Speaker 1: 0:01

The Pod News Weekly Review with Buzzsprout. Start podcasting, keep podcasting.

Speaker 2: 0:10

I'm very excited. I've got two very special guests on the show today. It's Adam Currie and Dave Jones, known as the Podfather, the Podsage, and they're going to be talking about the Holy App. Welcome chaps. Hello, adam Currie, co-inventor of podcasting, you've got a brand new app out. It's called the Godcaster. What is the Godcaster and why did you want to bring it out?

Speaker 3: 0:32

Sam, first of all, it's good to be here, a rare you, me and Dave moment. I love that a lot. Godcaster came about over a year ago. Someone who had seen me speak at the Spark Media Conference in Houston came to me and he said you know, I've got this thing. It's not an app, it's a service. It's for radio stations and I'm kind of in the middle of determining whether I need to do a technology upgrade. I hear all these cool things about the podcast index and about the new features that you have. Can you tell me about it? So, as Dave and I always do, when it comes to podcast index and 2.0, I'm happy to talk to anybody, particularly someone who's developing against the API that we make available. So I chatted with him and then he came back again. He had some more questions and by the third or fourth time, his name is Gordon Marcy.

Speaker 3: 1:22

By the third or fourth time, I had started to put together what was going on, and he's been in the radio business all of his life at big, big networks like Salem and, oh goodness, ambassador. There's a big content network and these are all faith-based broadcast organizations and stations and the solution he had was a podcast player for radio stations and as I was talking with him more and more, I learned that there's a real conundrum with radio, not like we didn't know it. I mean, over 20 years ago we figured that podcasting would eventually disrupt radio, and that moment has arrived. And that arrived to me through the faith-based radio stations. There's about 4,000 of them in the United States alone and the problem is they are literally riding their over-the-air listenership into heaven. The average age is 74, and everyone's already moving to streaming online. Most of the radio stations have a button that says listen live and they're seeing more and more of their audience go there.

Speaker 3: 2:25

But now here comes the second issue with radio and this is not just faith-based radio, it's all radio Is that local programming has gone away. Most of this is naturally syndicated content, which also is available on a podcast. So what radio stations were doing is they're airing this programming and it's not just praise the Lord stuff. I mean, glenn Beck is considered a faith-based podcaster. You know Dave Ramsey. You know there's a lot of different content out there. You know news and just maybe a biblical worldview in many things, but it's a big variety of content. And so the station would say you know, here's this next program. It's a focus on the family, as an example. And focus on the station would say you know, here's this next program, it's Focus on the Family, as an example. And Focus on the Family would say you're seeing the Focus on the Family on KCBH and go to FocusontheFamilycom and subscribe to our podcast. So the stations are literally sending their audience away to places where they can get podcasts and people are either listening there on their website, they might be subscribing in an app. Many of the radio stations have apps with not much more than a listen live and support the station.

Speaker 3: 3:31

This is an interesting part of faith-based radio in the United States. It's pretty much value for value. The stations ask for support and between the stations and the content programming there's been this issue for 40 years of how do I know that someone was listening to your program on my radio station, gave you a donation, but I don't know about it, and so we're supposed to share revenue. In some cases, the big content providers will buy the airtime Again. They need to know where did it come from. Buy the airtime Again, they need to know where did it come from. And it's been this big problem that's been discussed even at the National Religious Broadcasters Conference, where I was last week, where 5,000 people show up, it's been this issue where they just can't figure out what they call attribution.

Speaker 3: 4:17

So, as I was thinking about it, I'm like, wait a minute, this can all be easily solved with a lot of these 2.0 features that we've developed over time. And why don't we create a backend and a player and an API for the inevitable apps so that you can have a live stream? We know we have the lit tag, you can have as many podcasts, a whole management interface and really let these radio station program directors and people who know how to package, market et cetera, create a place for all of the programming and then have the audience go to their website, support the show through their website, which we're doing with the funding tag. It's incredible. We'll get into it with Dave. But the oh wow moment of all these broadcasters who said, wait a minute, now the station knows that someone hit donate and we know it as well. Why, yes, oh, you've solved a 40 year old problem Seems simple to us. Sometimes you just need some fresh thinking.

Speaker 3: 5:17

So, as we were designing the product and Dave will get into a lot, he had so many genius ideas. We really made this whole thing about first party data, understanding what people are doing in the player, whether it's in a podcast app, because you can subscribe to the station, basically, or whether it's their own app, you can really see what's working. And this is another thing. Well, in podcasting in general, we've never really had that, and the excitement came both from the stations and from the content producers who also were just looking at download numbers and they're saying wait a bit, now I can see how well my program is performing in Phoenix, arizona, if someone dropped out after eight minutes, but meanwhile in Albuquerque, new Mexico, it's doing much better. So this all-encompassing solution kind of came about and we were just ideating on this and then Dave Gordon and I formed a partnership called Godcaster at Godcasterfm and we've put this into the marketplace and I think as of yesterday, we now have, I want to say, 249 stations who are using Godcaster and also now content providers like these big ones, focus on the Family.

Speaker 3: 6:30

They're on thousands of stations. They're tagging their programming at the end with to support Focus on the Family. Go to KHCB, the KHCB website, or use the app and support us there. So we've really created a backend service with detailed measurement and statistics of what is actually happening, and I was at NRB with Gordon this past week at the National Religious Broadcasters Conference and we just got nothing but incredible feedback and new customers and it's interesting that this came from this direction. Any radio station could use it, obviously, but for Dave and I it has the added advantage of we're doing this for Jesus, so we're super happy about it.

Speaker 2: 7:16

Okay, look, I've got two questions before I go to Dave. First of all, adam, why can't they just drive traffic to the website, or drive traffic to the usual suspects you know, the Spotify's and the Apple's and do dynamic ad insertion and get their money that way? What's stopping them doing it in what we consider the traditional 1.0 model of podcasting? Why couldn't they just do it that way?

Speaker 3: 7:38

Yeah, that's a good question. Well, first of all, these stations are not really doing it for the money. They need money to survive but they're doing it to spread the gospel. That's their main mission. The big part of this is every single radio station has a relationship with a church or multiple churches in their local community. So now they are starting to add local inserts. You know, go listen to Pastor Jimmy's podcast on the KHCB website.

Speaker 3: 8:07

So you want them, who understand the radio stations are, you know, they really understand the local market, packaging marketing to that local market. And while they still have these big megaphones, why not build up that local property so that they can do a lot more localized content, give people a feeling again that that station digital or otherwise, but really moving towards digital is their all-encompassing place. And what they have seen is that 50% of their users are moving towards an app and not a podcast app but towards an app of their own, and there's a large portion is just going to the website and clicking play, and this is something I've noticed as well. We've been talking about it on Podcasting 2.0, about kind of the waning of the interest in a traditional inbox-based podcast application. So we want to give them the tools to what's being highlighted and not just adding a feed but really having a management system where they can see what's working.

Speaker 3: 9:09

And the way we have it now is you can literally see in the live streaming stats you can see someone listening to that or a hashed IP address, someone listening to that, then hearing a promo, going over to the station app or the webpage and listening to the podcast that was promoted, and so really everybody wins in this model and again it's all a value for value based model. So now they can work together on fundraising for both content producers, for the local producers, and I feel churches are content factories and they're not just doing a weekly session on Sundays. They've got men's breakfast ministries, they've got youth ministry, where I'm kind of in charge of our local Godcaster. We've got the high school kids. They're doing a podcast about the Frederick's River Billies, which is our women's basketball team, who are doing well in the nationals now no-transcript.

Speaker 2: 10:11

Nice, okay, so it's control, it's monetization tools, it's administration, all the things and some of the podcasting 2.0 capabilities that we've all been working on. Nice, dave, hello, how are you? I'm good, sam. Now, adam, you've known for how long.

Speaker 1: 10:29

Oh gosh, 15 years years.

Speaker 2: 10:37

Okay, so Adam's come to you on several occasions to say hey, I've got a great idea for a business, how about you do it with me? The last one being the podcast index, obviously. So what did you think when he said I've got this great idea for Godcaster? And what did you think, yeah, let's do it. Or, oh, my God, not again.

Speaker 1: 10:51

There's a. There's always a little an equal amount of both involved in every in every one of those. But my standard answer to Adam whenever he says hey, let's do so-and-so is yes, and then we'll figure out actually how to do it later. So I just always answer yes first and then figure out later if it's actually possible. So yeah, the same same thing here.

Speaker 2: 11:12

I love it that Jim Carrey film yes man when he says yes to everything. Yeah, exactly, exactly Okay. So let's let's take a little step back. How long is it taking you to build this platform and where did you start? I mean, you've got a blank piece of paper.

Speaker 1: 11:28

You're looking at it and you're going.

Speaker 2: 11:30

How do I build this thing? So what did you do?

Speaker 1: 11:32

Yeah, what you know look at what what Adam said was we sort of took over an existing product with with Gordon's product that was called Glorystone, and so I determined early on that I was just going to rebuild that thing from scratch. It was an older platform, I mean it still worked well. It was an older platform that had been sort of upgraded over the years to have sort of more modern features, but the core of it was still sort of an old LAMP-based application, php MySQL that was just showing its age. So I just determined to build from scratch and initially replicate all the features that we thought that the current customers couldn't live without and then at the same time, sort of weave in the newer stuff that we knew we were going to be needing to bring the product up to what we wanted it to be.

Speaker 1: 12:26

So it took I mean it was rapid lots of just you know late night, early morning coding sessions to get this thing up and running in about five months. So it went from zero to, you know, launched in five months to be ready for a discussion about it and selling it in RB for people who would want it. So that that was the timeframe. You know we pretty much hit everything we wanted to achieve by then. But that's, you know, to say that it was a, you know, an enjoyable build would not be entirely accurate, because it's rush, rush, rush. But at the same time, I think the way me and Adam have always worked has kind of been that way we just go, go, go, go, go as fast as possible and then trying to hit a target, and then at the end we kind of sit back and say, okay, where are we at? Let's go clean up the mess, let's go, you know polish things up here and this kind of thing. So that's, we're kind of used to working that way.

Speaker 3: 13:21

And we're really we were building it, you know, building the airplane in flight, to be honest, you know, because we had customers. There were existing customers who had migrated over, and it would literally be the customer would say hey, and it would literally be the customer would say, hey, you know, my window popped out here, I'm about to get sucked out of the airplane and we go, dave, we're losing passengers, man. So it is the way we've worked. There's nothing more fantastic than working with live customers. There's also nothing more scary with working with live customers, and I just want to say I've worked with Dave on many projects. Some things have just been for us, some things have well, podcast index, which is the most successful, but of course, we have zero income from it, which was never the intent. The things that Dave builds are rock solid, the systems stay up and he's never really done a user interface. He's done user experience, a UX, but really a beautiful UI is something he's never done and, man, he knocked it out of the park. It really it's a beautiful, beautiful product.

Speaker 2: 14:27

Yeah, no. Congratulations to you both. Now. So what is the platform? Because it's not what I would have thought you would have gone for originally, which would be a native iOS app. That's what we're all told to do Go and build for the app stores. You know Android, blah, blah, blah. That's where podcasting is. And actually, to be fair, when you look at the data from companies like Buzzsprout or OP3, you know, and you look at device and you look at platforms, generally mobile iOS. So you haven't built the native app yet. So why did you make the decision to go and build what Adam has nicely called a universal web app rather than a progressive app?

Speaker 1: 15:04

It's a little like with everything that we do. It's a little hard to explain. That's sort of a theme that runs through almost every product that Adam and I build is. It takes a little bit of thinking outside the box and there's some overlap here. The Venn diagram between the Podcast Index and Godcaster is pretty, you know, pretty overlappy. So one thing is, when we started the Podcast Index, we started that to support podcast apps, to give them a back end, and what we said at the beginning was we're never going to create a podcast app. So that also comes into play here. This really isn't a podcast app. This is something really different than that.

Speaker 1: 15:50

The thing about the linear to digital transformation for radio is that if all you do is just transfer that broadcast linear audience to a website player, you've really done nothing. The beauty of digital is that it's available everywhere through multiple channels. So that's really the concept that we brought from the very beginning. The problem with Glorystone the old player was that it was purely just a website player and it was no different than than a podcast app. But you just had to go to this radio station's website to do it. So that's just as restrictive as broadcast, maybe even more. So you know. And so what we did was we said okay, you're going to have a web player, because that's helpful to the customer People, their audience wants that. We're going to build a web player that's installable on any radio station's website and they can plug in all the different content, all the different podcasts that they play on air. They'll plug that in to make an on what's essentially an on demand guide in a player on their website, demand guide in a player on their website. But every player they build also spawns an RSS feed that has all of those shows in it and that RSS feed is branded to the station. So the station gets their own RSS feed that will hold all of the podcast content and gets essentially redistributed back out to the podcast index and other directories so that now these customers or listeners can subscribe not to just focus on the family. They can subscribe to KHCB itself and by doing that they're going to get focus on the family and all of KHCB's other national content and KHCB's local content. They're going to get all of this stuff in a single feed that they can then subscribe to in a normal podcast app, something like True Fans, apple Podcasts, overcast, podverse, podcast Guru, all the 2.0 apps. It's a standard podcast feed with 2.0 namespace enhancements in it. So that's the thing that we took to. It is we, yes, our player, we're proud of it and we're glad that it works well. But we're just as happy for people to not even use our player at all but instead to subscribe to these radio stations podcast feeds in their own podcast app.

Speaker 1: 18:15

Because that's all you're doing is you're now you're allowing your listener as a station.

Speaker 1: 18:21

You're allowing your listener to listen to you, including your live broadcast, because we use the live item tag. Now they can listen to you in their most convenient, preferable way, which is a podcast app. And for the station side of things, they get stats on their players. They build out their player, their own demand guide and all that kind of stuff, and then they install the player on their website. But they're getting stats for the player itself plays you know, listens and engagement, that kind of thing but because it has an RSS feed, they're also getting. There's a separate section in their stats dashboard that gives them stats about podcast apps. So they're getting stats on their feed too. They're getting the traditional, you know downloads, where the downloads are coming from, that kind of thing so they can also see the metrics that they're getting from podcast apps as well. So it really doesn't matter who's listening to your content and where. We want to accommodate all of that and then give them some stats that will show them what's happening.

Speaker 3: 19:23

In addition to that, if I can just add, we also expose an API for the increasing number of stations who just have their own app. They with you, sam. They're like yes, we need an app, not just iOS, but Android. They're using multiple known companies like Jcaps and Subsplash, and Xperia, I think, is another one. Some have a custom developer who's doing stuff for them and now they have a real piece of functionality in there because you can build your Godcaster player however you want it, with native player elements and native view elements, and I think the Godcaster itself is that we're the back end, so we're just the plumbing. We're letting you program your lineup and do all of that stuff and get your analytics on the back end. You do it in one place once it goes to wherever you want it to go.

Speaker 3: 20:19

And so, as it turns out, the universal app, which I've coined the term it used to be progressive web app, but I call it the universal app that really is a great stepping stone for a lot of the stations and also increasingly churches, who I think are radio stations in themselves, so they can just put a web view in there and at least have the Godcaster player in there, even though it won't function the way you'd like it to on Android Auto and CarPlay. But, as Dave points out, I mean I've been using my own Godcaster station, even just to manage my own podcast subscriptions, and I love it because I use Podcast Guru as kind of my daily driver and I pop it right in, I've got my Hello Fred feed and I can listen to my live signal, I can listen to any of the podcasts I subscribe to and of course, all of the value for value passes right through. So you know all of that just works. So it's really an all-encompassing system which is meant to replace a lot of pieces of that linear broadcast infrastructure winded emails.

Speaker 2: 21:39

but it was to do with the publisher feed. And again, when I look at how, with my CEO of True Fans hat on, I get a feed for Hello Fred, for example, and it has multiple radio stations within the same feed, and then what I wanted to do was actually I broke that back out into a radio feed of a publisher feed for want of a better word and just demoed how it could be presented as a publisher feed, an RSS standalone feed that the podcast index could ingest and apps like Fountain support it and WeSupport it at TrueFans. And then you'd still have the clean, single RSS feed for each individual radio station so that if I wanted to go and look at previous episodes, I'm looking back at their previous episodes. So I'm keeping the shows individually, but I'm creating this aggregated feed using the publisher feed technology that we curated in podcasting 2.0 to actually then see the station as a complete entity with all of their shows and look it's horses for courses.

Speaker 2: 22:36

But that was one of the ideas that I threw back at you and I don't know if that's something that resonated with you or that was something like no, we're not going down that road because we can't get it into Spotify. We can't get it into Apple. We can't get it into because they don't support publisher feeds. It makes no sense to create that feed when we have to do it in the traditional RSS feed structure.

Speaker 1: 22:58

Well, you know, that's never stopped us at all, sam is. Is the fact that Spotify or Apple or any of those guys don't do something? That's not. I don't even think about it in those terms, because they, they will eventually. They'll all start doing all this stuff eventually because they'll have to. So that doesn't stop me at all.

Speaker 1: 23:17

Publisher feeds are definitely on the roadmap, for sure. This sort of sprint to just get a product going is one-tenth of the actual roadmap of the stuff we want to do. We really haven't even gotten to the cool stuff yet. Cool, even gotten to the cool stuff yet, you know. So that's, that's really yeah, because I mean, we support the live tag, we support funding, uh, support the value tag, uh, location chapters. We pass all that stuff through and then we add some of it as well for, like, location tag.

Speaker 1: 23:47

But there's also stuff.

Speaker 1: 23:49

We also support pod ping, of course, for for live broadcasts and all that kind of thing, because if we're going to be pumping out a feed to true fans, well, true fans needs to know when that stuff goes live and we need to be telling you know, because one of the things you can do on the player is a listener can hit the follow button and it just gives them a list of podcast apps and so, if they choose you know true fans or podcast guru or whatever you know we need to be able to provide that data.

Speaker 1: 24:21

So a lot of that stuff is interdependent and we built it, built that out. But then we also have this other huge list of things we have to support and that's going to be what comes next. So we have, you know, we're going to be supporting soundbites, transcripts, publisher feeds, all the value time splits, just pretty much all of this stuff is on the to-do list. And the publisher feed is great because what we're allowing and through various partnerships that we're still developing with native app developers and live stream companies and that kind of thing, through these various partnerships, we're going to be able those relationships we've built over the last nearly five years to help the radio stations build up their own content catalog, and then we'll be able to put all that stuff into a publisher feed, like you're talking about. Then the radio station has their own master feed that shows their brand and everything, and then, underneath that, all of their content. So, yeah, I think you're, I think you're just sort of anticipating where we're headed as well.

Speaker 3: 25:41

Adding to what Dave said, I think that the very positive for the the podcast namespace, because when, when we say subscribe to this radio stations feed so you get all the show episodes, et cetera, we show preference over the modern podcast apps right now for the main reason that it has the lit tag. So I think it's going to be a very net positive. You'll see, certainly Apple will have to look at the live item tag because they're going to be losing market share to podcast apps that already have this built in. So I really see that as a huge net positive for 2.0 in general, but also for the apps.

Speaker 1: 26:27

Yeah, I think Apple definitely. I mean I know this is not the prediction show, but I think Apple will support the live item tag within two years. I mean, you know I'm giving myself two years just because they move slow, but we know that they watch the podcasting 2.0 project. We know that they watch what we're doing and sometimes they reach out and ask for things. So we know that they are involved in their own special Apple way, and so I I feel like within the next couple of years, a live item tag support in Apple podcast apps will definitely be a thing.

Speaker 1: 27:05

You know right now, when you click the follow button on a station's player, your Apple podcast is at the bottom. You know Spotify can't even be on there because they don't allow that kind of interaction, so they're not even on the list. But everything at the top, you know, the order of preference is the podcasting 2.0 apps at first and that support things like Live At that. We need that to be a complete experience. And then Apple is still on there because they have such big market share, but they're at the bottom just because they don't support live. And the live experience for a radio station is gosh. That's, 90% of the experience is being able to listen live to a podcast app. So you know, but I think they will do it for sure. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 27:49

Yeah, I mean we talk about commentsivity, we talk about the ability to do that in a live item. I mean friday night is great with you two guys getting you know all the boosts in and you know and all the 777 harps and all that stuff coming through. Now one one thing we've had a discussion on in the past is Shoutcast, Icecast, HLS. Are you going to be the provider of the live item tag service, the server as well as the management?

Speaker 3: 28:21

platform. Let me just jump in here and address that and other things. So the short answer is no, we're not interested in providing hosting. We're not interested in providing streaming services. We're not interested in providing hosting. We're not interested in providing streaming services. We're not interested in providing app building services. What this is doing. I think this is a huge opportunity for our hosting partners. A lot of these radio stations and a lot of content providers use Omni, and Omni is going to have to catch up and I don't know if that's even within their DNA to do this. So we exclusively want to work with partners where we can, and we are literally. This is what we're good at. We're good at the plumbing. We do have a beautiful web player and it's perfect for what it's intended for, but we really see it as okay. Here's your digital signal. Where do you want it to go?

Speaker 2: 29:12

Yeah, I mean, I can see, with the API you can even do Alexa's and Podhomes and anything else. It doesn't have to just be iOS and native Android apps. So what's?

Speaker 1: 29:21

next.

Speaker 2: 29:22

What's next now? You've got it out the front door. You've got this excitement, adam, do you see the funding tag being the primary mechanism for monetization? But do you see the funding tag being the primary mechanism for monetization? But do you envisage a time where people will naturally understand what a wallet is, will understand what a micropayment is, will understand what V4V actually means and start to use that way of monetizing radio stations?

Speaker 3: 29:47

So moving forward. The most excitement right now is about the funding tag. That has just been mind-blowing for this particular group because of the attribution of a donation on both sides. There's a lot of talk about integrating. Unlike traditional radio, there's really no competition. Everybody wants to work together because if someone donates then the tide rises all boats. So the attribution is one everyone wants to see it tied into CRM databases for the conversion. At the same time, it's really beautiful to see that the stations are just as excited to allow the content producers to log in to see the station's first party data for their program not all of it, obviously so that they can really understand how they're performing and moving forward.

Speaker 3: 30:42

For the products. You know, there's a whole nother group which is, I think I've said before, is churches. They are, you know, ever since COVID, every single church in America, but probably worldwide, has become a real content factory. They've upgraded their gear, they've learned how to do podcasts, and so we we don't want to be necessarily in, you know, in competition anywhere, but we'll just, we'll serve anybody, even if you just have a top 40 radio station. You know, we actually had a conversation about that we're okay If, if, if, if you just have a top 40 radio station we actually had a conversation about that we're okay. If you're a top 40 station and you want to use it or an all talk that may be more secular. Regarding value for value, there's one group who has a very young chief innovation officer. It's Hope Media, and if you look at their offering and they have many stations throughout the US he was the only one I felt comfortable demonstrating value for value to and it just blew his mind, and so I'm hopeful that we'll set up a pilot project.

Speaker 3: 31:41

A lot of these stations also work very closely with artists with different musical recordings with. You know different musical recordings they are looking for to. You know they're looking towards creating a whole new music genre. That would be value for value and it all comes down to education, as we know, but there's a lot of interest from them. I'm very excited about that and, in general, this group and maybe it applies to radio across the board.

Speaker 3: 32:09

There's really no farm team. There's no next generation that has been cultivated to do radio, so they see these things as an opportunity to bring in a whole new group who will understand connecting your wallet to a podcast app, connecting your wallet to any kind of app who will understand that micropayments is a very viable way forward. And the music industry, contemporary Christian music artists. They definitely are very interested. There's some big names who we've been in touch with. They all would like to try it out. Because you know the same with the traditional secular music industry no one's making any money. Secular music industry no one's making any money. So they they want to figure out how how can I?

Speaker 1: 32:59

continue to be producing records without only doing it through merchandise, sales and concerts. Yeah, every time that and when, when it comes to the you know really, you know religious sector or spiritual sector or whatever you want to, you know, however you want to categorize that, I mean the value for value is just in that DNA from the very beginning. I mean it's just the way it's, that the culture in that culture it makes so much sense. Everything's donation based, everything is please support us if you're getting something. I mean all of that content from the earliest days of Christian radio or religious radio has always been a value for value concept. You give the product away because you have this bigger mission and then you just ask people to support you and so it all like that is the most easy fit to pull. You know to bring that in because it makes sense to that mindset from day one to pull, you know to bring that in, because it makes sense to that mindset from day one.

Speaker 2: 33:52

So, with all of this now out in the open and you've got a clear pathway forward very quickly, you've got this other project, you know, podcast Index 2.0. Where do you see that taking shape in 2025? What's going on in your heads that you think you know we're healthy? This is happening. Where are your thoughts on it?

Speaker 1: 34:12

currently, you know, I would say that I think we're. I think we're in a good place. You know, the podcast index and the namespace have sort of hit a. They've hit a point where things are, people are comfortable with the technology. I think now and so you know, we just had a big discussion this week about the images tag and about how to re-engineer that thing to be good, and so now we're looking at unprocessing things as how do we need to sort of shape the way we do tags and the way we do namespace work going forward to sort of fit this new model?

Speaker 1: 34:51

You know, in the beginning it was nobody knew what we were doing, nobody understood any of this stuff. You know we're having to deal with pent up demand for new features for the, you know, for 15 years worth of content. So we were just going to, you know, go, typical fashion, just go, go, go, go, go as fast as we can. That really has changed, and so now things are at a slower pace and I think, you know, going forward, I think we're probably going to focus on just one or two things with each phase of the podcast namespace, because there's still I mean there's still dozens of apps out there that don't even support a single tag. Still dozens of apps out there that don't even support a single tag, even though there's 600,000 feeds out there that support the Podcasting 2.0 namespace. There's maybe more than that. I haven't counted in a while.

Speaker 1: 35:40

There's so much content that has the Podcasting 2.0 namespace tags in it, but many, many podcast apps just still don't even support number one, the very first one, something easy like transcripts. So I think there's no need to just rush, rush, rush anymore, but at the same time I think we need. It's good, because now we can just slow down, have our focus on one thing and then, with the namespace, and then on the index side, you know, I think we're shifting focus to decentralizing, because we don't want to just become another Apple with a directory that everybody's dependent on, even though we're, you know it's, it's open. So we want to decentralize that as we can. We, I think we're getting to the point in the index and the namespace where we we're we're a mature technology and mature technology and now our focus gets to shift to a sort of mature, more important things.

Speaker 3: 36:35

My job has always been to tell you what should be happening now, and it usually comes true in 10 years and I never make money on it. So, I'm always the last of the trough.

Speaker 2: 36:45

Join that club, Adam. Yeah, I feel your pain, sam.

Speaker 3: 36:48

So what Dave said about decentralizing the index, you know we have kind of said from the get go the podcast index. Our job is to eliminate ourselves and that means you know whether it's distributed hash space or however, we wind up doing it. And there's some amazing things being done. I would love to see Podping integrated. I did a presentation at NRB in the ballroom and I showed the tilespodpingorg and people just their minds were boggling.

Speaker 3: 37:17

Like, in a way, you're doing this with TrueFans is to show that you don't have to just create another podcast app.

Speaker 3: 37:39

You can create an experience or an interface or a service for a group of people who want to use podcast technology and specifically Podcasting 2.0, since there's such a rich environment. I mean, even Ellen Beats is a great version of that. That is only for the music side and for the music shows. So this, I think, is where we can have great success instead of, as I lovingly call the podcast industrial complex, focusing on what share does this app have? Well, that's going to remain kind of the same for a long, long time, but meanwhile, as we've proven, with value for value in general you can make a living, you can make your product successful with a smaller demographic in this highly connected world. So certainly on the Podcasting 2.0 podcast which is where the name came from, although it became kind of its own beast is to show more of that and as more of these experiences are developed, I think you'll see the rest of the industry come along with that.

Speaker 2: 38:50

Adam Curry. Dave Jones, I could talk to you for hours on this, but thank you very much. Now, where would anyone go, Adam, for getting more information about the app itself?

Speaker 3: 39:00

Well, this is godcasterfm. Godcasterfm, and really appreciate the work that you do, sam, and that James does. Power, as we call it, power is one of you know is certainly one of my weekly listens. I wish we would have coordinated better for this interview when we all would have had a glass of red wine to go with it, because we know that that's usually how you're listening to our show.

Speaker 2: 39:23

Absolutely the only way. And, dave, anyone wanting to help get involved with it, maybe give you some, you know get involved with the API. Where would they go for any of that stuff?

Speaker 1: 39:38

Just reach out to me and we can help them out on that. And you know, the thing about Godcaster is under the hood. You know sort of double under the hood, it's all podcast index. So anybody who is already familiar with the index under the hood it's all Podcast Index. So anybody who is already familiar with the index and the way that works can help here too. So we're sort of eating our own dog food in that way.

Speaker 2: 39:59

And on behalf of the community, just for me, I'd like to say thank you to you, both publicly, for all the work you've done for the Podcast Index. It's massively appreciated. You may not hear it all the time, but just know that we do appreciate what you do. Thank you, sam.

Speaker 1: 40:13

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Speaker 3: 40:19

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Speaker 1: 40:23

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