Speaker 1: 0:00

The Pod News Weekly Review uses chapters so you can skip from story to story, even the one about HLS video.

Speaker 2: 0:07

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

Speaker 3: 0:15

I'm James.

Speaker 4: 0:15

Cridland, the editor of Pod News, and I'm Sam Sethi, the CEO of True Fans.

Speaker 5: 0:20

Could we put on our own awards celebrating the funniest people, podcasts and moments in the industry?

Speaker 3: 0:27

Yes, he could. Giles Gear from the Golden Lobes and the Cheerful Earful.

Speaker 6: 0:32

Plus giving the listener more options. It just also seems a better way to do video, Justin.

Speaker 3: 0:39

Jackson from the Podcast Standards Project on HLS Video. This podcast is sponsored by Buzzsprout with the tools, support and community to ensure you keep podcasting, start podcasting, keep podcasting with buzzsproutcom From your daily newsletter, the Pod News Weekly Review.

Speaker 4: 0:57

So welcome back, James, Welcome, welcome. You were missed. I made a massive ricket last week, so apologies for no Pod News Weekly review to everybody. I clearly didn't plug the right plugs in on my road and we had massive echo so the audio was garbled. So thanks to John McDermott, who was the co-host. He did a fantastic job of trying to un-echo it. It's still a little bit weird when you hear it, but I'm going to say I said to James just before we came on I'm going to edit that down and put it on Pod News Extra because I think John had some great insights, so I don't want to lose it all together Very nice.

Speaker 3: 1:36

Well, I look forward to that Now.

Speaker 4: 1:39

I also asked one of our power supporters, david John Clark, to do a little jingle for me for last week's show. I have sent that to you, james, maybe you play it.

Speaker 3: 1:49

Yes, I've got no idea what this sounds like. Here goes G'day listeners.

Speaker 7: 1:53

James Cridland's out and about this week soaking up the sun in Darwin with his fam and hanging with thousands of crocs. So no Pod News Weekly review from him this week Fair dinkum, he never takes a break, but he's Ah, the phone beeped. Fuck you, megan. Thanks a lot, monica.

Speaker 3: 2:16

Wow.

Speaker 7: 2:18

Oh wait, wait, All right, where's fucking airplane mode? I'm still recording. This is going to be funny. I'll send that to Sam.

Speaker 3: 2:30

There you go. That's what a proper Australian sounds like, exactly, and that's why this version of the podcast has an explicit sign next to it.

Speaker 4: 2:41

Thank you, David John Clark. He sent me three clean versions of that re-edited but. I was just wetting myself with the unclean edited version Wowzers.

Speaker 3: 2:51

Well, there's a thing, thank you. Thank you, david, for that. That's fair. Dinkum mate, who said Crocodile Dundee's dead hey who said that.

Speaker 4: 3:01

Now let's start off with some proper news. The funding tag this has been one that's been bubbling up. It's been around for ages and it's sort of been ignored, but now it's getting a lot of traction. James, what's happening?

Speaker 3: 3:14

Yes, it is so a story from Supporting Cast, who have said that NPR has recently added support for the funding tag across all of its shows. So what it is, in case you don't know, it's a podcasting 2.0 feature and if you put an additional thing in your RSS feed, it allows a button to appear in lots of great podcast apps like Pocket Casts or Podcast Addict or True Fans or AntennaPod. You press the button and, hey presto, it's there and links you through to, in this particular case, their Supporting Cast page. Brilliant to see NPR is doing it. Brilliant to see that Supporting Cast is talking about it as well. And, you know, great for podcasters that want to offer, you know, an alternative to just hearing ads for Casper mattresses offer an alternative to just hearing ads for Casper mattresses.

Speaker 4: 4:10

Don't knock it. I mean I've got seven mattresses now from that. I read the last paragraph. The more podcasts we have championing podcasting 2.0, the stronger the podcasting ecosystem will be. Let's make direct audience support a core part of how shows and creators succeed. I couldn't agree more. Yes.

Speaker 3: 4:23

No, it's a really good thing and really good of them to have published that. There's a brand new guide about how the funding tag works on podcasting2.org, including screenshots of different apps in there. There's presumably more apps that need adding. Sam Sethi, yes.

Speaker 4: 4:44

Again my question of how do I edit this page.

Speaker 3: 4:46

You edit this page. There's a link that says edit this page. I mean, it really couldn't have been any any more, don't worry I will.

Speaker 4: 4:54

I will be on there later. No, I think the other part of this that I find interesting is how this is. You know, initially sites like Patreon are memberful and supporting cast being excited by it, but also all the complications that we've had about V4V and micropayments and wallets has held back the direct payment model from fan to creator, and I think this is a nice interim footstep that allows people to understand in basic, simple language. You know, click this button or click this link and then put in a in a mount you understand, not in Swahili and, hey presto, you can now be giving money to your favourite creators.

Speaker 3: 5:42

Yeah, now, I think I think it's a really useful thing. It's really easy to understand. It's just a button to help fund the particular podcast. It's on this show and because Buzzsprout supports it, and when you click it it will open a page for you to become a power supporter. I mean, it really is as simple as that. If you use it on the Pod News Daily podcast, then it opens a Stripe page where you can send us any amount of money and it is different, clearly, to streaming payments. It's just another form of value for value, of course, but it is a super easy one and you know, really pleased that Pocket Casts are now, you know, have now stuck it in, and hopefully what that means is that app developers understand that Apple is not going to cut you off for having that particular feature in your podcast app. So one day perhaps we can see Overcast putting it back. It would be great if Overcast did put it back, but, yeah, so it's a good thing that more people should end up getting Now let's move on.

Speaker 4: 6:51

James, the Spotify people have given something back to Nathan Gathright. What have they returned back to him?

Speaker 3: 6:57

Yes, I think this is a really good move, and it's something that I have been quietly asking Spotify to do for a while. I've actually been contacting Spotify every now and again saying are you still linking to such and such? And you probably shouldn't be, because that app doesn't exist anymore and they've made a couple of changes under the hood, but clearly it's not a focus of theirs anymore, and so Nathan Gathright, who came up with Podlink, has been given it back. So it's a simple one link that you can advertise, that you can market. It basically allows you to open your podcast in any platform you like, of course, including Spotify, but many other things and, yes, and Nathan now has that back.

Speaker 3: 7:40

There are, I calculated, 1.7 million links to Podlink on the web, so that's great news, because it means that all of those will keep on working, assuming that Nathan doesn't break it, and I can't imagine that he will. So one of the other things that Nathan does is he also has a number of helpful GitHub things. One of them is links to all of the logos, and one of them is links to how to link to a particular podcast app directly. And one thing just for you to be aware of, sam he's updated the TrueFans logo. Now that he's seen how your iOS app looks, he has updated it. So it looks nice and smart in the new thing, and so the Pod News podcast pages are already using that, so that's a good thing.

Speaker 4: 8:29

Oh, very nice. Thank you very much, nathan. Now I'm glad people tell me things that I have no idea about my own platform. I mean again.

Speaker 5: 8:37

I got told that it was in the app store when I didn't even know. Yeah it's lovely.

Speaker 4: 8:41

I wonder what else has been happening with my app that I have no idea about. Who knows? Who knows More often, who cares? Right Now, related to this, CoHost has added new features to its tracking tool. What's this one about, James?

Speaker 3: 9:06

Yeah. So this is if you are promoting your show CoHost has a similar tool to Podlink and if you are promoting your show, maybe you have bought some advertising on Blue Sky or on Twitter I don't know if you can buy advertising on Blue Sky, but you know what I mean or on Twitter or on Facebook or whatever. You can tag those in different ways and what that will do is that will actually tell you how many listeners you got from those advertising. You know from the advertising that you ended up doing. So. Linkfire does something a bit like that, but only for Apple Podcasts, I think, but Co-host is doing that for everything. So that's a very cool thing, I think.

Speaker 4: 9:37

Linkfire is the one I was going to ask you about. That's the oddest platform integration with Apple I think in my time in the industry I've ever heard of. It's not part of Apple, They've not bought it, and yet it's a third party that they use. I don't get it.

Speaker 3: 9:53

Yeah, I don't get it either, to be honest, but LinkFire is. I mean, the nice thing about LinkFire for music is that you can link to a music track and it does all of the lookups onto all of the music platforms and stuff like that. What Apple have done with LinkFire, which they haven't done with everybody else, is they've done some integration with Apple's analytics so again you can actually see how many proper plays you've got from the LinkFire links that you do. I don't really understand why that's an exclusive with Linkfire. I don't quite understand why they're getting that data and no one else is, but you know. But I suppose it's nice, isn't it.

Speaker 4: 10:36

Now one other thing related to links and stuff that I spotted. Blue Sky have added live notifications to the platform, so very much like if you go to YouTube there's a bell icon. You can click on the bell icon and basically, if there's an update to that account, you'll get a push notification. That's lovely and I'm very excited by that for one reason because true fans just added blue sky auto publishing this week and it means that if you're James, for example, listening on True Fans and you happen to listen to this show, you can choose to auto-publish your activity listening activity to X, mastern and now Blue Sky. And of course, what it means before is that I would then follow james on blue sky but I'd have to go into the app to see, oh, james has just listened to pod news weekly and I'd have to keep going back into the app. Now I can just put a bell icon on james's blue sky account and anytime there's an auto update from true fans or you publish anything new to Blue Sky, I will get a push notification.

Speaker 3: 11:46

Well, there we are, and, of course, blue Sky being where the liberals are, the wet liberals, and X being where the Nazis are. So it covers both sides of the political spectrum there.

Speaker 4: 11:59

Well, we don't know. Now Elon's coming back from the dark side. It's like Luke Skywalker, you know he nearly went to the dark side. It's like Luke Skywalker, you know he nearly went to the dark side, luke, I'm your father. And then he's sort of come back.

Speaker 3: 12:09

Yes, but now he's got no friends. Oh, that's true. Yes, I was listening to the Rest Is Politics this week and Alistair Campbell was saying exactly that. He's loathed by people on the progressive side because he helped Trump and he's now loathed by the Trump people because he's gone against Trump. So I don't think he's the vehicle at all.

Speaker 3: 12:27

I would, though, like to point out that, because I am entering the United States of America the freest country in the world next month, I would like to point out that I'm a fan of everything that that country does, and please don't go reading anything into what I've just said about any particular one of your fine people who live there. I hope that's clear.

Speaker 4: 12:51

I will come and visit you at Alligator Architrave for you. Yes, exactly, moving on, we'll do a show from there. Yikes Right, this story here, james. It says Thanks to Ryan Pownall, a Canadian social media influencer, and I will let you go from there. Yes, what's this one about?

Speaker 3: 13:11

So Ryan Pownall or Pownall or something. Anyway, he is either a very stupid person or he's a very malicious person, because what he's done is he's launched a podcast on our sponsors on Buzzsprout. Person because what he's done is he's launched a podcast on our sponsors on Buzzsprout. One of the brilliant things about Buzzsprout is that when you add a podcast there, you appear everywhere. That's part of what Buzzsprout does, so you can easily get into Apple Podcasts. You can easily get into Spotify and all of the other apps and, of course, getting into Apple Podcasts essentially means that you're getting into pretty well every single podcast app under the sun, because that's how most podcast apps work if they're not using the podcast index, anyway.

Speaker 3: 13:53

So Ryan ended up doing that Hooray hooray for being a Buzzsprout customer and then hired a company called Certus DMCA. Hired a company called Certus DMCA which apparently is an AI-powered anti-piracy service which has sent a takedown notice about us to Google because we were stupid enough to automatically list his rather grubby podcast. So essentially, he has got us a black mark with Google for carrying what Google thinks is copyrighted material. Of course it's not. It's just a podcast that we're linking to, like how podcasts work.

Speaker 4: 14:32

Oh, I had to explain that to Apple, by the way, yeah.

Speaker 3: 14:34

Oh yeah, Well, yeah, exactly Exactly. So I ended up appealing that copyright strike with Google a week ago. Still haven't heard whether or not my appeal has been accepted through Google or not. But I mean, obviously, if enough people do that to anyone, then Google will essentially take your entire domain off. So you know, I mean, either he's a malicious person doing you know bad things specifically, or he's just very stupid and doesn't understand how podcasting works. But I'm surprised, after mentioning him last week, that nobody has reached out, that nobody has commented. If he's a social media influencer, you'd have thought that he would be pretty good at spotting any mentions of him on social media, but clearly not. So anyway, thanks, Ryan, but no thanks, and I think, rather unfortunately, I think he's from Calgary, although he now lives in LA. So I am in due in Calgary in September. So you know, if he wants to apologise to me there, then that's absolutely fine.

Speaker 5: 15:43

Anyway.

Speaker 3: 15:44

Fight, yes, fight, fight, fight.

Speaker 4: 15:48

I know where my money is.

Speaker 5: 15:50

Right.

Speaker 4: 15:52

Cridland's been to the gym people.

Speaker 5: 15:54

Yes.

Speaker 4: 15:55

Yes, watch out, ryan. Yes, watch out. Anyway, now zipping over to France and the UK for this one. France's podcast industry has called for official government recognition for podcasting. Yes, we've seen this in India, canada and, of course, john Savage was asking for it in South Africa. It says if we want podcasting to remain a diverse, creator-driven medium, it must be recognised as a cultural industry in its own right. The organisation said in a statement following its AGM. Creator-driven medium, it must be recognised as a cultural industry in its own right. The organisation said in a statement following its AGM. This also follows on the back of the Audio UK asking for something similar, james. So is this something that, globally, all countries should now be doing?

Speaker 3: 16:38

Yeah, I didn't fully understand initially why and Canada have been asking for the same thing as well why this was a thing. But it turns out that there's two parts of this. Firstly, it means tax relief, which is an important thing if you are recognised as a core creative industry. So tax relief is a thing, and movie makers, for example, get that, tv makers in most countries get that, but podcast makers don't, and that seems a bit of a mistake. But also, secondly, it means that if you are recognised, it means that you get to help government set their policies, which, again, the audio industry is being frozen out of in both the UK, france, canada and other places. So, yeah, so it is actually a really important thing.

Speaker 3: 17:30

If you are in any of those countries, then both the Canadians, the British and the French are certainly asking for you to do a few things. One of them is to contact your MP, one of them is to sign a joint letter and there are various other things. I would very much push for that because you know I was unaware of what a difference it could actually make to the industry and it does seem a little bit weird that the Moron Box gets, you know, ticks of you know well, this is brilliant. This is part of our UK creative industry by the Moron Box. Obviously, I'm in television, but for audio we don't get any of that, and I think that that should probably change. So hurrah for France, hurrah for Audio UK in the UK, hurrah for Canada as well, and more power to you. From my point of view, Now I think it becomes.

Speaker 4: 18:25

I look at spotify and the music industry. It's become so amorphous across the globe. You know, guaranteed it's taylor, swift, bruno mars, ed sheeran. It's the same people in every country. There's no real distinction. I think culture has been lost through the globalization of, and I hope that we could keep the cultural localisation of podcasting. That would be my hope. Yeah, indeed, now the Comedy Podcast Festival is to expand into the US and it's also returning James to London, but coming to your part of the world in Melbourne.

Speaker 3: 19:02

Yes, it's a podcast festival called Cheerful Earful. Of course, we've just seen a very successful podcast festival. It's a podcast festival called Cheerful Earful. Of course, we've just seen a very successful podcast festival, which we'll talk about more in a few minutes. But Cheerful Earful is, I think, three years old. It's planning 15 days of live podcast shows across the world and they are in New York City for the first time, which is very exciting in partnership with their headline sponsor, adalicious. So you ended up talking with Giles Gere.

Speaker 4: 19:28

I'm excited because last week was the Golden Lobes and this week, thankfully, we have the organiser and the sponsor of those. So first of all, giles Gere, director for Cheerful Earful, hello, how are you?

Speaker 5: 19:40

I'm very well, thank you. I'm just about getting over the emotional and alcohol hangover of the lobes. But yeah, I'm well, sam.

Speaker 4: 19:47

Excellent and Andrew Goldsmith, ceo of Adelicious, welcome. How are you, andrew?

Speaker 1: 19:52

Thanks, Sam. Yeah, very well, Thank you very much. Yeah, it's a busy time of year, isn't it? For all of us in this industry. So, yeah, all good thanks.

Speaker 4: 20:05

Yeah, we've got the London podcast show coming up in two weeks, so we're all all decamping to that, so that should be fun. Let's start off charles, the golden lobes. What are they, what were they this week?

Speaker 5: 20:13

and and give us some highlights from the event I mean, yeah, the golden lobes were sort of born. I mean, everything it was is good to start as a pun, so they were pun based first, but they were born out of our podcast festival, which is cheerful earful. So cheerful earful is a festival of funny podcasts. It was born four years ago, so 2022, just in a handful of london pubs, and even back then andrew and adalicious were very kind and sort of you know, having a look at what was going on and helping us put things on. So it grew from a sort of four-day handful of London pubs because there wasn't, there was nothing in that space for comedy podcasts or even funny podcasts. And we do say funny podcasts. There's lots of mental health podcasts, sports one, I mean. Joe Marla made his sort of live show debut as part of the festival a couple years ago. So it's not out and out comedy necessarily, and they've they. And last year the festival had multiple days in London and in Melbourne as well, and then, just as they were coming to a close, I've worked in radio and audio and podcast for a while.

Speaker 5: 21:13

I've been on the other side of awards. I've always wanted to do awards and I, from a personal point of view, get a bit grumpy when they cost your mortgage to enter and then you have to remortgage to then get a ticket to the night itself and it can be a bit I don't know leave a bad taste. I was like, well, based on our infrastructure of our brilliant partners and supporters and sponsors, and also on the sort of network of comedy podcasts funny podcasts that we worked on over the years, could we put on our own awards celebrating the funniest people, podcasts and moments in the industry and have a bit of fun with it and have categories like best blooper, best tangent, as well as like more proper one in inverted commas. And I wanted to, but I couldn't think of a nice name. And then, as always, away with good ideas, a 3am thought came into my head. I used to be bullied for the size of my ears at school, so I was like right, I'll reclaim that. And the golden lobes were born and we put things in motion and it literally was a series of WhatsApps to some trusted, creative people that I know, the guys at Podlife Awards and I.

Speaker 5: 22:17

Just really, with the lobes, it was like we want them affordable, accessible and fun, affordable to enter. It's not 60 quid per category, it's 25 quid. Enter as many as you want. You know accessible. Any genre can enter. It's not out and out comedy. If you're really let's, you know, face it stagnant or boring business podcast, but you have a hilarious blooper.

Speaker 5: 22:37

Get involved and fun, because putting together your best bits and relishing of what you've done over the past 12 months should not feel like a slog. And when I worked in radio putting together a 15 minute entry, it was a bit of a. It was all this oh stress and everything. So we went five minutes, just do five minutes. The big one is 10 minutes. Let's just do five minutes. For all the other ones, though, and get involved, and it was a bit of a firing a creative flair in the sky to see would anyone care, would anyone get involved? And, and people did care, people did get involved, and, as of yet, we've had no cease and desist from the Golden Globe. So I think plans are already afoot for next year.

Speaker 4: 23:12

I think they feel threatened, giles, because on the back of your event, they announced that they're going to have a podcast category. I mean, I genuinely think they can't see you, but I think they feel the fear and they've moved with it.

Speaker 5: 23:24

Yeah yeah, exactly, exactly. And you know we were very, very lucky to have tons of. I mean, with the festival it's always a fantastic melting pot of indie creators, sometimes people doing their first ever live shows, and big boys as well. You know we had Lateral with Tom Scott. It's a massive, massive podcast. It sold out the Clapham Grand last year but had never done a live show and we facilitate that. And with the festival everyone gets the exact same ticket split. You know, whether you're tiny, tiny, never done a live show or you're, we're trying to, you know, convince big agents to get involved, kind of thing.

Speaker 5: 23:53

And we had the amazing Frank Skinner was nominated for a couple of awards at this year's Loebs and he picked up the Loebs Legend Award for services to funny audio. We had this Paranormal life picked up the biggest award, which is the big ears award in brackets, basically the funniest show of the year, like they're an independent show that have been going for eight years but have tons and tons of downloads. So it was just this fantastic melting pot of small creators, big creators, producers, all at the clapham grand raising a glass, and we had a very, very fun silly tongue and cheek awards night. We had a few pop-up appearances from Stephen Bartlett supposedly some people have questioned whether it really was him and again.

Speaker 5: 24:34

That was important on the night was not to just have a two, three hour slog where lots of names, lots of applause. We wanted it to be quick, fun and lots of mingling and networking time and and I'm not just saying this because Andy's on the call, but I had a really interesting email from one of the guys at this Paranormal Life so our winners who said we loved that you were so, rather than keeping partners and any paid for sponsors hands off, we love all of the proactive promotion and we're going to be working with Orthonic. We want to pick up this. We want to pick up that because we really curate the partners we work with and we want to encourage collaboration well beyond just the festival or just the awards, because that's the only way the industry will grow yes, and while you were talking, can I throw two names into the hat for awards, because you've got big ears.

Speaker 4: 25:22

But clearly there has to be the linekers. I mean there must be an award for the linekers and and the dumbo awards, they've got to be those for the bloopers. I mean, just you know, yeah, and I'm sure that you'll get many other suggestions now. On a postcard now given, given that the event is, was it inaugural event or is this the second event?

Speaker 5: 25:42

this was the inaugural golden lobes, yeah, and it was from a slightly, you know, businessy point of view. We've got our sort of festival in October Q4, and we wanted something in Q2 that was captured the creativity, because with a festival, with events, you know you've got one thing in the year and then it sort of disappears for 10 months and then it pops back up again. We thought, well, we have so many hungry, funny podcasters in this network gagging to do more stuff and you know, and all partners who want to be collaborating the most. So it was like what you know, the awards just really fitted that of wanting to have something halfway through the year before we have the festival in october. That just continues it and just falls under the same brand and keeps sort of pushing everyone forward. And you know we have people who have performed at the festival and got involved with the awards or vice versa, and some people have never heard of the festival. But the awards are a great sort of entry point for them because some will care more about the, the recognition.

Speaker 5: 26:36

And you know, I was just about to swear there, sam, I wouldn't dare, but we, we made sure we, we offered a bucket load. I was gonna say fuck ton. But let's say bucket load of free stuff from all of our partners. You know free studio sessions and onboarding. And orthonic said you know you can have free this, free, that and we had. You know all these bespoke stuff. So for 25, you know money, 25 quid couldn't buy you that normally, let alone just being nominated for the awards. So it's really important that we gave back as much as possible and and, of course, sent out a good old Google form afterwards and said what can we build on, what can we do better? And there was some really good feedback already, you know, on venues and, like you say, sam, on awards, you know there wasn't enough, necessarily queer representation, there weren't enough. You know women's awards and all this kind of thing specifically.

Speaker 4: 27:26

So that's great, and it's already. You know plans in motion, like I said, for 2026, all being well, excellent. Now, andy, let's come to you First of all who are what is Adalicious.

Speaker 1: 27:34

Let's just get that out of the way. Oh yeah, ok, so hopefully we're not the best secret in the podcast industry anymore, but just in case there is a little corner of the industry that don't know us, we are the uk's biggest independent podcast hosting and monetization network. We are approaching our fifth birthday in august, so we're starting school pretty soon. We can read, we can write, we can talk, but we're growing very, very quickly and I suppose one of the best early decisions we ever made actually was aligning with Giles and Cheerful Earful, because we always wanted to, you know, say a flag in the sand for this kind of like missed tier of podcasts.

Speaker 1: 28:16

You know, I suppose like the last boys and girls in the industry, because they're not necessarily chart topping or considered some of the best. These are amazing content creators, an incredible group of podcasters and creators, and we wanted to champion those and cheer for, as giles said, their kind of whole thing was. We're not just about, you know, the chart toppers, we're about anything and anybody in every kind of genre within that funny space, and we just felt like independent, kind of festival, independent network, just aligned and the whole content was brilliant but, yeah, growing quickly given your participation, is it purely a monetary participation or do you do anything more with the event itself, you know, does your support extend beyond just a pure monetary sponsorship?

Speaker 1: 29:00

it's.

Speaker 1: 29:01

I suppose we're probably entering the fourth year this october, giles, I think, and we try and push it on every year.

Speaker 1: 29:09

It started as a way for us to give Cheerful Earful a step up and make the event actually happen.

Speaker 1: 29:15

What we quickly found, actually when we supported year one, was that it turned into an opportunity for us to kind of represent people that we weren't always aware of and they were able to kind of come to us and find us, and I think Giles has done a very good job of finding partners that can extend beyond just a monetary partnership and into something that really genuinely gives back to either the industry or to individual creators that need a little bit of help. So we support in every single way we can, from marketing and promoting and pushing the event through to, you know, if partners are coming through as a result of seeing us on that, we work with them in a very deep and meaningful way. So we're really kind of proud of this relationship and how it's evolved, and I can't see us ever, ever not wanting to be Giles's headline sponsor in anything that he does, and it just made natural sense for us to kind of step in with the lobes as well.

Speaker 5: 30:07

Can I just say, sam as well. First of all, I'd like a recording of that just to make sure I can put that in the contract. That's good In perpetuity Rise each year, exactly, exactly. But that is really important because we've all been both sides of the coin asked for money or asked people for know, for sponsors and everything, and I'm deadly serious in sort of doing this sort of funny business of we don't just want to slap a logo on things. You know and I will try and speak with any potential partners or lapsed ones or ongoing ones go, what is really of value to you and some, some of them it is we want our logo everywhere and that's great. But some want to, example, host a branded drinks during the festival where they can invite clients along and showcase their shows, but the shows themselves are still getting the ticket split. Part of the festival, that. But for the sort of the you know, for an Adelicious, they are getting to bring on clients to go look at what's going on, kind of thing, whereas for others they want those email addresses or they want to properly invite people to sample their tools.

Speaker 5: 31:06

You know there might be a let's let where are we on now? Descript, are we? Yeah, let's say a descript, not them yet, but let's say a descript. Say we want to have access to people. Go, do you realize this could be especially those smaller or India emerging creators? Do you know these? All these tools exist, you know, and so let what Orphonic's best example, best example where you know we hand over those email addresses and we properly promote them again. Look, if you use orphonic and I can say from personal experience I've had someone record what sounded, you know, like a goldfish bowl was absolutely pants you pop it in orphonic, click a button and it's good to go, so they get a proper endorsement rather than logo slaps, and you know that's that makes it much more interesting to me, because commercial partners know if it's just a logo slap and you disappear, you know if you just squeeze money for no reason, that's true.

Speaker 4: 31:50

Now you've talked about your other event, cheerful Earful the festival. Give us a feel for that event and why it's. You know, something that people should come along to yeah no pressure, but I mean blooming nora.

Speaker 5: 32:05

I mean, yeah, I mean you're starting the 10 giles. I know, I know I wouldn't, I'm not even the best person to talk about that, but I mean just in the, just in the way that in the early days, sort of andy and adalicious got it in inverted commas and said, yeah, we see this, we, we, we want to support this. We had a sort of a number of legacy shows or older sort of shows that did exactly the same, like pappy's birthday girls, desert island dicks who are on just now. They, they understood what we were going for. We were saying, look, we want to create a creator first festival with a gigantic, you know, ticket split in your favor. You know, for us it's, it's just a laugh, it's fun.

Speaker 5: 32:43

And then, equally, the bedford embalm, who put on loads and loads of events, got it and they were like, can we be the festival hub? You know, they've got this amazing, beautiful sort of 360 theater space built into the pub I would highly recommend for any live podcast, you know, you can have 25 to 130 people in there. And then upstairs you've got smaller rooms where we put on our smaller shows, you know. And then alley at the Clapham Grand for our headline shows, and so I can't remember what your question was. Well, give us a flavour of it. Yeah, the flavour is this sort of you know, I come from professionally and sort of personally, a background of comedy and being around festivals. I love the Leicester Comedy Festival, the Fringe, in the old days, let's say, and it was like, well, how can we do something like that for comedy podcasts, where the guys performing and the people attending could just almost tumble into each room and go what's going on here and here? And, you know, discover new shows, see their favorite podcasts live? You know, we trusty hogs from year one really get it and trust us.

Speaker 5: 33:41

And then last year, you know, we gave them a headline slot and they sold 500 plus tickets and and that was just a lovely full circle moment and so for us, each year it's I always say we want to grow, we're global but grassroots. You know, this year we are going to New York for the first time, so we will have London nine days, three days in Melbourne, three days in New York. You know, it's big boy stuff, but we're grassroots and it's sort of just me and a team of friends, slash volunteers, slash, you know freelancers, and we're keeping it independent and fun and any growth we do has to be considerate and kind to everyone as part of the ecosystem. It's not just pressing the button and doing growth for the sake of it, because you will lose identity. You know, I've seen that happen with festivals and so for me, the best, especially at the final weekend in London and you have to come along, sam, when you're going, you're just wandering around the pub and you've got, you know, these back-to-back of live comedy podcasts going on and especially because they book their comedy friends, you never know who's going to be there.

Speaker 5: 34:36

In the final show of the festival we had james acaster in a room with 100 people. I mean you'd be paying, you know, again remortgaging for a third time just to see him on tour these days, but it was great because they all just book their, their friends and mates and get them involved and there's so much crossover. So it's a love to be a part of and to come watch your shows. I mean I try as much as hand over the actual run of it during the week so I can just enjoy myself. You know I did that at the Loebs last Wednesday. I just wanted to enjoy the show.

Speaker 4: 35:00

Yeah, I can't think of a better way of putting it really now, if you had a magic wand, is there anything you would want to change or do differently with either the lobes or the cheerful airfield festival gosh?

Speaker 5: 35:12

do you know what? No, I can't think of, and that's not me trying to be humble or arrogant. It's always been a creative, fun side hustle. Essentially, you know, it's been an experiment that has grown. It's just joyful to see and I'm so chuffed with where they've grown to and especially when, on the lobes, it was a bit like you know, back in 2012 watching the Avengers assemble for the first time.

Speaker 5: 35:32

We had all you know, the, our production manager and our technician, everyone that helps out in October at the festival came along to the Clapham Grand to help run the lobes and it was just a really, really lovely collaboration and I think that sort of crossover between the podcasters and the partners and just people getting involved is joyful. So maybe a logo refresh, maybe I don't know, but I'm quite happy with the colour scheme. Or maybe I wouldn't have gone to Melbourne as much, because then all of the profit line completely disappears on plane tickets. But again, it's just fun being part of it. I mean, for example, I'm a massive fan of Aunty Donna. I mean, aunty Donna some know, some people don't are gigantic comedians. You know titans in Australia. They had a Netflix series. They're doing a world tour again this year and they took part of, you know, one of their sort of spin-off podcasts as part of the festival last year, and I was just an absolute giddy child. I couldn't believe it. So I think it's really joyful seeing these smaller, growing podcasts who are so hungry for coming back to the festival performing again and also for the lobes, because, as I said, I've been there, I've been a bit cynical of radio awards and podcast awards and you sort of think, oh, I didn't win, for god's sake, why not?

Speaker 5: 36:35

What was it this time, you know? And but there was just such a goodwill in the room and people posting online say, you know, I mean I might not have won, but I spoke to this, I spoke to I, you, I had one podcast going. What was the name of the podcast studio that was your partner, and I was like, oh, podshop. They're like, yeah, brilliant, thank you, you need to go speak to them. And I was like, oh, great, lovely. You know, I've never experienced that before.

Speaker 4: 36:56

Can people watch back online anywhere the lobes? Was it recorded and is it available?

Speaker 5: 37:04

Short answer, no Long answer. No, that's my fault. Technically they are international and we did have quite a few entrants from the US and from Australia as well, and that was some really good feedback we got from people. Offers that we to improve that accessibility.

Speaker 5: 37:17

I was quite keen on not doing it in London, but sometimes you got to listen to your headline sponsor and it wasn't actually Andy, but one of his staff was like do not do it, do not do it in Leicester. I think that was more for other reasons, for diary reasons, but you know I'm really keen on the clapham grand is fantastic setup for live streams and whatnot, and so you know, again, I'd be keen to collaborate with someone to help facilitate that, because it's really important, because you know, it's not just a ticket to an event, is it? It's the train tickets, the hotel, it's this is that it can all add up, especially for those smaller podcasters, which why we were trying to offer as many giveaways and prizes and as much free stuff for them as to make it humanly sort of worthwhile again moving forward, then.

Speaker 4: 37:57

Where can someone find out about tickets for the cheerful earful festival? What's the website?

Speaker 5: 38:03

it is cheerful, earfulcouk. We've had a bit of a website refresh, which I'm pretty, pretty proud of as well, because you know it was always going to be the festival. And then just, and you know, and the golden lobes was a little spin-off and then, and then the lobes sort of slightly I feel like they might take over the mantle in the coming years. They seem to be such positive feedback to them. So now we're trying to call ourselves the unofficial headquarters of funny podcasts. So we've got the festival, we've got awards and we've got a few other things cooking away in the background to try and bring podcasters and podcast fans together more, with some meetups, mashups kind of thing, because that was a lot of feedback as well.

Speaker 5: 38:39

This sort of mingling, I mean, I've never known it before. We said we are not providing food, the budget doesn't allow it, we are not providing food. If you want to disappear off at 8 45, go for it. And the mingling went on until the bar. People were just kicking people away and it was just so great to see. So for me it was a lovely and a good learning point of people care about mingling, networking, meeting new podcasters and other people. And someone was saying either people was. You know I was. I'm fairlyverted, I need to know who's on the tables, and could you have almost some chaperones and introduce and make you know, because people find it difficult to. I mean, look at Andy, he's a. Look at that haircut. He's an intimidating guy, you know. So sometimes you need a middle person to go right. This is Andy from Adelicious and then Andy go who are you? And this person go. I get 200 000 weekly downloads and andy goes wow, brilliant, you know, welcome to the party, kind of thing sponsor abuse online live.

Speaker 4: 39:31

I've never seen it before, but it's amazing it's relentless, yeah, yeah andrew. If anyone wants to know more about adalicious, where would they go?

Speaker 1: 39:41

so adaliciousfm is the best thing. A bit like giles, we had a. We had a refresh on our website, but that was last year. Now it looks brilliant. But, yes, you can get us there, you can get me at andrew, at adalicious dot fm, and we're going to be at the podcast show next week.

Speaker 5: 39:55

Got a big stand there, bigger than we had last year, and yeah, please do, please, just give us a shout sam, I know you've got your script because, but I do want to put on record purely just to you know, bring it back a bit because I've insulted andy too much, but we could not have built cheerful, earful to where it is without adlicious support and getting it. And I've worked in the industry. You know day job and then this as well, and it is tiring, having to explain and re-explain, trying to bring people along and trying to, and people go. Who are you again and what, what?

Speaker 5: 40:24

And I've had people, potential sponsors, who are basically comedy podcast makers or comedy podcast whatever, and they go well, we don't see much of a sync up here and I'm like it's in the name, what don't you get, whereas Adlish has got it from the sort of first syllable, not yet we get it. And so the growth that we see again is always done creatively and considerately. But we could not have gone global in averted commas or done the lobes without those guys just getting it and sporting it. I think that some of the shows on their network now I mean you've got the creme de la creme of comedy podcasters and comedians and you know Frank Skinner's sitting on there. You've got Shag Married, annoyed, which is, you know, apps have been there for the best part of a decade now just doing what they do, so it's phenomenal. Thank you, thank you.

Speaker 1: 41:03

Giles, that's very kind of you to say. Yeah, I mean comedy and funny. It's a phenomenal kind of environment to be in. It puts a smile on people's faces quite literally. So yeah, and thanks for the shout out, giles.

Speaker 2: 41:16

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

Speaker 4: 41:25

James, let's zip around the world back to your favourite people. The BBC has quietly removed BBC Sounds app from international stores. Why, why, why, why, James?

Speaker 3: 41:35

Why, why, why, indeed, yes, so the BBC Sounds app is going away on July, the 21st, for everybody outside of the UK. That's the app that the BBC produces, which is there for music radio podcasts. As they say at the front of every single podcast that is going away in that voice Music radio podcast.

Speaker 7: 41:55

BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts, your finest Yorkshire that is going away.

Speaker 3: 42:03

For those of us outside of the UK, it continues inside the UK and it turns out that it's already been removed from the international app stores, so you won't be able to download that anymore. If you are running the old version as I know a few people are then it tells you to update it for the newest version, and then you try updating it and it says no, you can't update this anymore. So brilliant, another triumph from the organisation, but still. But there we are. Anyway, what happens after then? If you want to listen to on-demand radio from the UK, then no, you're stuffed. You can't do that anymore. That is now no longer available to anybody. You will be able to listen to live radio, and the way you listen to live radio is you look, sadly, at the new bbccom website, bbccom slash audio. You try and find the radio station that you want to have listened to, and that might be BBC Radio Berkshire or it might be BBC Radio 2. You don't find it in that app, you end up clicking a link marked Audio FAQ. You then end up scrolling to the middle of that link and in the middle of that link it will give you direct links to the BBC Sounds live stream website, which remains open for people outside of the UK.

Speaker 3: 43:24

You are probably thinking now, what a bloody mess. And it is a total mess. They couldn't have made this any worse if they possibly tried. There are some reasons behind it, but frankly, I think that they could have been doing this much, much better, but still. But all of that is going on. So basically're using the the bbc sounds app. Then, firstly, you shouldn't be, and then secondly, well, tough, because it'll go away in a couple of weeks time anyway I live here and I still don't understand what the bbc is doing anymore these days.

Speaker 4: 43:57

But there you go.

Speaker 3: 43:57

No, no anyway, zipping over, let's go to your favorite place?

Speaker 4: 44:02

yeah, I don't know if it's my favorite place. I was, you know. I was chucked on a train and found and handed into Mother Teresa's. I don't know if it's my favourite place, but let's go back to India. Yes, very weirdly.

Speaker 3: 44:13

Sam Sethi's life story there in half a sentence.

Speaker 4: 44:18

Oh yes. Have you ever seen the film?

Speaker 3: 44:20

You could make a podcast out of that, but no. No, I'll throw it away in half a sentence in episode 143 of Pony's Weekly Review.

Speaker 4: 44:29

Yeah, well, look, when the film Lion came out with Dev Patel and Nicole Kidman, my phone went off the Richter scale. It's the story of your life, sam. You, you know, abandoned and adopted. Yeah, I said my mum wasn't Nicole Kidman, so let's move on Now. Anyway, back in India, the India Brand Equity Foundation has been looking at India's podcasting revolution and it says it has an estimated audience now of 200 million plus, which puts it third behind China and the USA. According to this report, $3.72 billion US dollars, that is by 2030. And I don't know. You know we've always seen these big numbers published in the future, but again it looks like there's some real growth. And we talked a few minutes ago about France, canada and the UK asking for tax relief for podcasting. Well, india put in $1 billion to podcasting only what four or five months ago we were reporting. So you know they are putting a lot of money and emphasis behind podcasting.

Speaker 3: 45:37

Yeah, no, indeed it's. I mean, you know, I've always been looking into India, looking at that market and thinking that is a real, significant growth market, so it's really interesting to be seeing more data coming out of that market. I do know, by the way, that there will be quite a few speakers from India speaking at Radio Days Asia and indeed Podcast Day Asia, which is in Jakarta in early September. If you'd like to go by the way to that and you are and you might find yourself in Indonesia in early September then do drop me an email because I may have a few tickets for you. So you know, if you fancy a couple of days of learning about radio and podcasting, then that's a thing. But no good to see that information coming out of the Indian market. There's also been more information coming out of the Canadian market as well, hasn't there?

Speaker 4: 46:35

Yeah, so it says Canada reaches 39% of Canadian adults monthly as YouTube surpasses Spotify as the platform of choice. Sounds very interesting, James. Tell me more.

Speaker 3: 46:48

Yeah, so this is data from Signal Hill Insights. Now, one of the difficulties about this is it says Canadian monthly podcast listeners now account for 39% of the population. That is a much smaller figure than Edison Research's infinite dial, which is over 50% now for the US, for the UK, australia and New Zealand. Now, of course, it's worked out in a slightly different way and again this kind of underlines the point that I keep on making, which is let's just get infinite dial in as many countries as we possibly can, because that would be really helpful to get data worked out in exactly the same way in all of these other countries. But so either it says that the data is worked out exactly the same way in all of these other countries, but so either it says that the data is worked out very differently or it says that podcasting is not quite there yet in the Canadian market. And certainly, having a look at the differences between French Canadian and English Canadian, there are still some clear differences there in terms of French-Canadian not quite getting yet into the same numbers as English-Canadian shows are.

Speaker 3: 47:52

But you know, interesting taking a look at that and that data which is available from Triton, although behind an email wall, which I'm getting more grumpy about and so may not even link to that. That data comes out at the same time as rather sad news from the Podcast Exchange, which was, I think, the first podcast advertising agency in Canada it was launched in 2018 and news this week that that company is filing for bankruptcy protection. So essentially, it's the chapter 11 equivalent in Canada which allows TPX to continue to operate, but they're under supervision and they need to submit plans to restructure and fix their business. So I think I've been covering the podcast exchange ever since it launched back in 2018. So, you know, wish them all the best, but that again, I think, points to some of the difficulties of podcasting in that country.

Speaker 4: 48:52

Yeah, and we've talked about that in the past. You know PodNorth has talked about it quite often as well. How you know, there have been challenges over in, and you've talked about radio being very funny over there as well.

Speaker 3: 49:04

Yes, well, it's quite a lot of. It comes down to the concerns that the government has that Canadians won't just become a 51st state and consume the same media as all of the US does, and so they regulate everything incredibly strongly, which essentially means that it's very difficult to actually operate a decent business because you have to deal with all of the regulations. So, really, what appears to be going on, certainly in the broadcast radio business, is that the regulations that have been put in place by the government are actually killing the business and doing the opposite of what they actually want, which is more Canadian content out there, more Canadian broadcasters and all of that. So it's a very strange old thing, but, yes, it's a bit of a messed up area, and, of course, newspapers are doing incredibly badly in that part of the world as well. So, yeah, not all good up in the frozen north.

Speaker 4: 50:09

Moving on, then Jobs, who's moving, and grooving James this week.

Speaker 3: 50:13

Well, a movement away from platform media to Crowd Network. Dara Kelly is Crowd Network's new Director of Strategic and Commercial Partnerships. They are a big sports podcast company based in Manchester. They've made a number of other hirings as well Down here in sunny Australia. Nine Audio, which looks after Nine's podcasts, has unveiled all kinds of new commercial leadership stuff. The point of the changes at Nine Audio, we're told by industry analysts, is that Nine, channel Nine, the TV company, is looking at basically selling the radio stations and the podcasts to anybody that has the money. So that may well be why they are making some very careful changes in terms of how that business works. And Neil Carruth, who I remember from NPR he then moved to Freakonomics Radio. He's now been made general manager of Silver Tribe Media, which is a company that I'm not very familiar with, but it's a digital media management and production company. He's a very well-known and very intelligent guy about podcasting, so good to see him moving onwards and upwards.

Speaker 4: 51:27

Now whiz around some awards and events. Now, friend of the show, dina Sophos and a few other people put together CrossWires up in Sheffield recently. James, what happened?

Speaker 3: 51:37

Yes, a brilliant, large, large podcast festival. So this wasn't a conference, it was a festival of lots of shows being recorded live in front of large audiences. One of the people who was there was Michael Palin, the old Monty Python member of Monty Python. I mean, they're all old, aren't they? But you know what I mean. And he was Still alive as well, okay, that's technically useful Still alive.

Speaker 3: 52:04

Yes, which is always handy. He ended up reading the deleted end scene of Life of Brian. So if you want to have a listen to that, you'll find that, because we've got it on the Pod News website in video.

Speaker 4: 52:19

So he's not just a naughty boy then.

Speaker 3: 52:22

So that was very good. 20,000 people is the figure that Dino has shared in terms of the amount of people who ended up going there. I counted 37 different things that you could buy tickets for at the event, so it's a massive, great big podcast festival. I think it's the biggest in the world and nobody has yet kicked up a fuss at me thinking that. So that's probably a good thing, but good for Dino. I think one of the nice things that I liked about it is that it was based in Sheffield. It wasn't based in London. It wasn't another event in London Based in Sheffield. They ended up even taking over a very famous department store in the centre of Sheffield, the Coles Brothers store, which has been empty and unused for quite some time, and they ended up taking that over for the festival, which I thought was a brilliant idea and, yeah, it's just a really good thing, the BBC jumping to its support very highly. So well done, dino and the rest of the crew. I thought that was a fantastic thing.

Speaker 4: 53:30

Yeah, I'm going up to the Edinburgh Festival for the first time this year.

Speaker 3: 53:34

Oh, my word.

Speaker 4: 53:35

Yeah, no, no gosh. It was on my wife's bucket list, so we're doing it, and the thing about it is so many shows, so many events. I can see this event here CrossWires, you know taking over bigger and better over the next few years. I can see this becoming even bigger than it is this year.

Speaker 3: 53:54

Yeah, well, I certainly hope so. I thought it was a masterstroke of Dino to host it away from the capital, because I think that that's really helpful and really good that the BBC got so behind it that quite a lot of those events were free, so you could, as long as you got hold of the tickets, just turn up and away you go. So, yeah, I thought it was a really smart move and good for them for doing that. I wonder where the US equivalent is. There are a few podcast festivals, but not to this size or this scale. So I wonder whether somebody in the US wants to copy that winning formula.

Speaker 4: 54:36

Now talking about another group that meets up in the north of England. Vic Turnbull has a group that she's been running for a number of years called MIC's Mike's Podcast Club, and they've got their summer drinks coming up on July the 17th. So again, if you want to go to that, it's a great event. Vic does a great job of bringing the community together, so well done.

Speaker 3: 54:58

Yes, next week will you be driving up to sunny Manchester?

Speaker 4: 55:02

No, A, it won't be sunny there never is no, it's Manchester. Yeah, and it's got Oasis all over the place. No, don't worry about that?

Speaker 3: 55:12

A, a, a. We've just been talking about a podcast festival. Of course haven't we. And here's another one, the London Podcast Festival, which takes place in early September, just weirdly, just 10 minutes from the venue of the podcast show. It's at King's Place, which is where the Guardian newspaper is based, very close to King's Cross, and they've just announced a number of big shows taking part in the 10th year for that podcast festival. So, yes, you should jump on now and buy tickets for some of that. Acast are this year's official partner as well, so worth going to, I think.

Speaker 4: 55:50

I might try and zip along to that one. Now, one thing that we have been trying to do for a little while and I'm glad it's happened Adam Curry is going to be at a podcast movement this year. Rocky Thomas, friend of the show, one of our power supporters, was on the Podcasting 2.0 show a couple of weeks back and she sort of gently nudged Adam into being on stage with her, which is brilliant. And he's on after lunch, not during lunch, not in a little box, but he is on after lunch at 1.30 with.

Speaker 4: 56:24

Rocky. I still think it's not the right time slot. I still think Adam Curry, given what he invented and who he is, should be the keynote. But that's up to Dan Franks. But I am super glad that he is now at least going to be there and maybe we can convince Adam to do one more presentation at the London Podcast Show as well.

Speaker 3: 56:48

Well, I mean, that would be good, wouldn't it? But yes, no, wonderful news to hear that Adam is going to be at Podcast Movement. They've not Podcast Movement themselves haven't actually made that announcement quite yet, but I'm certainly looking forward to seeing him again. I didn't spend an awful lot of time with him in Dallas and one of my regrets was not being able to go and spend an awful lot of time with him in Dallas, and one of my regrets was not being able to go and, you know, have a chat with him and all of that stuff. So hopefully we can make that work on this time.

Speaker 3: 57:16

He tells me he's flying in and out on the same day, so not even staying the night, and it'd be lovely if we could convince him just to stay one night. Stay one night, adam. Somebody will buy you a beer, might even be me, so that would be a good thing. But well done, rocky, in terms of doing that. If you want to go to Podcast Movement, then you should. It's in Dallas, in Texas, but don't let that put you off. And the code PODNEWS will save you lots of money on your ticket, so it's well worthwhile doing that.

Speaker 4: 57:47

Sadly, being a brown person, I won't be coming through customs.

Speaker 3: 57:51

And again I have nothing but praise for the United States of America.

Speaker 4: 57:57

So are you taking a burner phone and an alternative laptop?

Speaker 3: 58:00

No, I absolutely don't need to because, as I really need to reiterate, I have nothing but praise for the United States of America. Other things going on the New York City Web Fest is now accepting podcasts as an official category. That festival is October 3rd to the 5th, which you should go and take a look at. And in Madrid in Spain, Podwoman, which is a podcasting event dedicated to women in podcasting Hurrah. It's back for a third year, but this time it's its first in-person edition. Previous years have been online. That's taking place on October the 18th. All kinds of things going on with that. There's more details if you speak Spanish, because you'll need to, in the Pod News newsletter.

Speaker 4: 58:47

A few other events, James, that you might want to mention.

Speaker 3: 58:49

Yes, a couple more Radio Days Asia, which is happening in Jakarta in Indonesia, very early September Contact me if you'd like to go, but it looks a bit X-y and I'll see what I can do and Pod Summit YYC, which is happening in mid-September in Calgary in Alberta. I will be flying there from the UK, Looking forward to flying there. I'm flying there via Dallas, which was clearly not a mistake because, again, let me just stress how much a fan I am of the United States of America. The Tech Stuff on the Pod News Weekly Review.

Speaker 3: 59:25

Yes, it's the stuff you'll find every monday in the pod news newsletter. Here's where sam talks technology. What have we got, sam? Well?

Speaker 4: 59:33

our sponsor and friends at buzzsprout announced on buzzcast that they've got some new updates to their magic mastering. They've got a feature called filler killer and another feature called power clean. So filler killer is basically the removal of words, like you know, whatever, and power clean is the ability to use or take bad recordings and remove complex noises like chatter, wind traffic. I did try using it for last week's show. That didn't help. Um, they didn't have echo as well. It has reverb, but it didn't help. And the script studio sound didn't help. It just made me sound like a robot. John sounded fine, but I sounded like a robot. So but there is a new version and it may not have been the one I was using last week, so, but strangely j they haven't told you about it yet.

Speaker 3: 1:00:27

No, I mean, it's very good of them to announce it on their own podcast. Not all of us listens to the Buzzcast podcast. Perhaps we should, but still, there we are. It's the number one on a pod roll it is, but that's great news. I believe under the hood it's Orphonic, and Orphonic will be speaking at Podcast Movement. There is going to be a particularly excellent session, all about AI tools for podcasters, and I only mentioned that because I'm one of the people on that session. So, hooray, looking forward to that. That should be fun.

Speaker 4: 1:01:04

Now a bit like the funding tag. We've talked about this tag before, but it's now available. The new podcast image tag has been formalised and the full documentation is now online available. Again, james, remind me what has happened with this new tag.

Speaker 3: 1:01:20

Well, there used to be a podcast images tag and that was a bit useless. It was basically your thumbnail, but in different sizes, didn't necessarily fix a particular issue that most podcasters had and, you know, at the end of the day wasn't that helpful. What I'm very pleased to see is that podcast index has gone. You know what that wasn't working. We are going to get rid of that. We're going to replace it with the podcast image tag deliberately a different tag so that it doesn't cause any problems with anybody that's still using the images tag.

Speaker 3: 1:01:57

But what that enables you to do is it enables you to put specific size artwork or indeed videos and stuff like that, for anybody that wants them, inside your RSS feed.

Speaker 3: 1:02:10

So if True Fans wants to turn around and say we want a banner, we want a banner of this size and we would like it to be in WebP format, then please, then you could absolutely do that and that could be given to you with every single podcast using the podcast image tag. Similarly, that might allow Apple to take images directly from that rather than manually uploading it through an Airtable form, which is weirdly the way that they are currently doing it. So all of that stuff is really good and well worthwhile. I'm a little bit surprised that it's been formalised without any examples, or not examples, but any companies actually deliberately asking for specific sized artwork. I would probably have waited until I'd got a True Fans or an Apple podcast asking for specific size artwork in there, but nevertheless it's a super useful thing and there's been quite a lot of work done in terms of that, so hurrah for them.

Speaker 4: 1:03:12

Yeah, no, well done Dave Jones for pushing that forward. And you know we mentioned Nathan Gathright earlier about pod links. Well, he's also a very clever man and he's done a visualizer, a demo tool that you can then upload your graphic into and then see the different shapes and sizes and formats.

Speaker 3: 1:03:30

So congratulations, yeah no, that is a very cool thing, so that's lovely. Also lovely is a brand new demo for producing the podcast location tag. It's not just a demo, it's a UX demo as well. It's an ideal way of doing it for a user. It uses, you know, populates all of the OpenStreetMap ID, so it does all of that properly, differentiates between creator and subject, does all of that properly. It even handholds you through. Okay, this is a podcast about a place, but where are you recording it and where would you like? Would you like that piece of information in there as well? It's really nicely done. It uses a service called Location IQ, which has a free tier in it as well. I think it's 5,000 hits per day, so it's big enough for you if you self-host, certainly All in JavaScript. Very nice. Produced by Alberto Batella of rsscom and yeah, and it's definitely worth a peek. You will find that linked from the podcasting2.org website, along with a bunch of other things as well, but hurrah for them.

Speaker 4: 1:04:36

Now moving on another host doing some great stuff Transistor Justin Jackson's company. They have now supported the pod role.

Speaker 3: 1:04:45

Yes, they've supported the pod role in their podcast website, so Transistor has the pod role. Yes, they've supported the pod role in their podcast website, so Transistor has supported pod role for you. If you publish a podcast with them, now you can see all of the shows that you are recommending in your podcast website on the Transistor website, so that looks really smart. Not just that, though Transistor is also supporting HLS Video, which is currently supported by TrueFans. What's that? Or the Fountain Beta as well.

Speaker 4: 1:05:15

Why is anyone shocked when we say we already do it?

Speaker 3: 1:05:22

We need a t-shirt saying already implemented, mate, or something like that, but anyway. But if you are publishing again, if you're publishing with Transistor, you're publishing a show with Transistor you can now support HLS video in a nice beta way. You ended up catching up with Justin Jackson, who is one of the co-founders of Transistor a very bright guy and you started off by asking him what HLS is, what it stands for, and then later why we might need it.

Speaker 6: 1:05:55

So HLS stands for HTTP live streaming, and basically it breaks a media file into smaller chunks and delivers those kind of a few chunks at a time, so that instead of downloading a whole media file the way that we've traditionally done it in podcasting, it just serves little bits of that media file. And it's also adaptive. So if someone has a bad internet connection it can downscale the media. If it's a good internet connection, or if you're watching it on your big TV, it can upscale it to 4K. And so, technology wise, it's a very interesting technology. It was invented by Apple. All of the major centralized platforms like YouTube and Spotify use it to deliver media and in fact I'm almost certain that when Spotify was rehosting podcast media, it was delivering that via HLS.

Speaker 6: 1:06:52

And the interesting part for those of us in the open ecosystem is the old paradigm, for video and podcasting was something that Apple kind of instituted, which is a separate feed for video podcasts and then you'd have a separate feed for your audio podcast. So somebody like Leo Laporte would have two separate feeds for every single show he did. Here's the audio one and here's the video one. And if you go back and look at old screenshots of iTunes and Apple podcasts. You can see there was a switcher in the directory where you could browse by all podcasts, or you could just browse video podcasts and then browse just by audio podcasts.

Speaker 6: 1:07:34

So I think one big problem we're trying to solve here is what's a better experience is actually just to have one feed, have it audio first with the traditional audio enclosure we've always used, and then, if someone wants to switch to the video version like oh, they're talking about something you know on the wall they have a picture up, or I just want to see what they look like they could switch to the video version, get that information, switch back to audio if they want.

Speaker 6: 1:08:04

Or if they're walking home or driving home, they could get out of the car and airplay it up to their TV and watch it on the TV, so giving the listener more options. And it just also seems a better way to do video audio first. But if you want the video version, it's there available in a single feed, as creators don't have to maintain multiple feeds. And I think that was the interesting part for me is, from the user experience side it's much better. From the technology side it is better, but there are some challenges, some obstacles we'd have to overcome if we were going to implement it in the open ecosystem.

Speaker 4: 1:08:48

Okay, so let's just take some of that, because that's a lot of information there. I'm a podcaster, I'm on Transistor and I currently take my episode which I record and it's an MP3, in this case just the audio and I upload it to Transistor and at some point Transistor will support the HLS option and I can say, maybe I don't even need to Transistor, and at some point Transistor will support the HLS option and I can say, maybe I don't even need to do anything, I just upload what I give and Transistor automatically translates it into HLS, and then apps like Fountain, true Fans, podcast Guru can then consume that and play back the HLS. That's the goal that's right.

Speaker 6: 1:09:28

Yeah, if you can try this right now in true fans or fountain there's shows that support the hls video enclosure and if you could be listening along and you just switch to video right now, as long as the length of the audio file and the video file is the same, it's seamless. It'll just take whatever time code you're at on the audio file and just switch it to video and you'll be able to see it right there and you can see this video on the podcast standards project blog. So, and from the podcaster's perspective, I mean, in my mind, the ultimate kind of best user experience for a podcaster who wants to do audio and video is that they would edit their episode, export it as a video and then upload it to their podcast hosting provider. That would then get encoded as an audio file, but then it would also get encoded as a video file and delivered via HLS and the alternate enclosure and likely for, you know, youtube and Spotify. It would also just get syndicated to YouTube and Spotify.

Speaker 6: 1:10:36

That seems like for a podcaster who wants to do video and it seems like a lot of podcasters do, and maybe we shouldn't ignore those folks. If they want to do video and audio, then that seems like the best user experience. We just upload one file and then sure it gets automatically sent to YouTube and automatically sent to Spotify, although I do think there is a lever the open system has with Spotify in terms of them adopting something like the HLS alternate enclosure. But then in the open ecosystem, any app that supports this HLS and the alternate enclosure folks would be able to switch between the two versions. So it feels like kind of the best of all worlds when I describe it like that from the UX side, and I think it holds the tension of power nicely as well. So, especially if we could convince a big player like Apple to adopt it as well- and they don't adopt it.

Speaker 6: 1:11:37

Well, I mean, this is something we're working on at the Podcast Standards Project. I think, first of all, we have to overcome some of these challenges that I think we should talk about. First of all, we have to overcome some of these challenges that I think we should talk about, and Apple might be part of the solution. But, yeah, I do think having someone like Apple adopt this especially given you know they've stated publicly like they want to support the open podcast ecosystem They've been doing this for 20 years it would be great if they adopted it.

Speaker 6: 1:12:05

But in the meantime, our thought was well, you know some of these more nimble, smaller players like True Fans and Pocket Casts, and they could implement this right now. We could get some at least proof of the concept up and running so people can see from a user experience side, oh, this is the vision, this is how it works, and if you haven't experienced it, I think you should really try it. And the nice thing is that this is also an experience people will get on YouTube music, and it's also an experience that you'll get on Spotify right now. So it feels like the industry is kind of aligning on this idea that switching between an audio first podcast to the video version in the same feed is the way to go. But yeah, let we got. We've got some significant obstacles to overcome to get there okay.

Speaker 4: 1:12:56

So what are those obstacles? Because, as a host at transistor, one of the things is you know, I've heard one of the challenges is storage. But actually does this, apart from enabling a faster deliverer of video and making the experience better for the user, does it actually save you money as well? Is there any real tangible benefit to doing this? Because there's a lot of work required by the host in order to convert everything to HLS.

Speaker 6: 1:13:29

Yeah, there's a few challenges. I mean, almost all the hosting providers use outside CDNs and we're using AWS and Cloudflare and Node and all sorts of other providers to do the infrastructure part of our business. And one of the challenges with HLS is that the big providers who kind of offer a complete package, like Cloudflare Stream for example, it's very expensive. I think James Cridland did some number crunching.

Speaker 6: 1:14:02

And he figured like for the podcasting 2.0 show it'd be $492 a month. For the no agenda show, the $83,000 for Cloudflare stream. So obviously that's not doable. Our hope is that as an open podcast ecosystem, we can maybe look at these costs together. We can talk to providers and see if we can find a good solution. So Soundstack has a good solution. We think Cloudflare R2 might be another solution. It would require us to encode our own media files and there's some other challenges with it. But we're looking at how could we bring the cost down. And yeah, if we can't bring the cost down, then it's not doable. Now there's lots of flexibility.

Speaker 6: 1:14:57

I think some folks are like, well, the costs are too high, we can't even think about it. And I'm like, well, hold on, hold on, hold on. We're just moving ahead. We're reaching out to people every day. Hey, what do you think about this? I've got a bunch more people thinking about these problems and we're just trying to bring everybody together, all the smart brains, and say how could we do this in a tangible way?

Speaker 6: 1:15:19

And the nice thing about an open ecosystem is we can share all that information. For example, one creative solution is you know a lot of those streams that James was calculating are coming from Apple, and so there could be a world where Apple helps by caching the media on their servers on their side and, as long as I think Todd brought this up, from Blueberry, as long as Apple gives us something back, as long as we get analytics back from Apple, that would be a nice trade. Is Apple would all of a sudden get this, all this video that they could use in all sorts of ways for their premium subscription product, for their Apple TV product. Imagine you watch a podcast on your Apple TV and then afterwards it recommends, you know, shows on Apple TV. They could do all sorts of things on their side. That I think might be a nice trade. So there's some creative solutions to cost, but I think cost is a big one.

Speaker 4: 1:16:19

Yeah, and I think I think, from my brief understanding of it, is, if you were a host having to deliver an MP4 video file today, the size of that could be anywhere between 500 meg and a gig. Let's say as an example, and if the user then just watches I don't know five or 10 minutes of that full downloaded deliverable, I don't know five or 10 minutes of that full downloaded deliverable then the cost to the host is significant. But the user has just actually just used a small chunk of it. That's right. Hls is the promise, potentially that okay. Well, you will only request that 10 minutes and therefore the cost of delivery is only the 10 minutes of video, which might mean instead of 500 meg or a gig, we're only delivering 100 meg. That's right. That, hopefully, is cheaper in the long run than having to deliver the full 500 or one gig file that's right, and there's a lot more kind of underneath the hood.

Speaker 6: 1:17:23

There's a lot of requests that you have to figure out with HLS and more complex caching and delivery than static file. So I think it's the complexity that is raising the price right now. But again, one advantage of us working on this together is that if there's a lot of providers out there that want to be competitive you know AWS, cloudflare there's lots of them and we may be able to figure out a solution that you know, figure out the complexity together. But if we figure out a solution you're technically right, like if you're just delivering little chunks of video instead of the whole progressive download and it's downloading the whole file, then that save you. You know there will be significant cost savings on bandwidth there, which is usually the big cost.

Speaker 6: 1:18:15

Hosting the files is one thing the actual disk space but it's bandwidth that ends up killing you, and we've been used to delivering audio files that are 50 megabytes to 150 megabytes. So the scale of this is significantly more than anything we've tried. Does that mean we should not try? No, I think we should absolutely be looking at this. Does it mean, like a small company like Transistor could do this on our own. No, we're too small. But could an army of open source advocates figure this out? Yeah, I think we can, I think it's possible. And again, if the costs look like it's going to be too high, then we might have to shelve it for a little while until the suppliers get a little bit more competitive.

Speaker 4: 1:19:03

One of the questions I have in my mind is the content delivery network, the requirement and the cost of it. Which is the main cost we're talking about is because you're delivering a large file and somebody who's, let's say, in Canada and the requested user in Australia. You don't want to have to deliver that over the global network, so you have a local delivery. But actually if you're delivering small six second, 10 second chunks of content, do you actually need the content delivery network? I don't know if anyone's done the performance analysis to determine whether that's required still.

Speaker 6: 1:19:44

I think you still need something. Yeah, I think you still need something. Yeah, I think you still need something. That the, the, the challenge is that, again, we are used to delivering small little mp3 files almost always using a cdn. And there's other reasons for using the cdn, like even because caching comes into play, like a lot of the bandwidth savings is when you're caching a file, and so I don't know how that works with hls.

Speaker 6: 1:20:15

Actually, can you, are you still caching bits of that that you know, bits of that request? These are the things we're trying to to figure out. My preference would be for us to partner with, you know, a handful of experienced platforms and for them to just give us a really great price that would enable us to do this. That's the preference. Or partner with with, again, this could be a partnership with Apple and Spotify to say, why don't you guys cache the files and then just give us analytics back? There's multiple ways this could go, and then any of the requests from the smaller apps will be manageable. You know those costs could be manageable. So, yeah, the the the technical side. I don't completely understand, but my guess is you'd still want some sort of CDN, okay.

Speaker 4: 1:21:10

Now some of the other challenges. So you talked about storage analytics. Is there anything else that we need to discuss?

Speaker 6: 1:21:19

Well, to touch on analytics, I think analytics is the other one that's challenging. So even think about that. So if I'm switching between an audio file and a video file, what do we count that as two requests? Do we count that as one download? Two downloads? We're going to have a. We're going to have a request on the MP3. But as soon as they switch to the HLS stream, that will be another request and we also just don't even know how to treat HLS streams On the server side.

Speaker 6: 1:21:55

It's quite a bit more difficult to do analytics. You can see the requests but from the IAB's perspective, for example, that might not be enough. Most of the, the platforms that do HLS streaming, all of the analytics stuff happens on the client side. So they're tracking plays and pauses and you know how far through the video you've gotten all on the client side. Well, of course, in the open podcast ecosystem we can't do that. We I don't, none of us control what happens on apple or pocketcast or any of that. So that's actually we have on our podcast standards project github. We have an open discussion on that right now. How can we do server-side analytics in a reasonable way for HLS streams? And we've also asked the IAB what they think, because there's kind of two issues there. There's the technical issue of how do we, how do we measure this on the server side, and then there's the other issue of like, well, if people are switching between these two. It also brings up some interesting transparency questions for YouTube and for spotify, which is how are they managing that?

Speaker 4: 1:23:11

well, I think. I think the challenge here is let's put out the problem. The problem is hosts are looking to get back analytic data on what was actually listened and consumed. Yeah, whether it was audio, was audio or video. Yeah, the apps, as you say, have first party data. So, for example, with my TrueFans hat on, we know we measure the total listen time. So we know when you're on audio and when you're on video and we measure that as a single listen time metric. Yeah, we also know percent completed, which is very important as a secondary metric, because somebody like James Cridland's Pod News Daily if all you said was listen time was three minutes and then I listened to your podcast, justin, and I listened to 60 minutes well, that sounds like I listened to a lot more of your show, but actually I did 100% of James and I only did 60% of your show right, so percent completed is a secondary metric that I think we need to offer.

Speaker 4: 1:24:08

Now, one of the things that Apple did was support for the open podcasting 2.0 standard for the verify tag in three, maybe four months ago. Yeah, and I think you and many other hosts jumped on board and I think I argued that, given that you've supported delegated delivery, as it was called. You implemented the verified tag. You've done all the work with Apple. You've done all the work with Apple. Would it not be beholden to Apple to now give you that first party data back, right yeah, as part of the quid pro quo?

Speaker 6: 1:24:40

Yeah, I mean, this is something I think we should definitely be talking about, and we are talking about that, and we're talking about it with Spotify. We're talking about it with YouTube actually has an analytics API. So, as much as YouTube is sometimes, I think, a threat to open podcast ecosystem, some of the things they've offered are very open. You can get your analytics out of YouTube. So I think there's a conversation to be had there. I think this also reveals like where are we eventually going, like in 10 years? How could we imagine this looking Well, in 10 years, maybe everything is an HLS stream, both audio and video, and then it becomes a lot easier to determine when somebody is switching.

Speaker 6: 1:25:24

You know, it's just like they're not switching to the old audio enclosure, it's just all HLS and, you know, maybe the enclosure becomes the backup, you know, and then it's HLS first. I think that would be a interesting future for the open ecosystem. That's innovative. That would allow us to do all sorts of other interesting things, even for those ad tech folks listening. You know, hls has a lot of interesting things there for the folks who are excited about live podcasting. There's all sorts of interesting things there. So, yeah, I think it's worth just continuing to explore the technology, realizing that we got some obstacles to overcome. I think the third obstacle, after analytics, is just adoption. So we've got kind of three things happening all at once, which is, you know, you need hosting providers to adopt it, you need creators to actually use it. That's another open question is if we actually offer this to creators, will they care?

Speaker 4: 1:26:29

I don't think they need. I actually don't think they need to care because I think for them and for the user it's irrelevant. They know you don't say to somebody do you know? You're using mp3 right now? No, I don't know, I'm using mp4. By the way, that video was just in orbis or it was done in vogue or whatever. It would be right.

Speaker 6: 1:26:47

Nobody cares yeah, I think the question and it is a legitimate question, but so, like adam curry, his idea is most creators are just going to post it on YouTube. So why do we even need an alternative? And I think that's a perfectly valid perspective. The momentum to YouTube is massive, from both the consumer side and the creator side. However, when we've done surveys of our creators on Transistor and we ask them where would you like to publish video, they say everywhere. So if YouTube will take it, we'll send it there. If Spotify will take it, we'll send it there. If Pocket Cast will take it, if True Fans will take it, if Apple will take it, we'll send it there. So most creators want distribution. Most creators want to be wherever their audience is.

Speaker 6: 1:27:41

And if there's an additional advantage for a consumer, for example, which is when I listen to my video podcasts or when I consume my video podcasts on True Fans, I don't get all those annoying YouTube dynamically inserted ads every 10 minutes. I don't have to pay for YouTube premium to listen to this podcast ad free. I get the host read ads, which I I'm fine with, but all these other like dynamically inserted ads that YouTube's putting in, I don't get those. That's an advantage that they might enjoy and the creators themselves might say you know what? This is just better for us. We get our podcasts distributed more places. We get all sorts of additional flexibility, like we can run our own dynamic ads truly dynamic and put them in and take them out the way we always have on the audio side.

Speaker 6: 1:28:33

So I think adoption is a big challenge and it's multi-threaded right. Like we got to convince podcast players like Apple to adopt it, we got to convince hosting providers to offer it. I think that'll be less of a concern if we can figure out the economics and if creators are demanding it. Like if Apple said we're doing it. Like now you can get HLS video on Apple podcast. And I actually you know what we've also done is we've introduced a special video podcast app on the Apple TV and we've we're promoting it in a big way and now everybody's getting, you know, tons of streams on Apple TV.

Speaker 6: 1:29:17

I think that momentum would help a lot, but we're also willing to do with it without apple. For now. We're willing to move ahead and keep exploring it, and my call for anybody who's listening right now is if you have ideas on how we might do this, you can contact us by going to podcaststandardsorg. There's a contact button. There's also our GitHub is listed there and we've got some. If you click on the HLS video project, you can contribute to the conversation we're having there. But we do need knowledgeable people. I don't want people with opinions, I want people who have knowledge.

Speaker 4: 1:29:59

Enough of those people with opinions.

Speaker 6: 1:30:01

Knowledge and actual boots on the ground experience with these kind of technologies, who could lend us their expertise, and I think if we can solve these challenges, the whole open ecosystem will be better for it.

Speaker 4: 1:30:16

Yeah, it will. And one area that we haven't touched on and let's just finish on that is also live. So we have the lit tag within the podcast in 2.0. And again we're losing ground, in my humble opinion, to the likes of YouTube, who do a very good job today. I don't know if you see watch-als in Canada, but we have a lot of those in the UK for football matches. Yeah, you know, it surprised me when they first popped up. You know I'm watching a single human watching something else describing what they're watching. Yeah, and they will get a hundred thousand people watching this person watching a match.

Speaker 6: 1:30:54

Yes, and it's weird right, yes, I, I'm, I'm for it. I. I think one of the reasons I was excited to kind of figure this out is if we can figure out the cost stuff, especially then once we can deliver video through hls, then doing live stuff becomes a lot easier. And I mean I'm recording. I record a podcast today and we've been recording it live the last four episodes. I think I've been doing live streams ever since YouTube started allowing you to do that. You used to be able to do it with Google Meets. You used to be able to do a live stream. It's such a great way to engage with your audience as a podcaster. So, yeah, imagine you're, you open up true fans or pocket casts and all of a sudden there's a little thing at the top you probably already have this in true fans a little thing at the top that says you know, justin and sam are live right now, and then you know we do have that.

Speaker 4: 1:31:54

Do you want to do?

Speaker 6: 1:31:55

you have that do you want to listen live and do you want to interact live. Interactivity is the other piece. So I'm yeah, I'm very excited about that idea and you know, live has been a part of podcasting for a long time. Dan Benjamin was doing it back with five by five, lots of really popular live accidental tech podcast always does it live. It's a great way to monetize your podcast. You can you premium members get access to live and can interact live. So the pieces are all there. But to get it widely adopted, yeah, we have to figure out these three challenges, which is cost, analytics and then adoption. And once we're able to do that, yeah, then live becomes just another feature we can add, because it'll, the pipes will all be there, the infrastructure will all be there, the foundation is set and we can just build on top of that 100% agree and I think you know one of the people who's helping in the community quite a lot is Rocky Thomas from Soundstack, who's doing a lot of work over there.

Speaker 4: 1:33:02

I think Soundstack could be one of those partners that's nimble. You talked about finding a partner that's nimble. I think we might struggle with the likes of Cloudflare or AWS, who are generically providing CDN services, whereas Soundstack provide a lot of podcasting infrastructure and they own their own infrastructure and they also own Live 365, their radio network, and I think within all of that they understand what live delivery of content looks like, but also what that does with HLS. I think my current bet is hopefully that Soundstack step up to the mark and become that infrastructure element for all of the podcast ecosystem.

Speaker 6: 1:33:46

They're in the conversation for sure. Yeah, and I mean there's other kind of tricky parts like ingress, and you know there's what do we call the bandwidth agreements between providers. So if somebody is uploading something to AWS, is there a bandwidth agreement so that you can transfer it over to the CDN without any cost? There's a lot of technical steps in there, but, yeah, soundstns in the podcast ecosystem, independent CDNs and hosting providers that you know are kind of provide the infrastructure layer. There could be a big opportunity there as well. If you, if you love setting up servers, there could be an opportunity there as well.

Speaker 4: 1:34:34

So, yeah, so one person who's done that already is pod two, russell Harrower. He's set up his own CDN with his own hosting to eliminate that potential extra cost. And I know Stephen Bufrom, who helps Adam a lot, uses a third party, much cheaper service called Bunny, I believe Bunnynet. Yes, yeah, so you know there are alternatives to the big players. I just think you know how you skin this and I think it will be interesting. I think somebody like yourself, who's the CEO of Transistor, must be having those thoughts and conversations about do we do this ourselves? Do we still outsource it? What's the benefit?

Speaker 6: 1:35:12

I think most small companies we're a six person company Most small companies won't do it themselves. That is, I think it would be difficult to be profitable. Doing that Not impossible, I'm sure it's possible, but I think it would be difficult to be profitable, and so I'm in favor of whatever option is in the open ecosystem allows these small, independent companies to still make a profit. That's really one of the great things about the open ecosystem is that open protocols spread the wealth, and one of the reasons I've been excited about podcasting from the beginning is there's all these small little companies.

Speaker 6: 1:35:53

You go to a podcast conference. Who's setting up booths? It's all these small little companies. You go to a podcast conference. Who's setting up booths? It's all these small little companies, you know, and in order for us to continue to be a vibrant industry, we need some alternatives, not alternatives. We need an answer to video, we need an answer to things like HLS, an answer to live, and so how are we going to get there and how can we make sure that, you know, the open ecosystem continues to thrive and all these small little businesses can also continue to exist?

Speaker 4: 1:36:29

Justin Jackson, CEO of Transistor and also the driving force I'll give you that behind PSP. Thank you so much. Take care, my friend. Yeah, thank you. There you go, Justin Jackson. James, I need to ask you a couple of questions now, because we're on a WhatsApp group together. Yes, yes, and you've been doing some maths. Your maths scared the heebie-jeebies out of me because I think you calculated no agenda. Adam Curry's show would be $82,000. Is that maths correct? Or what are we doing? Because if it is, how does any host make any money in this industry?

Speaker 3: 1:37:10

I mean so yes, there's a lot of questions there. Sam Seeking answers over this side of the water there's a lot of questions there, sam.

Speaker 3: 1:37:22

Where do I start with that? Well, I mean, I think probably the first thing to just mention is that there are maths involved with hosting HLS, and I am still having problems understanding why you and me both then HLS, and I am still having problems understanding why you and me both then. Not that Nathan Gathright has got anything more to do in this world, but he too has been having a look at the maths as well. It ends up being very much more expensive to host a file using HLS than it is just to use a traditional CDN and to have one download. So the example that Nathan has redone all of the maths because maths and I don't always go together, but Nathan has redone all of the maths to work out that, yes, no Agenda could cost something in the region of $82,000 if you were to host it as an HLS stream just in audio, by the way, just as a 96k piece of audio, if you were using a traditional CDN, it would still cost $10,200 to host that show.

Speaker 3: 1:38:35

It is a very popular show, it's very big, costs a lot.

Speaker 3: 1:38:40

But if you were to use a service called Cloudflare R2, which is Cloudflare's kind of competitor to Amazon S3, see what they did there S3, r2. Anyway, if you were to do that with Cloudflare R2, then apparently it would only cost you $300 to host that show, complete with complete in terms of HLS as well. So we end up with this weird situation where HLS is incredibly expensive to host, except with Cloudflare R2, where they make it incredibly cheap to host Cloudflare R2, where they make it incredibly cheap to host. And I can only assume that that Cloudflare R2 thing is an introductory offer and at some point they will change that. But to me, I'm still having difficulty understanding the idea of turning a one Learning, one downloaded file into essentially hundreds and hundreds of them, because that's how HLS works and therefore costing you much, much more as a podcast hosting company. All of that makes my head hurt a little bit and I'm not quite sure that I've necessarily got an answer for that got an answer for that no, and and the worrying things.

Speaker 4: 1:40:00

I don't think the industry seems to come up with an answer, because there's a lot of hosts on that whatsapp group and nobody seemed to come up with a clear oh. No, james, that's why it yeah. No, no, you've got it wrong because of x. No, everyone went oh, oh, okay, is that what it is? And the, the two parts that I I look at right is one is the technical capability one and then the financial capability. So the technical capability is super easy. I think I mentioned a couple of weeks back.

Speaker 4: 1:40:25

You know we've now done all of our tests. We can now upload audio video. We can now do conversions into HLS through the FFmpeg conversion. Very simple. Storage isn't massive. We can deliver that right, that's fine. All of that is cheap as chips, not cheap as chips as in. You know, it's costing us a great deal. The FFmpeg is an open source library and the storage isn't massive. Okay, all of that worked. I'm pretty sure that's what Transistor have done. The cost element is in the CDN delivery because of the number of requests that you have to do. So if you're only making one request to the MP3 or the MP4, fine. If you're making multiple requests, cause they're all in six second packages. That's when the cost goes through the roof.

Speaker 4: 1:41:17

So I I then looked at it and said well, actually, what does the CDN do? Because I understand, if you're downloading a 128 meg audio or maybe a one gig video, somebody in Australia pulling it from a London server, well, the experience is going to be awful. But actually the user experience that we found without the CDN, of testing it in various countries where we're just pulling six seconds without a CDN, is actually really good still. And I'm questioning do I need a CDN if I'm only delivering six second packages on a stream when I'm not downloading a very large file in each section?

Speaker 3: 1:41:59

Yeah, and I think that is an absolutely right thing to think about. The problem comes with scale, and so the PodNews website could very easily exist, because it's not visited particularly often. It could very easily exist without a CDN at the front. The reason why I've got a CDN in the front is firstly for growth, but also, secondly, just to protect the server itself. But there's absolutely no reason why I couldn't be linking directly to my S3 bucket for audio, for example. That's just a static server somewhere in the cloud and that would be absolutely fine to link to instead of pushing it through the CDN. The weird thing of the way that Amazon costs itself is that a CDN is actually cheaper than doing it directly through the S3, you know link, so you know, so you've got that kind of side of it as well. But you know I mean most people will want to use a CDN because it is much faster for them and for their users to access their website.

Speaker 3: 1:43:11

Now, that isn't a problem that we have in the podcasting world, because a lot of our podcasts are downloaded overnight. So that's all fine, and even the podcasts that aren't. All you need is something to load fast enough to start the playback, and so it can be only 128K connection, that's absolutely fine. As long as it's 128K connection or even lower for some shows, then that's all that you really need. So a CDN probably isn't required. But on the other hand, you also need to bear in mind that you've got a web server at the other end. In most cases that needs to scale enough to deal with many, many people requesting files from you. And again, as soon as you turn something from one download, which is all that a standard MP3 is or can be, if you turn that into a download where you've got a separate download every six seconds, which is the way that HLS works, then it's going to be. You know that adds an awful lot of stress to a web server as well, because you know if you have hundreds of people downloading that show at the same time, then that's an awful lot of requests that your web server is doing all of a sudden.

Speaker 3: 1:44:31

So all of this, you know, I just I totally get why. Hls is a good thing for the audience. Automatic changing of bitrate is brilliant. Not having to download an entire file if you're not going to watch the entire file brilliant. All of this I totally get. I just don't get the business side at all yet. But I'm sure I will. But right now nobody's yet convinced me.

Speaker 4: 1:45:02

Well, this is. This is where I'm questioning the CDN capability. It's. It feels like this is the way it's always done. Therefore, we shuttle, follow suit and then I go actually in the tests that we do and look, we're not releasing anything yet. So we're happy to be testing and stress testing, but actually it works really well so far. Now we we will, you know, keep playing with it. Now we might come up to a bottleneck or we might hit a brick wall. Whichever analogy you want to use, where you know the number of people requesting the file means that we can't scale or we have to add multiple servers, in which case the cost model then goes through the roof. The reason why I questioned you on the WhatsApp group was, if you look at our sponsor, buzzsprout, the cost of hosting per month is somewhere between $12.99 or $18.99, depending on what package you buy.

Speaker 3: 1:45:59

Yeah, yeah indeed.

Speaker 4: 1:46:00

Yeah, so this podcast, for example. We do a podcast every week, so that's four podcasts in a month for $12.99, as an example. That's the economics of Buzzsprout, and in that $12.99, they also have to make a profit, and so, even if they're delivering the package through traditional podcasting means an mp3 over a downloadable file they still have to make good on that, and I, and therefore the amount that it must be charging, is like dollars one dollar, two dollar, three dollars if they're going to then do four shows and still make money at the end of it. So that's where I'm questioning how do we go from $12.99 chargeable by Buzzsprout to the customer, the podcaster, to $82,000 deliverable?

Speaker 4: 1:46:52

for a no-agenda show which no one in their world can make any money from right. So this is where my brain doesn from right. So I don't see. This is where my brain doesn't get it, I just don't get it.

Speaker 3: 1:47:02

And the answer to that is on buzzsproutcom slash stats, where you can see all of the statistics for the Buzzsprout network of shows and in there, for example, right down at the bottom, is total episode downloads and what people are getting. So the average podcast, or the median podcast, if we're going to be strictly accurate, the average podcast on Buzzsprout gets 27 downloads in the first seven days, 27. In the first seven days, 27. So of course that's easily coverable with a $15, $12, $19 fee and that's the average podcast. This podcast gets considerably more. It says here that the top 5% get over 1,000 and the top 1% get over 4,000 downloads. We are somewhere in the middle of that, and the top 1% get over 4,000 downloads. We are somewhere in the middle of that, and you know so that's kind of one side that actually it's a bit of a gamble, and all podcast apps hosting companies work in this way. They gamble that you will not be as successful, as a no agenda is to make sure that they can afford to actually host you. Or they charge you in a different way captivate charges on a per download basis, for example and so actually the more successful you become, the more it costs. Potentially that's an easier way of charging. So there's that on one side.

Speaker 3: 1:48:34

And then on the other side, every single podcast hosting company has in their terms and conditions something that basically says if you get big enough, then we will move you onto a pro plan and we will expect you to be paying significantly more.

Speaker 3: 1:48:49

And the Buzz Sprout terms and conditions include that, although I should say not just because they're our sponsor, but it's really clear what you end up needing to hit in order to trigger that.

Speaker 3: 1:49:03

Libsyn, as another example, also has that clause, but gives no numbers at all. It just says you know, if we feel like we need to, then we'll ask you to pay for Libsyn Pro, ask you to pay for Libsyn Pro. So at least our sponsor is doing things the right way and is actually saying if it's more than 500 gig a month, for example, then we're going to charge you extra. So at the end of all of this yeah, it's all of this complication where we've ended up as a podcast hosting industry by having a flat fee and then on the other side, turning around and saying we're never going to increase our prices, because can you name a podcast hosting company that has increased its hosting prices in the last 10, 15 years? I certainly can't. So everybody has kept their hosting prices down. At some point we will need to start having that conversation of putting podcast hosting prices up, and that's going to be an interesting one.

Speaker 4: 1:49:59

Yeah, I mean we have seen actually just one fountain blue, which was the amalgamation of fountain and RSS blue.

Speaker 4: 1:50:08

They changed their $5 a month for hosting music to $50 a month for hosting music, and I obviously you and I've heard from various people about that, but I think you know that is more of a fair usage because they're trying to limit their risk right. They're going into a market space where they're uncertain about what the usage will be. So go high begin with and then maybe bring it down. I don't know if that's what their plan is or they're going to go even higher. Who knows, right? But hello, oscar, keep asking this. Come on the show.

Speaker 3: 1:50:44

But I think, to be fair to them, they are offering something different, their move from RSS Blue to Fountain Blue or Fountain as a podcast host. They are offering different things in there. It's not quite the same. It's not the same as putting up the prices, but for somebody that's been on Libsyn, on Buzzsprout, on RSScom fora number of years, they're still paying the same price. Yet inflation has significantly eaten into the profits on there. Of course there's been savings made in terms of bandwidth, prices and all that kind of stuff, but even so. So I'm surprised and you hear every so often when I listen to the new media show with Todd, he is forever talking about that and forever saying nobody else is putting up their prices, so we can't yet, and all that kind of stuff, get your owncom. But I think you know from that point of view, at some stage there will need to be that going on. But of course, if Spotify still continues to offer everything for free anyway, kind of, where's the future there?

Speaker 4: 1:51:56

Well, yeah, I mean, look, if we take a step back last bits on this, I guess you know we've been bemoaning the fact that there's no video support really within the hosting community and we've ceded that to YouTube and a little bit to Spotify. So the conversation at the London Podcast Show with the Podcast Standards Group was all about you know, how can we do it, how can we deliver around it, and adding an HLS type MP4 converted stream into the alternative enclosure was sort of yeah, that's the way we should do it. And then, of course, as you said, james, the cost model is now, you know, is this effective? And I think you've said in the past and I think this is one thing we also have to be aware of is Spotify using video as a loss leader? Ie, it is costing them a ton of money but they don't need to reveal it. And is YouTube, as part of Alphabet, stroke Google doing the same, because they've never released independently whether they're profitable or not?

Speaker 3: 1:52:55

Yeah, I mean you know certainly YouTube and Netflix and some other companies you would imagine Spotify as well have done an awful lot of work on their network to make sure that it doesn't cost anybody a lot of money to serve their. You know the media which is on there. So typically, if you go to an ISP and that might be you know BT in the UK or it might be Telstra here in Australia hidden away in one of their servers, one of their server rooms is a great big rack from Netflix and there's another one from YouTube with a ton of media on there, so that Telstra or BT or whoever it is doesn't have to pay for the interconnect fees to download all of that bandwidth from somewhere else and, more to the point, norda's Netflix or YouTube. So we're seeing an awful lot of that going on. Now that obviously doesn't exist in the podcasting world, but you would assume that from Netflix's point of view, from YouTube's point of view, they have spent an inordinate amount of money in making sure that their bandwidth bills are as low as possible.

Speaker 4: 1:54:06

Well, I've thrown the problem over to Soundstack, the Rocky Thomas, because they're the CDM provider that we're talking to, and I've said look, I want to be able to deliver HLS video and audio and multi-bandwidth, and I want it. If you want to use your CDN, and here's the cost model, come back to me and tell me how that's affected.

Speaker 3: 1:54:27

Tell me if it works at all.

Speaker 4: 1:54:29

Yeah, and if you can't make it work, then let's not bother, right yeah. But I've thrown the problem over to her to see what the problem is.

Speaker 3: 1:54:38

Yeah, I think it'll be really interesting. I mean, certainly, when I was working at Virgin Radio, to just sort of round this off, we were a relatively popular radio station online. We were a preset in Microsoft Windows Media Player, if you remember that I do, yeah, and we were one of, I think, five presets and our station was there as a preset, which was astonishing for every single new Windows customer. So we had a lot of downloads or a lot of streaming hosting companies across the world into places where internet service providers already were. So Telehouse in London is one good example. There are equivalents in places like New York, frankfurt and so on and that ended up being much, much cheaper for us because all of a sudden we were cutting our bandwidth bills down because because, essentially, we had a direct link between us and the ISP. So that was super helpful.

Speaker 3: 1:55:46

And maybe there's. I mean, there are probably laws against it, but maybe there is something to be said for the Podcast Standards Project to actually go. Well, we will do, we will pay for that metal, we will put that metal in various places and as a member of the Podcast Standards Project, you get access to those media. You know media proxies, I don't know, I mean, maybe that's a, you know, a step forward. But yeah, it's going to be interesting to take a look and I think I just think that there's a lot to look at in terms of video and HLS. But, on the other side, really important that we do it because if we end up just seeding video podcasting which everybody tells us is the future, which is another topic but if we end up seeding video podcasting to YouTube and Spotify, that's bad news for the podcast industry as a whole in the future and I think we should be very careful of you know about doing that.

Speaker 4: 1:56:48

Now related to this, podpage has announced that it supports HLS podcasts as well. But Podpage I just want to add, do something that with my back, with my true fans hat on that we do, which is an interesting that the rest of industry hasn't picked up on. So both pod page and ourselves use the youtube playlist as an option within our rss feeds. So, for example, you go into youtube, you go to the podcast tab, you go down and you click on the share button and that will give you the playlist url for youtube. You cut and paste that into pod page or true fans and now we are playing back the youtube video within the app and it's hosted by youtube and it's not breaking their terms of service because it's part of what they allow you to do. So there are ways short term like that, and I know, when I came out with that about a year and a half ago, the vitriol that I got- oh that's a hack, that's no, that doesn't work.

Speaker 4: 1:57:52

Oh why would you do that? But in the interim I haven't heard anyone come up with a better solution yet. And if the HLS video is going to cost us 82,000 for a show and no one can do the maths to make it economically viable, then somebody better come up with a better idea.

Speaker 3: 1:58:08

No, indeed, and interestingly enough I have today asked somebody at Google is there a programmatic way to link a podcast to YouTube? Because right now I cannot find a way to programmatically find a playlist ID for a podcast.

Speaker 4: 1:58:27

No, there isn't one.

Speaker 3: 1:58:28

So you know that would be really helpful because you know at the end of the day you can get any podcast you like into YouTube Music because YouTube Music is an RSS app, but you certainly can't in terms of YouTube Main, and so from that point of view, I mean, obviously YouTube Main earns YouTube a ton of money, whereas playing back a podcast through an RSS link in YouTube Music isn't going to earn YouTube anything. So hopefully they can find something there that might actually work hopefully they can find something there that might actually work.

Speaker 4: 1:59:00

Now, moving on, we were talking about the podcast standards project, which just in jackson at transistors heading up along with a lot of other people. They've certified a number of new apps. So the anytime player is now certified as a new app and you've also got some hosts that have been certified iona, pod home, pod 2, alley 2. They've all been certified, and it just reminds me I forgot to mention Pod2, when you were talking about putting your own metal in place. They've built their own CDN and globally rolled that out.

Speaker 3: 1:59:28

Well, of course you have, but if you've only got five shows, you can do what you like. I get that. I get that.

Speaker 4: 1:59:35

But I think, I think you know again, it'll be interesting to compare and contrast. Yes, they've got to grow the number of users. But I was asked the other day what is the certification, James, and why do you have it? So maybe you can tell me.

Speaker 3: 1:59:50

Well and it's an interesting question that you bring up so their certification. At the moment, the Podcast Standards Project supports this tag, which is fine, but I don't think that that's enough, and so I've actually been having a conversation with Justin saying it's not just a conversation around does it support the podcast location tag? Strictly speaking? For example, if you support the podcast location tag, you can just put a name of somewhere in a location tag and that's it. You don't have to worry about geotags. You don't have to worry about geotags, you don't have to worry about the open street map ID, any of that kind of stuff. But that's not best practice. It's filling a tag with some text and that's not particularly helpful.

Speaker 3: 2:00:31

So my suggestion is that the certification criteria for the podcast standards project should ideally be best practice rather than just supports it. And so, to give you an example, you are currently certified if you support the transcript tag, but one way of supporting the transcript tag is just to dump a website address into the podcast transcript tag. Now, that's supporting the tag, but it's a really crappy user experience, isn't it? So the ideal would be you need to support well, you must support VTT files and ideally you support SRT files as well if you want to, but those are the two formats. Out of all of the other things that you can do with that tag, that should be the best practice support. But anyway, at the moment, if you are a, you know you can become a certified player, a certified host if you in inverted commas support those tags, and I'm hoping that that gets a little bit squished in in the future to supporting best practice.

Speaker 3: 2:01:43

I do think that that's better than the Podcasting 2.0 Certified tag, which, essentially, if you want a Podcasting 2.0 Certified icon on your website, then the way of doing that is to download it and put it there. There's absolutely no checks whatsoever in terms of that. I'm not sure that that's a plan either. So you know so, but you know baby steps, as they say. And, by the way, I would suggest that any of their apps, if they're supporting the podcast transcript tag, they're going to support it properly, and so I don't think it would actually make too much of a difference. It might make a few differences to some of the hosting companies, but I don't think in terms of the players, and that's one of the important things.

Speaker 4: 2:02:29

Yeah, I mean the podcast index. Again, slight frustration for me is we've supported nearly every tag, have you? You haven't mentioned this. No, I don't like to sort of mention it. It's one of those things that.

Speaker 4: 2:02:43

I like to keep you know quiet and under my T-shirt, but one of the frustrating things is, again, medium equals. And you look on the Podcast Index app and everything says Medium equals. Oh, everyone supports that. And then I go well, okay, what about medium equals audio book or medium equals course, right? No, and so there's no granularity on the tags, and I think that's what you're saying with the certification as well, and I think we need to review how I mean it's yeah, I totally agree.

Speaker 3: 2:03:19

Agree, and I think you know I I've been saying for a long, long time that the the definitions, that the specifications that we have are way too open and that causes problems if you're a developer actually trying to code for them. I mean the podcast social interact tag, you know it's just to support that properly, you would need to support the Twitter API that doesn't exist anymore, plus the Blue Sky API, plus the Matrix API, plus the Mastodon API, plus the dot, dot, dot, dot dot, and it's just like you know, we need a best practice and I think that's where the Podcast Standards Project comes into all of this, to make that easier.

Speaker 2: 2:04:00

Boostergram, boostergram, boostergram, super, super comments, zaps, fan mail, fan mail, super chats and email. Our favourite time of the week, it's the Pod News Weekly Review Inbox. Inbox.

Speaker 3: 2:04:29

Oh, it's this time of the show. Yes, so many different ways to get in touch with us Fan mail by using the link in our show notes, super comments on True Fans, boosts everywhere else, or email, and we share the money that we make. We are so three boosts, two of which came in a week ago, one from Bruce the ugly quacking duck sending us a row of ducks saying thanks for another fine episode. I hope you both enjoy making new episodes. 73s. I think Sam didn't necessarily enjoy making last week's. Well, I guess. Yes, david sends us 304 sats using true fans.

Speaker 3: 2:04:58

About the argument for or against video podcasts I started a podcast, the audio kind being the ideal, but I have always made the video recording available on youtube because I record in video. My son explained it greatly in that you'll get different fans on the video version, so that's's a bonus. So let's make it an audio podcast with a video copy. That shouldn't lose the credibility of podcasts, surely? Totally agree with you, david, absolutely agree. Yes, a podcast is something for your ears when your eyes are busy. That doesn't mean that you don't add video to it. If you don't want to, it's absolutely fine. But it's audio first, so tick.

Speaker 4: 2:05:42

Are you taking those bumper stickers to America, because I think you could sell out on those?

Speaker 3: 2:05:47

I mean, yes, I think that will be a winner. Do you know, maybe I should do that. You've just got me thinking. I bought some stickers for something the other day. We have a very cute dog, right? Yes, yes.

Speaker 3: 2:06:01

And so I've got some stickers that I give to kids if they've plucked up the courage to pat our dog and their parents are around. Can you add that part? Then I say yes, I thought I'd better add that. Then I say yes, I thought I'd better add that. Then I say, would you like a sticker? And I ask the parents would they like a sticker? And the parents look at me a little bit quizzically and then I hand over a sticker and it's got Daisy's little face on it and some wording that says I gave Daisy a pat. And these stickers are everywhere. It's very, very funny. So now I know how easy it is to buy stickers. Maybe, maybe I should do that. Maybe that's a plan I don't have at the moment at least I don't have a stand at podcast movement this time around but maybe that's a plan just for a big bumper sticker saying something for your ears when your eyes are busy.

Speaker 4: 2:06:54

Yes, and people can come up to you and get it. That's it.

Speaker 3: 2:06:57

Yeah, I think it's a plan. Let's do it. Okay, excellent, one more boost. You can read this one. It's the one at the top.

Speaker 4: 2:07:06

Yes, this is from Justin Jackson. 1832 sats from True Fans. He said am I doing this right? This is my first super comment on the topic of video.

Speaker 4: 2:07:18

Yes, well done. At Transistor, our surveys of creators indicate that they want to do video and distribute it everywhere. This could mean YouTube, spotify, truefans, apple, et cetera. Yes, first of all, congratulations, justin. Thank you for using super comments. I hope you found them really easy. That number 1832 will mean that he would have done it in a fiat currency and we would have translated it into sats, unless that 1832 means something in Canada Other than that? Yeah, look, you know, it is what we've just talked about. Can we get the financial model to work? And if we can, then let's do video. If we can't, we then have to just say it's down to YouTube.

Speaker 3: 2:08:02

Yes, no, I think that makes a bunch of sense. That was probably $3 Canadian or that sort of thing, or $2.50 Canadian, something like that. But yes, and I know that Justin is trying to get Apple interested and engaged in the video conversation, as they should be. So I think he's doing a very good job and he's got very good taste in shirts. Let me just tell you very good taste in shirts. Thank you to our tremendous 20, those people who help us every single week by pressing the funding button and giving us some actual money every single month. Those include Neil Velio, I include Rocky Thomas, who we've mentioned earlier, and also include Ralph Estep Jr, our latest. Thank you so much for doing that. You can join them if you like weeklypodnewsnet, if you get value from this show, and then you can give us value back, like that, or you can share this show with your friends. That would be a good thing. So what's happened for you this week, sam? Have you been? Have you been walking still?

Speaker 4: 2:09:06

yes, another leg of the thames walk. We're nearly there. Uh, two legs well, I mean, another leg will help, won't it? Yeah, I put two legs to go. Then I realized that that's just not the pun intended, but yes, we've got, we've got one.

Speaker 4: 2:09:22

We might do one this weekend, but it's going to be 31 degrees and so we're umming and ahhing. But other than that, yeah, I'm still enjoying that god getting the google app store. I beta for true fans what aaver. So I've had to buy an Android phone something I never thought I'd do then register it with my developer account. Then we have to run a beta for 12 weeks before we can actually get the published to App Store. I thought Apple was going to be the hard one.

Speaker 4: 2:09:51

Yeah, no, you have to run a closed beta for 12 weeks and you have to have a minimum of 12 people in the beta as well is.

Speaker 3: 2:10:01

That is that why the google app store is full of such excellent apps that aren't rubbish at all, and oh, no, wait, no, that's not the case is it?

Speaker 4: 2:10:10

well, that's what I thought. I thought I thought it was going to be. You know, literally the ios one. We did, we published it, it was reviewed, it came back a couple of times about I don't know three, four days. We updated it a couple of times and then, boom there it was To my surprise, as we all know, and the Google App Store? No, you have to do this, then that, then this, and so, yeah, finally, finally, we have now got the beta out and I'm going to be sending out beta invites. You're on the list.

Speaker 3: 2:10:39

Yeah, I'll have to turn the Android phone on then.

Speaker 4: 2:10:42

Yeah well, I mean, you know I've turned one on, it'll be turned off in a minute. I just registered it and then that's it. Really, what did you buy? It was a Samsung, yes, ah okay, yeah, nothing too flash, cheap as chips, but you know it's what it had to be. And then the other thing I just noticed, and it's obviously not directly related to podcasting, but OpenAI has announced they're going to release a web browser to challenge Google Chrome. I thought, ooh, first time we're seeing some real competition in the market.

Speaker 3: 2:11:11

I will lay a bet to you that OpenAI's browser will be based on Chromium. Yes, so essentially it is Google Chrome. Yes, it is, it's a Chromium-based browser. There you go, I win that one. How ridiculous. So it's Chromium, which is basically Google's code anyway, which still has tons of hooks into Google. I discover yes, so well, brilliant, well done OpenAI, another triumph.

Speaker 4: 2:11:41

When you've got hundreds of billions, you can do what you like with it.

Speaker 3: 2:11:44

Yes, Well, yes, exactly. Well, I won't be getting that. So what's happened for you, james? Well, funnily enough, you mentioned browsers. I've been using a very excellent browser for the last year or so, called Orion, but I ended up junking it because it's just not quite working yet, and it particularly isn't working when you look at things like the new Apple beta, where it just simply doesn't work. Anyway, it turns out that Vivaldi is a very excellent thing and is worth a play.

Speaker 3: 2:12:14

So if you are looking for a new browser that is de-Googled, doesn't have Google stuff in there unless you want it to and that is very movable, very personalisable, then I would recommend that. So that's a thing. And I also, I think I've managed to get something on LinkedIn, sam, which is actually trending, which is very exciting, which is a email that I was sent bless, from somebody who was trying to put I think, trying to put their client forward for this very show. And yes, and so a lovely email coming from Stephanie Luna, who doesn't actually exist on LinkedIn, so I'm a little bit dubious as to whether or not she actually exists, but but anyway, she apparently represents the inventor of the only global patented cure for erectile dysfunction which is nice, you know.

Speaker 4: 2:13:06

I was asking why she reached out to you and not me, but there you go I think it might be quite hard for her guest to come on.

Speaker 3: 2:13:16

Hey, oh, there you go. Anyway, let me say again this is the only global patented cure, not a device, not a cream, not a prescription or a Band-Aid. I wouldn't use a Band-Aid for that. To be honest, it's a regenerative cure with a 97% success rate. After carefully reviewing your podcast, she goes on it just made sense to me to reach out in regards to the possibility of this doctor being a guest on your podcast. And then she adds I have attached a couple of interviews for your viewing. It's a podcast, so anyway. So my response to her was one sentence I'm curious how carefully you reviewed our podcast. No response, so anyway thank you very much.

Speaker 4: 2:14:05

I was going to say which podcasting Tito O tagged. Does this fit into?

Speaker 3: 2:14:09

Yes, Anyway, thank you. A person who represents Dr Nick or whatever the doctor was called, yes, but we will not be booking that person onto this show.

Speaker 4: 2:14:23

Maybe the podcast images tag. Good job.

Speaker 3: 2:14:28

That one doesn't exist anymore, and that's it for this week. All of our podcast stories taken from the PodNews Daily newsletter at podnewsnet.

Speaker 4: 2:14:37

You can support this show by streaming sats, you give us feedback using the buzzsprout fan mail link in our show notes and you can send us a super comment or a boost or, better still, become a power supporter like the noteworthy 20 no, what we call them the, the, the nice 20. I don't know what we decided on james the terrific, the terrific 20.

Speaker 3: 2:14:57

I can't remember what we decided on. We did.

Speaker 4: 2:14:58

It's so long ago, weeklypodnewsnet.

Speaker 3: 2:15:02

Yes, and our music is from TM Studios. Our voiceover mostly, is Sheila D. Our audio is recorded using Clean Feed, we edit with Hindenburg and we're hosted and sponsored by Buzzsprout. Start podcasting. Keep podcasting at buzzsproutcom Get updated every day. Subscribe to our newsletter at podnewsnet.

Speaker 5: 2:15:24

Tell your friends and grow the show and support us, and support us. The Pod News Weekly Review will return next week. Keep listening.