live broadcast, the alternative enclosure is also part of the live item tag. So, again, you will be able to see very quickly. You know, if you want to, you could watch Ainsley Costello or you can listen to Ainsley Costello, because it supports that tag as well. So, yeah, I just think people need to have a look at this tag, support it better in the apps and also enable it within their feeds. That's all.

James Cridland: 57:03

Yes, I would certainly agree with that.

James Cridland: 57:05

And I think there is one addition to the specification that I would make and the specification, I'm not quite sure what you would call it, but something that you can say identical or switchable or something so that if the standard enclosure is the same audio as an alternate enclosure so maybe you've got a different bit rate, maybe you've got a video version, whatever it is that you've put in there if it's identical in terms of the audio so if you were to switch between the main version and the and the alternate enclosure, it wouldn't it wouldn't, you know be the same audio then I think we should be able to signal that, so that would then allow you to replicate the video and audio switch that you've got in YouTube music or in Spotify.

James Cridland: 58:02

That would enable you to put a low bit rate switch in if you realize that you're on a bandwidth constrained connection, so you could grab a lower bit rate version of that file as well. At the moment we have no programmatic way of the service actually knowing whether or not the audio is exactly the same audio. So you could put a director's cut, you could put a longer interview version, and those are all fine and quite acceptable use of the alternate enclosure, but we need some way of showing a podcast app that this is switchable in between the default and the non default, or not.

Sam Sethi: 58:47

I guess that's quite cool If you want a longer discussion on this. Episode 32 of Future of Podcasting for Dave Jackson and Daniel J Lewis is a very good talk about how they see the alternative enclosure being used.

James Cridland: 59:03

Yes, and good luck with that If you really do want a longer discussion on that. And Rode has produced a fancy looking microphone stand, If you like that sort of thing. It's called the DS2, which I'm guessing stands for desktop stand number two. Anyway, it looks quite nice. So if you're bought into the Rode ecosystem and why wouldn't you be then take a peek at the Rode DS2, which is available now. Good Aussie engineering there for you. James, yeah, Struthmite yes, made in Sydney. Incredible company. They seem to be really turning everything out every so often. So, yeah, it's a good, smart company there. What else is?

Sam Sethi: 59:50

going on. Well, BBC Sound, which we talk about being at this closed wall often. But they've done something quite clever, which is they've enabled multi-room playback for Alexa-enabled smart speakers. I didn't think that was new, but again it might be, Because you can do Alexa play everywhere as a command and if you've got multiple Alexa's it will play in every room. But now it says the BBC Sound has enabled multi-room playback, so I didn't know you couldn't do it, but anyway, I'll give it a go later. I've got six Alexa's around my house so we'll have a play. Gosh, Amazon must love you. Well, yes, my wife doesn't, but Amazon does yes.

James Cridland: 1:00:28

Yes, well fancy. So, yes, you can absolutely do that. You say Alexa, ask BBC Sound to play Radio 2 everywhere, and it will do exactly that. Apologies if that set off your Alexa, and Spotify has redesigned its TV app and looks rather a lot more lovely. I should disclose that I have been given six months' worth of free Spotify premium, I think probably because I keep on banging on about the fact that I don't pay for Spotify anymore and they would rather like me to experience it, so I'm busy playing around with Spotify. It's been a couple of years since I've last used Spotify premium, and so it's quite interesting seeing what's changed and what has remained the same. But it's such a polished app, isn't it? It's a really good, good service. So, yeah, that was good fun to end up playing with.

Sam Sethi: 1:01:22

Now this is a weird one. The guys at PodLP have come out with a podcast. What's podcast, james?

James Cridland: 1:01:28

It is a new way of subscribing to podcasts in your calendar app or calendar app. Why would you want to do that? Heaven alone knows. Is it possible? Yes, Thomas has done it, and why would you not do that? Actually, it's quite weirdly useful in that if you take a look at the Pod News Daily, for example, then you can see exactly what time I'm publishing every single day and you can work out how inconsistent that particular podcast is In terms of published time, certainly over the last couple of weeks where I've been travelling and stuff. So, yes, you'll find that linked to from all of our podcast pages at podnewsnet. And, yeah, it's very, very, very strange but seems to you know vaguely work, I suppose.

Sam Sethi: 1:02:20

I suppose if your calendar driven, that might be a tool that you want to add. But there you go Now. Last but not least, pod page. They've now started to support podcasting 2.0. They've got a very nice blog page which says we've added support for the podcasting 2.0 namespace. They're supporting the GUID, the funding tag, the person tag, the transcript tag, the season, the episode and trailer, and they say they're going to be starting to support chapters and value elements, which I don't know what that means, other than I hope it's value for value, but value elements.

James Cridland: 1:02:57

It won't be, but yes, no, that's really cool and Brendan is a good guy, very, very bright, very, very clever, so good to see him doing that. What would be really good, sam, is if you get him, do you think you can get him speaking next week?

Sam Sethi: 1:03:15

Your wish is my command, sir. He is booked for next week, so we will find out more about what pod page is doing with their podcasting 2.0 support.

Announcer: 1:03:23

Excellent Boostergram, boostergram, corner, corner, corner On the Pod News Weekly Review.

James Cridland: 1:03:30

Yes, it's our favorite time of the week. It's Boostergram Corner. If you get value from what we do, press that boost button, just like these very excellent people have. The first one who just sent a love heart, for some weird and wonderful reason, is Oscar Merry, who ended up sending us 10,000 sats, which is an excellent thing. Thank you, oscar, for that Fountainfm very, very good app. You should all download it. Well, we love you too, oscar.

Sam Sethi: 1:04:00

Yes, so that's it we love you too Good thing. What else? Curran from the Mere Mortals sent us a boost, saying love that I can listen in, live and boost as well. Congrats to RSScom Amazing job. He sent us a road, not a road ducks, a road dicks 1111.

James Cridland: 1:04:17

Yes, Barry from Pod Home. Thanks for the nice chat, sam, he says. By the way, I do now use freelance developers to help me with support and development, so it's not just me. Great episode and a row of sevens whatever on earth that is Seems to be lots of rows, because the next one double two, double two, a row of ducks is from Curran again, and it says bit of a pickle with the balance of adopting new tags quickly or not, I feel for them on that. I'm not quite sure who them is, but yes, he has moved a couple of his shows onto Blueberry, which is a nice thing. So yeah, blueberry doing a good job in terms of the podcasting 2.0 stuff. So, kyren, thank you very much for that. We should organize a time. Since you're coming to sunny Australia, we should organize a time you need to meet Kyren as well. That would be a platter, wouldn't it.

Sam Sethi: 1:05:15

Yeah, no, I'm looking forward to that. I've got to give him a few more sats and then I get a t-shirt, which is lovely, so I'm going to pick that up from him. No, what he was referring to was Libsyn. He's been on Libsyn for a long while and they're not adopting the podcasting 2.0. He has tried to nudge them along that way. Nothing's really happening, and so he's decided to jump ship over to Blueberry.

James Cridland: 1:05:38

Yes, well, there we are. There we are. Well, listen, if you get value from what we do. This show is separate from Pod News. Sam and I share everything from it and we really appreciate your support so we can continue making this show. You can become a power supporter with your fiat currency at weeklypodnewsnet, or support us with sats by hitting the boost button in your podcast app. If you don't have one, podnewsnet slash new podcast apps will help you find a brand new app.

Sam Sethi: 1:06:07

Now, james, this is the part of the show where I sit back, go make a coffee and let you talk about the last word. So what's your last word this week?

James Cridland: 1:06:14

James. Well, I am interested in the unwritten contract between podcast creators and apps and I think that there are four parts of the unwritten contracts that we all have. Firstly, that open RSS feeds are intended for consumption in podcast apps, so you don't need to sign contracts or anything, it just appears. If you publish an open RSS feed, podcast apps will not touch or alter the audio in any way. The last thing that we want is for people to fiddle around with that. So just take it from the podcast publish as hosting company and that's a good thing.

James Cridland: 1:06:51

Podcast apps will not charge to listen to your podcast is unwritten contract clause number three. So nobody put podcast listening behind a paywall and there are very, very few podcast apps who are doing that. And finally, podcast apps will not touch or alter the accompanying metadata. So the title, the description, the image, that data should be taken directly from the RSS feed, and podcast apps really shouldn't be fiddling around with that not altering them, not truncating them and certainly not adding additional stuff as well. Read Pod News on Monday. So I think that the unwritten contracts between podcast creators and apps is a really important thing and podcast apps that follow that unwritten contract are good, but podcast apps that don't are bad. Now, what's happened for you this week, sam?

Sam Sethi: 1:07:45

Well, we've been cracking on through a number of things to do with pod fans.

Sam Sethi: 1:07:49

Actually, really, all I do I sleep, eat, breathe and live it right now, but I do love it as well, so it's not an onerous task.

Sam Sethi: 1:08:00

We are going to announce here, I guess, that the doors open for pod fans at the end of the month, so that we've got 15 days to finish off what we're doing.

Sam Sethi: 1:08:09

We've been ingesting all of the music and all the V for V podcasts so far, and then we're going to start on the next part, and I think I announced last week we're going to open source the validator that we use so that anyone can use it. So you'll be able to also upload any RSS that you want into pod fans. As long as it pass our validator, we'll automatically add it for you and you'll be able to export your RSS as well out of pod fans, so you'll be able to add any and all tags that we currently support. I think we still are top of the tree on the number of tags we support on the podcast index page. So any of those tags that you want to enhance in your RSS, and that's you going back to what you just said. We support what you do. You'll be able to enhance them and then export it out as a valid new podcasting 2.0 feed and then put it wherever else you'd like to put it Very fancy.

James Cridland: 1:09:08

Yeah, so podfansfm, if you want to dive in to that. Open to everybody by the end of the month.

Sam Sethi: 1:09:14

Yes, Good luck. Thank you, I need it Now. What's been happening for you, James?

James Cridland: 1:09:18

Well, I came back to Australia on Tuesday morning to a heat wave. So that was nice Always a nice thing and I ended up launching two different websites, one of which we've already talked about RSS2youtubemusicnet, rss2ytmnet. The other one that I launched, which is a little bit more quiet because I'm still kind of thinking about this, is I think we should agree that getting rid of email addresses from our RSS feeds was a bad idea, and I don't think realistically that it's going to be very easy for anybody to put some kind of complicated verification service in place. I think that there's an easier way to do that, which is just to use rather more protected emails for your podcast RSS feeds. So what I've built is I've built a thing called podprotectemail that's its website address, podprotectemail, and what that essentially gives you is it gives you a random looking private email address. That private email address you bung into your RSS feed instead of your real email, and what this system does is it automatically spam checks them, it automatically virus projects those emails that come through, forwards you through all of the email that's safe and in phases to come, it will automatically block those unsolicited sales emails that you don't want and it'll automatically block basically all of the rubbish that is the problem about putting a raw email address into an RSS feed.

James Cridland: 1:11:06

So, and after we've done all of that, then we'll start letting you pay, but, inspired by value for value, I'm going to let you pay however much you want to pay. That's basically how that works. So if you think it's worth $10 a year, then that's great. If you think it's worth $10 a month, then that's even better. So you're more than welcome to end up doing that. So you can get your address just by going to podprotectemail. And that entire website was produced, and indeed the code behind the email forwarding system was produced basically one evening in Mexico, when I was a bit too tired to wander out and put my life in my hands and wander out and find some food. And on the other side, the website was put together on the plane trip between Mexico and LA. So, yeah, so that's why it looks the way it does. But, yeah, take a peek at that. If that's something that you are interested in, then there's details of how to get your free. For the moment, podprotectemail address Very cool.

Sam Sethi: 1:12:14

So just remind me. I go there, I get my email address and then I put that into my feed and that's basically all I have to do.

James Cridland: 1:12:21

Yeah, you stick that into your feed, that's all you have to do. We'll guarantee that things like Spotify Claiming your Podcast, those emails will get through, absolutely fine. But in the future, what we're doing is making sure that some of the more spammy emails and particularly those emails from naughty companies who are trying to get you to move away from your current podcast host and move on to a different podcast host naughty, naughty companies such as that that those emails don't actually get through because that's a bad thing. So yeah, and I think that way you've got an email address that works for claiming, but an email address which is pretty locked down for anything else, and I think that that's probably going to be the easiest way that we can actually have that a way of hiding your proper email address, but a way of still claiming shows without anybody having to write any additional code.

Sam Sethi: 1:13:17

Hmm, because the verify tag, as much as I've been knocking and pushing and cajoling, has got nowhere.

James Cridland: 1:13:24

Yeah, that's not going to go anywhere. So I think podprotectemail might be the way forward. And, by the way, please, if you're a podcast hosting company, it's really easy to do this sort of thing for yourself and for your own customers, and actually you can control who your customers get to hear from and who your customers don't get to hear from. Please don't leave it to me. You can code this yourself as well.

James Cridland: 1:13:50

What's interesting about the back end that I'm actually using here is I'm using Amazon. I'm using Amazon S3 to get the emails in and Amazon's SES, so it's email service, and then I'm using a Lambda function to just forward that on, so it's seemingly completely scalable. It might bankrupt me, but it's completely scalable. So from that point of view, that's a pretty impressive thing, and the code is, at the moment, relatively simple. But there again, I am currently hard coding all of the customers into the code, so I need to work out how to do that in a slightly more scalable way. But yeah, it appears to be already working. It's already in place on the Pod News RSS feed and it seems to be doing its job, which is good, congratulations.

Sam Sethi: 1:14:43

And that's it for this week. You can give feedback to James and me by sending us a boostergram. If your podcast app doesn't support Boost, then grab a new app from podnewsnet forward. Slash a new podcast app.

James Cridland: 1:14:54

Our music is from Studio Dragonfly, our voiceover is Sheila Dee. We use Clean Feed for our main audio and we're hosted and sponsored by Buzzsprout Podcast hosting made easy Get updated every day. Subscribe to our newsletter at podnewsnet.

Alberto Betella: 1:15:11

Tell your friends and grow the show and support us, and support us. The Pod News Weekly Review will return next week. Keep listening. Don't eat meat or cocker in.