James Cridland: 0:00

It's Friday, the 21st of June 2024.

Speaker 2: 0:04

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

Sam Sethi: 0:13

Yes, I'm James Cridland, the editor of Pod News, and I'm Sam Sethi still the CEO of True Fans even after my rants and raves.

James Cridland: 0:20

In the chapters. Today, Libsyn has integrated YouTube Music's API and Riverside launched the new Conversation Studio Plus.

Kendall Brietman: 0:30

Hey, I'm Kendall Brightman, Community Manager at Riverside, and I'll be on later to talk about all of the new tools and features that Riverside is launching, from live streaming to editing, to mobile editing. I can't wait to tell you all about it.

Theo Gadd: 0:42

Hi, it's Theo Gad here, one of the co-founders of Podlife Events, and I'll be on a little bit later talking about what is Podlife, what are podcasting events and the new Medium Equals events that myself and Sam have been working on together.

Nathan Gathright: 0:55

Hi, I'm Nathan Gathright from Episodesfm. I'll be on later to talk about new proposals for in-person events and radio stations.

James Cridland: 1:01

They will. This podcast is sponsored by Buzzsprout. Podcast hosting made easy with easy and powerful tools, free learning materials and remarkable customer support.

Speaker 2: 1:12

From your daily newsletter, the Pod News Weekly Review.

Sam Sethi: 1:19

James, you know, there's occasionally a story that I see in Pod News Daily, and this was one that stopped me in my tracks what the Libsyn supports YouTube API. After all the grief we were giving hosts about not integrating video, along comes Libsyn, who basically have just announced they've integrated with YouTube Music and also can pull out the stats though that first-party data that we've been talking about. Tell me more.

James Cridland: 1:45

Yeah, so announced at Podcast Movement Evolutions in March, although Libsyn thinks that it was announced at the podcast show in London which it wasn't. Youtube has a API which essentially allows you to upload a RSS feed to YouTube, for YouTube to then pull and set it as a podcast and away you go. So you can use that in YouTube Studio. Anybody can do that. But what Libsyn has implemented is YouTube's API which allows all of that to happen at Libsyn's end rather than having to log into YouTube and go to YouTube Studio and press the buttons and everything else. So it makes a bunch of sense, makes it much nicer and easier to do and that automates the process essentially of telling YouTube where your RSS feed is. So that's one thing. I believe that they're the first podcast company to implement that API.

James Cridland: 2:43

I have heard other podcast companies saying that they will never implement that particular API because they think it's bad for podcasting. But Libsyn has jumped in there. But the other sort of side to it is Libsyn has been working with YouTube for some time, so Libsyn has been for a while pulling in stats from YouTube. They go into a separate page in the Libsyn dashboard, but you can very easily get stats out of YouTube. The reason why they go into a separate page is that, of course, they're measuring something different than a download, and so therefore, they really should be going somewhere differently.

James Cridland: 3:20

But they are there differently. But they are there, but also Libsyn, because they support video podcasts. What they have done for quite some time is they will automatically upload the video podcasts that you put onto Libsyn into YouTube as well, which is really cool. Now Castos also offers that particular feature. But those are the two podcast hosts who are supporting video but actually integrating with YouTube, and I thought that was a really interesting move. I was unaware that either of those podcast hosting platforms were actually doing that so many questions now.

Sam Sethi: 3:57

Okay, so many questions, yes, so many questions. Right, first off the YouTube upload. Right, right, that can't be to the alternative enclosure. So is it that when I podcast with libsyn, I have a audio podcast and I have a video podcast?

James Cridland: 4:15

yes, you, you can upload video and have a video podcast if you want, or you can upload audio and have an audio podcast if you want, if you, if you both, then you can get both, but obviously they're in two separate feeds here.

Sam Sethi: 4:28

Okay. So, libsyn, please implement the alternative enclosure. It's super simple, okay. Second question, and the big one is is this pass-through? Because one of the issues that has been with supporting video into, or RSS into, youtube has been ah yeah, but they take the feed, then they ingest it, put it on their own servers and we get nothing back. So what is this?

James Cridland: 4:51

Yes, it's exactly what you say, in that it is still uploading to YouTube. It is still taking one copy, putting that onto YouTube servers. So that's why Libsyn is pulling in stats from YouTube so that it can actually get the stats back again. So it's why Libsyn is pulling in stats from YouTube so that it can actually get the stats back again. So it's not pass-through.

James Cridland: 5:08

Youtube don't offer pass-through to anybody, whether that's for RSS audio or whether that's for video, and, to be honest, they shouldn't be offering pass-through in terms of video because, you know I mean, as you might have heard in the Buzzcast podcast recently, buzzsprout are very good at pointing out that video is difficult and complicated to do.

James Cridland: 5:31

Well, you don't just want to put the 4K version in an RSS feed and serve that to everybody. That would be mad, be mad. And so being able to do as YouTube does, produce lots and lots and lots of different versions of the video file is really important to YouTube, and currently there's no video podcasting out there, which actually has. That be lovely if there was a bit more alternative enclosures both for audio and for video, but nobody is actually doing that side of the of the bargain yet, and that involves, you know, taking a piece of audio and then re encoding it in all types of different sizes, which for some reason podcasting seems to be very against, even if it's your podcast host doing. Interestingly, buzzsprout does do that, but most other podcast hosts don't.

Sam Sethi: 6:27

So, yeah, so it's not pass-through and YouTube will never offer pass-through so far as I can see the third part of this question is the stats they're getting back is fundamentally first party data, which we've said is the listen time, potentially percent completed. This is the stuff that we want to be moving towards as metrics, as opposed to downloads, and this, I guess, api, a loopback, in effect, where they can pull the data back out. Is this what it is? It's first party data that they can use with their podcasting clients.

James Cridland: 7:08

Is it that first party data that we've been talking about? Yeah, so far as I understand, it is essentially the YouTube Statistics API, the YouTube Analytics API, which Libsyn, quite some time ago, ended up doing those data. You know that data work, for I mean, there's a story back in January 2023 of them talking about real-time data within, you know, libsyn and YouTube. So Libsyn actually getting real-time data into what's now called Libsyn Ads, which used to log into their YouTube dashboard, give them permission to access their stats and away you go. I don't think it's anything more than that, but it's interesting that no other podcast host has done that, probably because you do have to keep them separate, you know, because they aren't the same as a download stats.

Sam Sethi: 8:27

Apple could do this, spotify could do this, amazon Music could do this and they could provide that first party data back to hosts.

James Cridland: 8:36

Yes, and one of the conversations that I've had with the Apple folk, in fact, when they were announcing that fancy LinkFire integration, I said is this the first client of a new Apple Podcasts Analytics API? And they looked at me as if I had insulted their grandmothers or something and they said no, no, no, no, it's got nothing to do with that. And actually seeing what the data that you actually come out of it yes, it is nothing to do with that. I would love Apple to actually have analytics APIs. I believe that Spotify can have an analytics API, but obviously if you're doing pass-through, it doesn't matter anyway. So you know, but I believe that Spotify does have that sort of thing only available to specific partners of theirs, but YouTube's analytics API is open for anyone.

James Cridland: 9:33

April weird, which is achieving IAB version 2.1 podcast measurement certification. Very strange when you see Libsyn blogging about something that they've done two and a half months ago as if it's news. But quite a lot of people have covered it, so I guess that's one way of doing it. So they've clearly been. You can actually see that of all of the tech shows on Blueberry, you are currently in the top 20% or whatever that might be. I think that's quite a nice thing. It's quite a neat plan that Todd and Blueberry have done there, so that's nice.

James Cridland: 10:42

And also we've seen Buzzsprout doing some quite interesting things launching a brand new podcast which is called Buzzsprout Weekly. It's not the Buzzsprout Weekly review, thank heavens. It's just called Buzzsprout Weekly. Stay off our patch, you lot. It's a five minute show. Again, no pretensions of this juggernaut, but the show is there to cover new Buzzsprout tools and it's an accompaniment to the company's weekly newsletter. Anybody would think that nobody was reading their weekly newsletter, and so they're putting it out as a podcast as well. But why not? It's called Buzzsprout Weekly and you'll find it wherever you get your podcasts, apart from Spotify, where it's not, it's also in our pod role.

James Cridland: 11:26

I've added it. There you go. Excellent, what a clever man, riverside.

Sam Sethi: 11:31

We talked about a couple of weeks ago Descript Season 6, their new version that they launched, and it seems that Riverside James have got a new version called Conversation Studio. Now have you heard anything from Riverside?

James Cridland: 11:46

about it. I haven't heard anything from Riverside about it. I'm not quite sure where those emails are going, but I gather that you have.

Sam Sethi: 11:54

Well, I did Kendall Brightman's on a WhatsApp group with us and they were talking about this new version and they've put some videos up on YouTube and I thought, oh, I wonder what's in this new version. So I reached out to Kendall and said look, tell me more about what's this new conversation studio, what's the features and what should we look out for?

Kendall Brietman: 12:15

So, yeah, we launched our conversation studio. So that includes two different pillars that's live streaming capabilities and that's editing, and actually I'm going to add a third because we're going to be adding mobile editing as well. So, whether that's live streaming capabilities and that's editing and actually I'm going to add a third because we're going to be adding mobile editing as well so, whether that's live streaming, we're going to be adding a bunch of new features, including streaming in full HD, branding your studio, having Omnichat so you can chat with everybody all at one time across platforms. And then, as far as editing, we're going to be having multi-track editing, being able to create your own layouts, use AI to create the layouts for you, all still customizable. So that's just kind of a few of those features. We have royalty free music overlays, so we really dropped a bunch of new features that are going to make Riverside much more of an end toto-end recording editing solution for our users.

Sam Sethi: 13:07

Cool, let's start off with then. So in the area of editing, you've added multi-track. Tell me more.

Kendall Brietman: 13:12

Riverside has always had the ability and it's one of our best strong suits is having those separate high quality tracks. But up until now, when you went into the editor, you were able to edit it as one track. What we're doing is we're making it possible for within the Riverside editor, to go into each individual track and isolate different parts of the audio. For example, that could be crosstalk, so you can go in and mute somebody individually. You can also we're going to be introducing magic mute AI so you know when you're talking sometimes and then the other person is not speaking, but maybe they have a fan whirring in the background, maybe they typed a little bit. What it'll be able to do is isolate the moments that they're not speaking and mute them so you're able to get the crispest sound.

Kendall Brietman: 13:55

As far as multi-track editing also, you're able to volume control, but with multi-track editing with video, that means that you're able to control layouts, so I'm able to show myself full screen. Bring you on. I'm able to change the background and really customize and make the most engaging videos, because what we find is a lot of the time when you're doing a long form podcast especially if it's a video podcast having that side by side view the entire time. You want to create something more engaging, and so yeah two talking heads is never exciting.

Kendall Brietman: 14:29

Exactly, and so what we're doing is we're trying to give our users the tools to be able to create those more engaging videos, because then they're able to bring in more people, bring in a high audience and keep them there.

Sam Sethi: 14:41

You've also added live streaming, so what have you done there?

Kendall Brietman: 14:46

Yeah, so live streaming. We've had the capability to do live streaming and I find that for some podcasters, video creators, live streaming feels like this kind of next step for them. Maybe, if they're not doing it yet, that's something that they want to do in the future but maybe might be a little bit afraid of, because you know, when you're live it's live right, so there's not really any way to edit anything out. But what we're trying to do is open that up for more people and give more of them the opportunity. So what we first of all did is we made live streaming a lot easier. So just a few clicks and you're able to multi-stream across different platforms.

Kendall Brietman: 15:19

We're also speaking of different platforms, adding Omnichat so you're able to see all of your chats in one place, and a little favorite of mine is that you can actually click on one of them, on any of the chats, and bring it up on screen so you can really again create that kind of engaging live stream. But the big ones are that we're able to live stream in full HD and that you can fully brand your studio to really give your audience anyone tuning in this really custom kind of experience when they come to see your live stream Everyone's talking about it AI, apple intelligence, ai, whatever you want to call it I call it assisted intelligence and that, to me, puts AI into its perfect box.

Sam Sethi: 16:03

It's a tool to help me. It's not a tool to replace me yet one day, but in that sense, you've added some new AI tools to Riverside. What have you done?

Kendall Brietman: 16:14

Yeah. So I would say that I fully agree with you on that. That AI. I think that what I really love about the AI features that we're implementing is that they're all there to guide you, but they also are, for the most part, all customizable. So, for example, you're now able to, as I mentioned, put out those layouts and create your own custom layouts. But we also offer a tool Smart Scenes that you're going to be able to set the parameters of what you'd like, and AI will choose those layouts for you.

Kendall Brietman: 16:42

So maybe at one point it'll show a grid, maybe at one point it'll show full screen, but the key here is that you're going to be able to go in and change those. So if I don't like something, I can go in and tweak it. So, as you're talking about assisting, not replacing, we also are coming out with a really cool tool called Video Dub. You have transcript editing within Riverside, so what you're going to be able to do is correct your transcript and we're going to be able to have your lips and audio sync to that correction.

Kendall Brietman: 17:11

So, let's say that you gave a statistic and you want to update your episode. You can go in and change that number and you'll be able to see that reflected on my lips and my voice. But a really important thing that I want to mention here is that you're able to do it for the host and that no one else can go in and use your voice and your audio and your video. So, for the protection, you're not able to do it for your guests. So it's really we're trying to make it so that you're not putting words quite literally in anyone else's mouth, so you're able to just really have that full control as a host, but no one else can access that, and so you're able to take full advantage of it while still feeling that protection.

Sam Sethi: 17:47

Is all of this now available? So if I want to do, you know, use any of these tools, is it all available or do I have to wait for some of it to still come out?

Kendall Brietman: 17:54

So we're going to have to wait for some of it, but we already have some of our live streaming capabilities already out. But you're going to see a lot of the tools I mentioned, like the multi-track editing, video, dub, our royalty-free music library, mobile editing, I mean the list goes on. So you will be able to see all that coming out pretty soon. We're going to be announcing it on our social media and an email. So just keep an eye out for everything that's coming, because there is a lot and it is all super exciting for end-to-end creation, for podcasters.

Sam Sethi: 18:25

If I wanted to go online to read more about it, where would I go?

Kendall Brietman: 18:28

You can go right on to riversidefm there's also riversidefm slash june-in june-in and you can watch the live event where we go through all of the features. And then, if you just want to keep a lookout for all the features that we're rolling out, follow us on Instagram, twitter, linkedin, anywhere where you like to get your podcasts and news, because we're going to be announcing it all there as well.

Sam Sethi: 18:50

Amazing Kendall. Thank you so much, Thank you.

Speaker 2: 18:52

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Sam Sethi: 18:59

Let's look at some numbers, james, because I think you know we've been Debbie Downers or I have on some of the things to do with the industry, but actually there's a lot of good news about the growth. So tell me more.

James Cridland: 19:10

There is a lot of good news about the growth. For example, the Triton Digital Australian podcast ranker has been released for May and actually the top 200 shows in May in Australia saw downloads increase by nearly 4%, listeners increased by 1.6%. So I think there is some good news coming out of those rankers and worthwhile keeping an eye on those yeah.

Sam Sethi: 19:33

And again, there's more info about the industry itself just growing, which I love. I mean, we talked about Edison reports recently talking about that. And again, in terms of advertisers, we're all younger, we're more female and, you know, everything seems to be positive on the side of the number of people coming into the industry, which could only be good news, I guess.

James Cridland: 19:58

Yes, and I think also a bunch of changes as well going on. Libsyn, for example, reporting another new low for Apple Podcasts in May. Another new high for Spotify. The iOS-Android ratio is also at a new low, so there are fewer downloads from iOS in comparison to Android. So there are changes going on. Right now. I hope that Cupertino aren't falling asleep at the wheel. I hope that Cupertino are looking at the numbers coming out, particularly in places other than the United States, and thinking, gosh, we need to do something. In terms of Apple podcasts, I mean, obviously the easiest thing for them to do would be to launch an Android app, but I mean, they're not stupid, but I doubt that that'll happen anytime soon, rather sadly. But yeah, lots of changes in the numbers and always worth, I think, keeping an eye on what those numbers are telling us.

Sam Sethi: 20:57

Moving on then. True crime, now Friend of the show. Evo Terra has done a lot of work in listing stuff, but there's a new app that's come on the block. James called Pods for Us that's done some very good work around true crime. Tell me more.

James Cridland: 21:12

Yes, and I'm not quite sure how they've done this, but basically you can go in.

Sam Sethi: 21:16

Sorry, you don't know because that's my question to you how the hell they did this Well.

James Cridland: 21:21

So basically, what you can do in their app or on their website is you can go in and you say I want to hear a podcast about somebody in Boston being killed with a spade, and it's got enough features and enough filters in there to allow you to actually do that. Because I imagine what they've done is they've put every single true crime show through AI to work out where the murder happened, what the weapon of choice was, who was killed, because you can find do you want only women getting killed? Do you want only men getting killed? Nothing's going to go wrong there. So a bunch of information in there.

James Cridland: 22:10

I think it's really interesting and you could imagine that for business podcasts, for example, you could actually do an awful lot of filtering work on those shows and come out with OK, I'm only interested in shows that have three employees or fewer, you know, and stories about them failing, and I would like to find a bunch of those, but only businesses in France, please and it could potentially come back and do that. So it's almost like the location tag, but on steroids, because it's actually pulling a ton of additional information about that. Maybe they're using AI, I don't know, but yeah, it just looked a very interesting way in for that particular app.

Sam Sethi: 23:02

Yeah, I mean if it is AI, thankfully that's fine. If it's some poor soul who's had to listen to every one of those podcasts and then actually tag it, that would go around the world.

James Cridland: 23:14

A couple of things coming out of the UK. Firstly, the Daily Mail is said to have more than 20 video shows in development. They didn't call them video podcasts, just video shows. Now I was looking for the person who would keep on trying to get onto this show Jamie East. I was looking for his name in the announcement. It seems that the Daily Mail have a different set of people doing their video shows, so that's going to be an interesting conversation Stuff going on in other parts of the world.

James Cridland: 23:58

In Austria, the government is making 500,000 euro, which is about 540,000,000 of public funding available for podcasts. For the first time, they give a media subsidy for private broadcasters, which is more than $27 million, and they've earmarked a little bit of that for podcasting, which is interesting Government money for podcasts. Who'd have thought? And stuff going on in Asia at the moment Triton Digital a guy called Simon Lee, who I haven't met yet. He works with Triton in Asia and he shared data both on the podcast landscape in Singapore and in Malaysia on LinkedIn quite recently. So I've asked him please come and talk at Podcast Day Asia, which is powered by Pod News in Kuala Lumpur on September the 3rd, and he has said yes, so he will be one of the first speakers in the day. You can use code PODN10 to save money if you want to get that podcastdayasiacom. But that should be really interesting, I think.

Sam Sethi: 25:07

Yeah, again a part of the world that we don't know. Well, I don't know much about.

James Cridland: 25:13

Yeah, so I'm very much looking forward to being there, and it's a whole day of podcasting stuff. I'm hearing a bunch of people from the US who are coming over as well, and so, yeah, it'll be an interesting day.

Speaker 2: 25:26

The Tech Stuff on the Pod News Weekly Review.

James Cridland: 25:30

Yes, it's the stuff you'll find every Monday in the Pod News newsletter. And here's where Sam talks technology. What have we got, Sam?

Sam Sethi: 25:44

One of the trends that we are beginning to see in podcasting is podcasters are beginning to supplement their income slash revenue with live events. We've seen this with the Rest Is Politics and we've seen it with many other shows. I came across one new company in the UK called Podlife Events. They were talking about organising events for podcasters and it sort of pricked my attention and I thought, oh, let me find out more from them. So I met them at one of the swanky clubs in London, soho House. I reached out to Theo Gad and said tell me more about what is Podlife and why you got into the whole events business.

Theo Gadd: 26:20

Podlife's an events company built exclusively for live podcasts, so we operate under two models. The first is a podcast exclusive ticketing platform, so this acts as a hub for fans to explore podcast events, whilst helping podcasters to drive sales, increase exposure and really streamline the event process. If you imagine Ticketmaster, but tailored exclusively for podcasting. So there's everything you'd expect in that analytics, check-in, payments, all at a much better value. And then the benefits you get from being specifically designed for podcasting means we can provide key integrations with RSS, which I'm sure we'll talk about today, Sam and the podcast card, which really just helps tie the events back to podcasters and increase their exposure that way. And then the other package is an end-to-end events agency, so through this we have a network of partner venues, connections and kind of other event partners, so we can handle everything where the podcaster just turns up, performs the event and gets to leave with the audio files to turn into an episode.

Sam Sethi: 27:21

Now, what's your background? Are you events specialist?

Theo Gadd: 27:24

No, we're not actually events specialists. I'll talk about how we got into the events world. At uni we started a peer-to-peer gambling startup. So that was imagine you and I went to play tennis, we could both put a bet on against who might win in like a Skybet mobile experience, as you can imagine. With that, with like gambling laws and stuff, that got a bit much, a bit crazy. So we parked that one and then we just saw more and more podcast events happening and there was no real way to find the events unless you listen to the podcast. So that was the first thing we wanted to change. And then two, we just started speaking to podcasters about the idea and they all were saying a company dedicated to events would actually really help with the setup, with kind of planning it all and really making the most of events.

Theo Gadd: 28:10

We both thought really that events do help to solve a number of the key issues in the industry. Obviously, it's so difficult to monetize. Events provide a great alternate revenue route from ticket sales, sponsors, the opportunity to sell merch and all that sort of thing at the event, and then, obviously, as podcasting is a one-way medium, you know fans take hours out of their day to listen to podcasters, but it's a real one-way medium. It's a strange that kind of disconnect. So events are a great way to build community, get everyone together and overcome that. And then finally, you've got all the like really engaging content that you get from events, like the clips from the socials. All the like really engaging content that you get from events, like the clips of the socials, all the photos you get from it really does help grow the podcast and kind of increase that exposure.

Theo Gadd: 28:53

Yeah, it does, and I think people are looking at all sorts of different ways, as you said I think fusing them all together as well works quite nicely, that kind of doing a bit of everything now, you and I met probably two months ago now, I think. Yeah, about that.

Sam Sethi: 29:07

The reason we met, I think it was to talk about who you were. And I said, oh, really exciting timing. I think we've seen Wavelake, the music site, starting to try and get into events and ticketing, but they're using another form of technology. But they're using another form of technology and I said, look, I'm really interested in coming with my CEO of True Fans hat on to talk to you about what we might be able to do.

Sam Sethi: 29:34

Because, in terms of podcasting 2.0, this new technology had just been brought out, called publisher feeds, and the idea of a publisher feed was an aggregated feed of all of the podcasts from one publisher so wondery or global and that could be embedded within the podcast as rss feed. So it's a great form of discovery. I could go to one podcast, say I really like this podcast, oh, I wonder if the producer of this does any others, click on it, and then you can then see what other podcasts they produce. And then we said, oh, I wonder if we can get events into this in a similar way. And that's where the conversation started. When you first heard that, what were your initial thoughts?

Theo Gadd: 30:16

I mean, I just think kind of embedding events in places where listeners live and spend their time, such as listening apps, makes a lot of sense and really does enrich that experience where, as you're listening, you can get a notification oh there's a new event happening and explore that. And I think vice versa, all of our events pages we have the podcast card and that allows people coming across the event, who might not necessarily know the podcast already, to go and like read a bit about the podcast links to where they can actually listen to it, their socials and all that thing. So I think that kind of cyclical discovery between us as an events platform and you guys is just a good thing for everyone really yeah.

Sam Sethi: 30:55

so what we've done? We've worked together on creating an event feed and we've worked together on proposing a new tag called podcast events, and the idea is that in the rss feed of the podcaster you just put podcast events and then you have a link to the event feed that is run by, say, podlife events other event companies could do that as well and then in that event feed you have the overall name in the channel of the tour or the event, and then you might have individual item levels for each individual podcast venue, the date, the tickets, where you can buy them and the people involved. What are your thoughts on that as well?

Theo Gadd: 31:41

now, we put it out quite early and rough, as this is what we're planning and we wanted to get some feedback. Didn't we Sam out quite early and rough, as this is what we're planning and we wanted to get some feedback, didn't we sam? So nathan's come back and actually really built on our initial proposal and improved things quite a lot, tying things together a bit more neatly and getting other existing tags involved, like the person tag and the location tag at a per event level.

Sam Sethi: 31:59

Yeah, but yeah, it's been really helpful getting feedback from everyone, so I think what we're looking for now is community feedback on that, but again, we have, in true fan style, already built it. There's a event that pod life events is running, called oh for food's sake, and you can find that podcast and then go to the events tab and you'll see it, and if you click on the buy button, it then goes back to pod life events for the ticketing purchase. So, apart from oh for food, so you're doing another big event as well, aren't you?

Theo Gadd: 32:30

Yes, we are. So we've got a number of things in the works. I suppose the biggest thing we announced last week was Cheerful Earful, which is a comedy podcast festival. So they went on launch about a week ago now and I suppose to explain a bit more about them, who they are, what they're up to. So Cheerful Earful is a launch, yeah, about a week ago now, and I suppose to explain a bit more about them, who they are, what they're up to.

Theo Gadd: 32:54

So, cheerfully, if always, a comedy podcast festival is going into its I think, third year this year. Um, this year they've got a lineup of it's more than 30 events across various venues all over a nine-day period, um, with kind of lineups involving some of the uk's biggest names in comedy podcasting. And what the team over there and Giles do really well is support a number of upcoming kind of smaller shows. I think he was telling me a success story of one where last year I can't remember the name of the show but they were doing kind of a hundred person event and this year they're up into the hundreds.

Theo Gadd: 33:21

And what we've done for Giles is he really wanted to take this year's festival to that next level. So we created an immersive branded experience across the entire user journey, so from the event pages all the way through checkout and confirmation emails, alongside a number of custom features specifically for the festival, like day passes. We're selling their merchandise, some live stream tickets, and one exciting feature actually is the ability to manage multiple podcasts. So at the festival level, manage all the events across different podcasts and allow the podcasters to get a login to view their sales. So that's quite a nice kind of collaborative feature coming through on that publisher page in TrueFan. So it'd be really nice for exploration and discovery.

Sam Sethi: 34:05

For anyone who wants to get involved with Podlife events. Would they go?

Theo Gadd: 34:09

yes, so I think the best way is probably just the website, so it's podlifeeventscom, or just google us um. Alternatively, like, if you're kind of interested in events, just want to have a chat, myself and my co-founder, toby, are always open to like having these conversations, so just email us tobyortheo at podlifeeventscom. You'll be able to find us through various 2.0 listening apps, truefans and vice versa. Theo, thank you so much. No worries at all, sam. Thank you for having me on.

James Cridland: 34:37

Theo Gad from Podlife. Sam, you're talking about event feeds in there, which sounds interesting, so a way of getting those events into podcast apps.

Sam Sethi: 34:50

Tell me more about them, yeah this is building on the idea of publisher feeds that we started with. The way of being able to list events for podcasts isn't easy, so normally a podcaster has to just create their own website, their own ticketing, and then say, oh, look in their podcast, if you want to buy tickets to our event, please go over there. But actually for Podcasting 2.0 apps, it would be lovely to be able to feature those tickets in the podcast page within the app itself. So I'm not the smartest and I can come up with crazy ideas, but I thought I'd go and find a really smart man who could do this for me. So I picked up the smartest and I can come up with crazy ideas, but I thought I'd go and find a really smart man who could do this for me. So I picked up the phone to Nathan Gathright and I said Nathan, let's talk about event feeds and how we might implement them.

Nathan Gathright: 35:37

Yeah, I think we're pretty close to landing on a fully fleshed out idea to help podcast apps display upcoming tour dates that either V4V artists or podcasters might have if they're doing a live recording or just a concert or any other sort of in-person event that listeners might want to buy tickets for, and the podcast apps could help promote that to their listeners. Maybe it's a podcast is going on tour and they'll have different guests at every single stop on the tour. Obviously it's different venues if they're in different cities, different start times. All of that metadata shouldn't live in like the channel level of the events feed. It should live at the item level of the events feed. So I took all the ideas you were throwing out there and wrote up an example spec feed of events so that we could just sort of nail all these ideas.

Sam Sethi: 36:26

And it's going to be there on GitHub. The nice thing about it is that we're using the existing podcasting 2.0 tags the location tag, the person tag and we're mixing those together to create this new events feed. What also works really well is that there is a new link tag in there which allows the event organizer to say this is where I want maybe for you to buy tickets or have the website of the event if you just want to have more information.

Nathan Gathright: 36:55

Just like the link tag in any item in any RSS feed, it's taking you out to a webpage. In this case it's a webpage where somebody could buy a ticket. I think it's perfectly feasible for podcast apps to append maybe their own referral parameter and maybe some affiliate fees can flow back to the apps that way. We initially were sort of talking about what does splits look like in this use case, and it seems like it was maybe too daunting of a task to figure out how splits would work when you're dealing with, you know, ticketing, capacities and refunds and all sorts of other things to do with live in-person events, I think it's a case of, yeah, let's not ball the ocean.

Sam Sethi: 37:36

It's fairly fundamentally easy to do in terms we just add a value block right to each event.

Sam Sethi: 37:38

Let's not ball the ocean.

Sam Sethi: 37:39

It's fairly fundamentally easy to do in terms we just add a value block right to each event, but let's not try and add that before we've done everything else.

Sam Sethi: 37:47

The other part of this that I like is there is a possibility of using pod ping as well, because it's a fully formed RSS feed. You might have a podcaster with their RSS with a podcast events tag pointing to this new events feed, but in the events feed, as I said, there's a link out to go and buy tickets. What might be nice is that when tickets are being bought from the third party ticket organizer, that there's a pod ping, an update to the rss feed that says 77 tickets, 75 tickets, 12 tickets sold out, whatever. Because again, the podcast app has to show or could show, doesn't have to show how many tickets are available. So 100 is the capacity and as that ticketing is going down, as in, more tickets are available, so 100 is the capacity and as that ticketing is going down, as in more tickets are sold, it would be nice. And pod ping could be the way, because it's a standalone, fully formed RSS feed.

Nathan Gathright: 38:49

Yeah, we'll have to come up with some new tags to hold that metadata. Like you know, remaining tickets available, those sorts of metadata that changes live after the tickets go on sale. But I think it makes a lot of sense for the events feed to be managed by whatever entity is handling the inventory of tickets.

Sam Sethi: 39:09

Now, that's the events thing. The other crazy thing that you and I were talking about and I've been talking to Russell at Pod2 and Kevin over at AfriPod is about creating a radio feed. Tell me more about what we were talking about.

Nathan Gathright: 39:28

Yeah, I think we were hashing out what you know if radio equals medium needed to be a thing and boiling it down to its core parts and realizing maybe we actually have all the tags we already need. The publisher feed gives us a cross-show view of all the shows that a radio station might be broadcasting live. So if every show on a publisher has live items that are pending, you could aggregate those together and make a schedule to see what is the programming for this publisher and present that in a user experience that allows somebody to enjoy it the same way they enjoy a radio station, except with the benefit of the value. Block is switching between shows and things like that.

Sam Sethi: 40:14

So step one is you would create the radio station. Step two, you would add the shows to that radio feed. For want of a better word, just for clarity.

Nathan Gathright: 40:25

It's really, you know, it's just a publisher feed which hopefully they'll already be interested in making so that they can have a publisher page in the various podcast apps. But they don't need to add anything special to that publisher feed in order for apps to be able to build features like this.

Sam Sethi: 40:41

And then step three would be to show or highlight all the pending live shows coming up. The nice thing you know just to end this up, nathan was actually we didn't really create much that was new. We just reused tags that were already out there.

Nathan Gathright: 40:58

Yeah, I think the sort of beauty of building a namespace full of little modular components is that you can figure out new and interesting ways to stack them together like Lego blocks and build something interesting.

Sam Sethi: 41:09

Yes, we'll be talking more about these in the coming weeks, but thank you, nathan, for all of your input and you will be able to go into TrueFans and click on radio and click on events and be able to see these working. And what we really hope is that people go and look in the GitHub and actually see what Nathan's done and what crazy ideas I've commented around it and then between us, we would love everyone else's feedback and then if other apps, if they will want to implement this, that that would be amazing, nathan, thank you so much for everything you've done. Quickly, episodesfm give us a quick update. How's that going?

Nathan Gathright: 41:47

Yeah, Episodesfm is going great. It's growing every day. I think we were over something like 5,000 monthly active users when I last checked, but we are working towards opening it up so that a podcast whether they're on the Apple directory or not can have a page on Episodesfm and, more importantly, the people can claim their show, claim a vanity URL, set up a custom domain, things like that. All of that's underway and there'll be more to tell soon.

Sam Sethi: 42:15

Nathan Gathwright, CEO of Episodesfm. Thanks so much for your input. Speak soon.

James Cridland: 42:20

Thank you, and you can see more information about the events feed with Nathan Gathwright in the Podcasting 2.0 GitHub, and longer versions of some of those interviews are also available in the Pod News Extra podcast, which you can find wherever you found this one.

Sam Sethi: 42:41

Eddie, which is from Headliner, which is their transcription tool, now generates transcripts and chapter files for podcasting 2.0 tags, so that's quite cool.

James Cridland: 42:50

Yes, it's very cool, Nice that they are doing that. Podlp celebrated its fourth birthday this month, which is an app for the rest of phones, not the smartphones, but all of the other ones KaiOS, GeoPhone and now a thing called CloudPhone. Cloudphone is quite interesting actually. It seems to be a very simple, straightforward operating system but that essentially uses a bunch of servers in the cloud hence the name. So you can actually take away quite a lot of the hard work that your phone is doing and instead get the cloud to do that instead. So PodLP is now on CloudFone. The only podcast analytics service to properly measure the downloads from that is OP3, because I noticed that they have just rolled out some nice new code to spot the cloud phone downloads, which look a little bit different to standard downloads. But that's all very cool, so worthwhile keeping an eye on that.

James Cridland: 43:57

Other things going on with AI include the first AI-powered podcast marketing tool, CapShow, launching CapShow NextGen in Open Beta, which is a new version of that. Also, again, congratulations to Blueberry, because Blueberry have just announced AI-generated podcast episode art. Ai-generated podcast episode art. It's available to everybody. As long as you're hosting with Blueberry, you can automatically generate images, including show titles and host names, so very clever from that point of view.

James Cridland: 44:28

And Audion, which is a French company, has launched voice cloning for advertising. It can apparently faithfully reproduce a person's voice, creating synthetic audio recordings that imitate the specific tone, rhythm and nuances of that voice. One of the things, though, that it does say is that they will be working with voice actors and ensuring that voice actors generate additional income somehow using this feature. I can't work out whether they're basically saying well, you're free to generate additional income, aren't you? By not being in the studio, you can go and get other jobs. I don't know whether it's quite as simple as that, or whether or not they are actually sitting down with voice actors and saying no, we will pay X amount every time we use a clone of your voice, but some really interesting stuff going on there.

Sam Sethi: 45:19

People need to have a license around their voice soon, I think.

Speaker 2: 45:22

Boostergrams, boostergrams, boostergrams and fan mail. Fan mail On the Pod News Weekly Review.

James Cridland: 45:29

Yes, it's Boostergram corner. And yes, because no fan mail. Actually, we did get one fan mail. We got a number, a generic number. Somebody sent us a number. I don't quite know why, but there we are. Thank you for that person who sent us a number. Speed dating on fan mail. Yes, speed dating on fan mail. That's clearly it A number of boosts, though who did we get boosts from?

Sam Sethi: 45:53

Oh, andrew Gromit, who was on Podcasting 2.0 recently and we had dinner with him in LA. Very lovely man. He sent us another one of 222, a row of ducks Really enjoying this segment on podcasting in Africa. Thanks, andrew.

James Cridland: 46:06

Yes, thank you Dwev, 2,500 sats using Castomatic. I was talking about skipping ads and suggesting that there is a difference between a pre-roll and a mid-roll. And yes, he says great insight, james. The behavioural economics of skipping, depending on whether the phone is easily accessible or not, is really important. If the irritation exceeds the effort, then people will skip. If there are four ads in a row, that's probably enough irritation Correct. Just one ad, then they can't be bothered skipping as it will be over soon. Yes, completely agree. And the late bloomer actor also says sending us 100 sats. I skip most ads and I do it via the forward button in the car or on my watch when out walking. And yes, I'm finding myself skipping, not necessarily ads, but I'm finding myself skipping a lot more using my watch while out walking as well. So I would agree with him.

Sam Sethi: 47:05

Damn. I had visions then of you skipping while walking. Oh, la, la, la, la la. That would have been funnier, but anyway yes, that's quite cool.

James Cridland: 47:16

We will see, Anyway. So in total, we had 4,822 sats in our boosts this week. Total streams though 22,109, which is a total amount of fiat money of $17.51, in case you're interested, Thank you to our power supporters as well, who are supporting us with actual money. That's £25 in this week. So thank you to Dave Jackson, Mike Hamilton, Matt Medeiros, Marshall Brown and Cameron Mull for your kind support. So what's happened for you this week, Sam?

Sam Sethi: 47:51

Well, one of the big things and I didn't want to really talk about it in the show until we got further but we implemented the olby hub, so you know the micropayments apocalypse that occurred a couple of weeks ago yes, that we talked about last week yeah, yeah, and we've implemented the olby hub. It's all working and everything's back to normal. We've opened up a number of channels. It means we can open up us accounts and european accounts and global accounts, basically, so we can do that again through the Albi API.

James Cridland: 48:21

That's very nice Good news so far. That's very nice. Do people get a Lightning address with a TrueFans account?

Sam Sethi: 48:27

They will be getting one because we are now going to be a managed. We are going to, in effect, become a managed account where we issue Lightning addresses Right.

James Cridland: 48:37

Oh, that's very fancy.

Sam Sethi: 48:39

Yeah, we haven't got that yet, but that's that's what we're working on today and the rest of next week. Well, very nice. So what's been happening for you?

James Cridland: 48:45

James, well, um, uh, I've I've I've just booked some flights to Venice, uh, later in the year. Um, there's a conference that I'm going to speak at in early November, uh, so that should be nice. I'll see how much of Venice is left.

Sam Sethi: 49:01

It floods all the time now there, so, yeah, apart from through COVID, when it proved that the water's cleaned and the water's went down. So yes, human effects, oh, well, there you go.

James Cridland: 49:12

Well, there's a thing, anyway, looking forward to that. I'm in a big hotel which isn't actually on the main island, and so if you want to go anywhere, you basically have to go and catch a you know, a boat, and those boats are not cheap, but yeah, but it'll be my second time in Venice, looking forward to it, actually, I think my third time. I think my third time, anyway, and that's it for this week. If you enjoy the podcast, the Newsletter's, better, you can find it at podnewsnet and the Pod News Daily, wherever you get your podcasts, and there are longer interviews in the Pod News Extra podcast too.

Sam Sethi: 49:48

You can support this show by streaming sats or at weeklypodnewsnet, and you can give us feedback using fan mail or with a boostagram.

James Cridland: 49:56

Our music is from Studio Dragonfly. Our voiceover is Sheila Dee. We're using Clean Feed to record our main audio today and we're hosted and sponsored by Buzzsprout Podcast. Hosting made easy.

Speaker 2: 50:08

Get updated every day. Subscribe to our newsletter at podnewsnet.

Kendall Brietman: 50:14

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Speaker 2: 50:19

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