Announcement 0:00

The Pod News Weekly Review uses chapters. If you're on iPhone, give the Castro app a try. The new release makes chapters look even better. The last word in podcasting news. This is the Pod News Weekly Review with James Cridland and Sam Sethi.

SamSethi 0:16

I'm James Cridland, the editor of Pod news. And I'm Sam Sethi, the CEO of TrueFans.

JeanineWright 0:22

I'm releasing 3,000 episodes a week, and I have eight people on my team. There's no way we're listening to the overwhelming majority of our content before it's released.

JamesCridland 0:29

Jeanine Wright from Inception Point AI on those AI-generated podcasts.

DylanHaskins 0:35

Plus We really ought to have an award that celebrates the industry on the island of Ireland.

JamesCridland 0:39

Dylan Haskins on the new All-Irish Podcast Awards. I say the audience cares. Stuart Morgan from Audio always has his thoughts. This podcast is sponsored by Bunsprout with the tools to support a community to ensure you keep podcasting. Start podcasting, keep podcasting with Bunsprout.com.

Announcement 1:01

From your daily newsletter, the Pod News Weekly Review.

AI - do we need disclosures?

SamSethi 1:06

AI. Does the AI stand for is anyone interested? Because that's what it feels like. Tom Webbster's put out a report this week saying AI may be coming to podcasting first, but no one can be made to like it. What's he talking about?

JamesCridland 1:20

What is he talking about? Yes, this is new research which was unveiled by Sounds Profitable this week, showing that some parts of the population are particularly wary, and particularly in terms of this, is people who are slightly more educated. I guess the worry there is if you do have a good education, well perhaps that is what uh you feel most threatened by with uh AI. But yet some good research which is um which you'll find in the sound profitable newsletter this week.

SamSethi 1:49

Now, last week at the end of the show, we started to talk about AI tags and maybe people uh self-reporting and a a need for like the explicit tag and AI tag. Well, a company called Adopter Media called for an industry standard, a majority AI disclosure for podcasts. It comes after Inception Point AI. We're producing 3,000 episodes a week. You were out there with them in Canada last week. Did you have a chance to talk to them at all?

JamesCridland 2:18

Yeah, I didn't uh chat with them particularly around this point. There were uh there were folks from Adopter Media at the event that I was at, but not the person that I've been talking to here. Yeah, I mean I think there's absolutely the call for an industry standard disclosure, but not much understanding of how they would do that. And I've tried to get them involved with the uh good folks at Podcasting 2.0 to see if they can you know if we can both work out the correct way of doing this. There's lots of different ways of doing it, and it really depends on what the advertisers want here. So I'm hoping that you know if that's a thing that people want to do, then we should go for it. But let's do it the right way and do it the way that the advertisers want to hear.

SamSethi 3:03

There are two proposals in the podcasting 2.0 GitHub. One is called uh the disclosure tag, and the other one is just a standard extension to the person tag. So the disclosure tag, I think, is an overkill right now, where you we, as an example, would have to put disclosure, we use WonderCraft, disclosure, we use D script, disclosure, we use whatever, whatever. I don't think anyone cares personally how the product was produced pre-production and post-production. I think the biggest uh uh I guess pain point that people feel is uh is this host really AI or is this a real person? I think that's the only thing that I personally care about.

JamesCridland 3:45

I think it's more than that. Are the words that the host is reading have they been checked by a human being, or are they totally the output of AI? I think that that's actually the thing which is you know, majority AI is the word here. If i if it's uh human voices which I have written that, you know, I've got a cold this week, would I prefer that this v voice was uh sounding better? Well, maybe I'll use my AI clone. That that that's certainly a way of of of doing it, but it was still my my own voices and my own words. So uh so I think it's a complicated thing. I think it's a nuanced thing, and I'm not sure that the people tag cuts it, and I'm not sure that the uh disclosure tag cuts it. But neither of those I don't think actually matters. I think the most important thing here is what the advertisers want. And we still don't really know what the advertisers are actually wanting out there. Adopter Media calling for a disclosure for majority AI, but not really having any idea of how that disclosure might work. So at the moment, you know, it's up to them really to work out what that plan is.

SamSethi 4:50

Well, uh on the last point on this, I think the reason advertisers are calling for it is because will people be turned off by an AI voiced host and therefore their ads within it are going to therefore not be consumed by people because they won't listen to it. But they may end up paying for it because it's still within the download. And that may be the reason why they want better disclosure, because maybe they don't want to put their ads into an AI-hosted podcast at this time. You know, maybe in the future people get used to AI voiced hosts and therefore it doesn't become a problem.

JamesCridland 5:23

But you're but you're suggesting that the problem isn't AI voice, and I'm suggesting that the problem is AI generated content.

SamSethi 5:40

In the sense that I know there's no warmth to it. I know that someone's trying to fool me into thinking that this is a real human. I think Yuri Naval said that in the world of AI, more human connection is better. And I just don't want to have that right now. I don't want that AI voice uh interface to what I want to listen to. That's just something I don't want to do.

JamesCridland 6:00

But there's but there's but there's a big difference, obviously, between the words that the AI voice is reading, whether or not those are words which have been through a human being and which have been checked to be actually correct, and whether whether or not they have to be able to do that. And I agree that that's m more of the issue there.

SamSethi 6:17

So look, there are some proposals. I think this story's gonna be ongoing. So you know let's move on.

Interview: Jeanine Wright

SamSethi 6:23

Now I I I've called this section an inflection point in AI because it's about Inception Point AI. And maybe this is the inflection point. So for the last few weeks we've covered Inception Point AI. It's been using AI to make podcasts. So tell me more.

JamesCridland 6:38

Yeah, uh so last week we mentioned a story on the Australian ABC which reported on the AI-generated podcasts that this company has been making for a presenter and journalist and better summarized it all by saying In researching this and listening to so much AI audio flag, I can't begin to describe how unsettling it was.

LintonBesser 7:00

A soundscape devoid of the most basic human identity and intelligence. And if that's the future, an audio washing machine of nonsense ideas and synthesized realities, we really are in more trouble than perhaps we know.

JamesCridland 7:15

Ouch. Well, who better to interview this week than Janine Wright?

JeanineWright 7:20

My name is Janine Wright, and I am the CEO of Inception Point AI.

JamesCridland 7:24

And what does Inception Point AI do and how do you make shows?

JeanineWright 7:28

Inception Point AI designs AI-generated personalities and then launches them into the world as 360 creators, and we create AI-generated content on their behalf across multiple different platforms. And we've started and grown up in audio in the process. We built what we believe to be the world's largest independent podcast company by Showcount.

JamesCridland 7:54

From the reviews that I've seen of your work, I'm wondering whether you're being judged a bit too much on the early stuff which is there and not necessarily uh some of the stuff which is there now.

JeanineWright 8:06

I mean, I think that's fair. I mean, obviously that's part of what I said in in my piece that we posted. Yeah, I mean, at this point, we've created more than 160,000 episodes. And we've been doing it for more than two years. We were very early in experimenting with AI. This was early in our own capabilities and early in AI's capabilities. And a lot of the stuff at the beginning, I mean, frankly, it really sucks. You know, we go back and listen to it and and we cringe. But I understand this is a very common thing. I've been working with creators in the podcasting space for many years, and pretty much without fail, everyone is embarrassed about their first episode, their first season, right? Because it's it takes a while to get practice and to get good. But I've also been candid that even some of the stuff that we make today might not be good, right? We still do a lot of experimentation. And some of it lands and some of it doesn't. And some of it, some of the stuff I really love, and some of the stuff doesn't do it for me, but it does it for other people. And all of those things are okay.

JamesCridland 9:17

I'm kind of looking at some of the ones that you have been promoting recently, and you know, some uh uh the there are very few reviews, listener reviews on there. Th there's one listener review for Bloom and Banter, which is hosted by Nigel Thistledown, somebody with a an accent almost as ridiculous as mine. And and that and that review isn't particularly positive, shall we say? I'm I'm wondering I'm wondering how many people I mean, you know, frankly, is this an SEO play? Are you there flooding podcast directors with content and hoping that people find that content, you know, in terms of SEO? Or are you actually seeing people coming back again and again?

JeanineWright 10:02

Well, we're definitely seeing people coming back again and again, which is why we're leaning into many of our personalities. I don't know if it's fair to say like flooding with SEO. There's lots of businesses that make content based on you know what people are wanting and searching for. And perhaps that's a problem with the way that we've been doing podcasting in the past. I mean, at some of the companies that I was at previously, you would make this beautiful, brilliant, incredible show and then title it something that nobody has ever heard of. And then you would have to spend huge amounts of money to invest in telling people that you made this show and this is the title of this show. And then they would they would go and they would have to type in too candidly what are these like rootementary search directories that a lot of these podcast platforms have. And you would hope and pray that they typed in exactly what you titled this show so that they could try and find that. And that was part of what drove up the content production, marketing, and how it costs of making content under this traditional model, which has resulted in I mean, really a widespread immediately dramatic, but extinct extinction events across our industry where we're seeing you know, fitcher and yellow and wondering less and you know, Odyssey. And I mean these these companies that that are just not finding sustainable business models to continue to produce original content or even you know partner content profitably. So yes, I mean if I'm gonna make I know I've said this before, if I'm gonna make a podcast about whales, we title it whales because that way when people are listen looking for content on whales, they can find our content.

JamesCridland 11:59

Yeah, it's the Max Cutler way of of of titling a show, isn't it? He had a he had a serial killers uh show which was called serial killers, and yeah, absolutely.

JeanineWright 12:09

Exactly, yeah. And then, you know, and then it also means because our time to production is dramatically less and our costs of production are less, it means that we can surf trends much better than traditional podcasting organizations. So a week ago when Charlie Kirk was shot, we had content about Charlie Kirk up, we had a living biography, we had a content, and a new show about his assassination up within an hour. So when people typed Charlie Kirk into Apple and Spotify, we were three of the top five shows, even beating out the Daily Mail. The only one that was beating us was the Charlie Kirk show. So that means that we're able to meet the need for content that people want that they're looking for in that moment. And that's part that has not really ever been part of the commercial podcast business model until now. When his assassin was arrested, we had a new episode up within 15 minutes.

JamesCridland 13:12

Did a human being check that first?

JeanineWright 13:15

When we are producing political or news related content, we we especially when it's new shows that we are launching, we listen to the content before it launches. And we is part of the reason why we haven't leaned into news and politics quite yet, is because I think there still needs to be human review and I'm not even gonna say editorializing, but still AI is not so great at always capturing the tone of the moment. And and when you are crafting personalities that you want to be complex, you have crafted into these personalities things like senses of humor and flaws and weaknesses and things. And so sometimes they don't always treat sensitive topics with enough sensitivity, they don't strike exactly the right key cord. And so as we think about news and politics, we are figuring out how do we build the right infrastructure that still leverages AI and still is consistent with our model, but mitigates the risk of getting it wrong. And that probably means that we need to have a news, a well-known news person who is reviewing that content before it was released and is making sure that we're striking that we're getting it right and striking the right tone.

JamesCridland 14:48

Yeah. So human review there is important, but human review for a podcast about whether it's knitting or about gardening isn't necessarily as important.

JeanineWright 14:58

Yeah, I mean, there's all sorts of levels of risk, right, associated with the different content. I mean, so we we think about which ones need to be much more curated and where we need to be much more careful. And then we also really examine and stay on top of what are the capabilities of the tools, right? AI still struggles with numbers, right? I would not rely on AI to do your math homework, right? So there's when we're thinking about current like what are the topics that we want to cover, we lean into the things that we know that AI is really good at, for which we are less concerned about you know any any potential downside risk if it's giving, you know, health and wellness advice. We're gonna want to make sure that we're doing more to pull from multiple different sources and mitigate against hallucinations, and that somebody is involved in listening and reviewing the content before it's released. But yeah, I mean, I'm releasing 3,000 episodes a week and I have eight people on my team. There's no way we're listening to all the content. There's no way we're listening to the overwhelming majority of our content before it's released.

JamesCridland 16:14

There's one podcast directory out there removing AI-generated podcasts from its directory. What's your thoughts on that?

JeanineWright 16:21

I think that it's an antiquated thinking. I think that in very short amount of time, if I can make yet another bold prediction, that'll probably cause stir.

JamesCridland 16:32

You're not you're not going to upset more people, are you?

JeanineWright 16:35

That seems to be my thing lately. I think that in a very short amount of time, and I would predict less than certainly less than 24 months and probably less than 12, AI will become the default tool for creating content. And this conversation around is it AI or not, transparency or not, will go away the same way that this happened with you know digital photography and photo editing, right? I mean, no, nobody makes a disclosure like this picture was taken with a digital camera and was edited after the fact, right? Everybody knows people use digital photography and photo editing. And in fact, nowadays you make a disclosure when something is not captured. You you would say, this is made on traditional 35 millimeter and is not edited, right? Because that's then the thing that's special about it. Already there was a survey on YouTube where 92% of creators said that they're using AI in their creative process. Yeah.

JamesCridland 17:41

And I and I think that there's a difference between using AI as part of your creative process and a difference between using AI as the only part of your creative process.

JeanineWright 17:51

Well, we're we're not using AI as the only part of our creative process. And I think that is a very, very nuanced conversation that people don't realize. So right now the standard is, you know, it's been related to us and we're kind of following as the community guidelines. If you use AI, it is a material portion of your content you need to include a disclosure. So we include we're AI transparent, we include disclosures in all of our content. I know you can't.

JamesCridland 18:17

You you didn't do that at the beginning, and now you do. Why why have you why did you change your your view there?

JeanineWright 18:25

We we were limited because we have so many episodes, we were limited by the API call capacity to be able to dynamically update all of our content. So we were not able to go back quickly to do it with all of our back catalogs, but now we were able to build out the process in order to do that. So now if you go through and you see all of our show notes, it's now in all of our content.

JamesCridland 18:55

Yeah, but you but but you didn't when you started, I guess is the question. So why why did you change your mind and start disclosing that it was AI generated?

JeanineWright 19:05

So you mean like it's two years ago when people first started making content? Well, I mean, to be clear, not all of the content that you hear from two years ago is AI generated. Many of it is in the voices of people who are on our team. Some of it we went back and then replaced with synthetic voices and personalities that we designed. You know, I mean, at the time, I don't even think people were thinking about how you would make an AI disclosure or not. So I mean, we've adapted and evolved as the as the industry evolved. And now I think we're really proud of the way that we're we're leading away in in transparency. We all of our personalities, we have some clever prompt engineering around we how we have them do their AI disclosure so that they say that they're AI, but they uh do it in a way that sells the benefit of having a host that is an AI personality. And from our data, we find you know, very little, sometimes immeasurable drop-off uh from our AI disclosure. So our read is that if people like the personality and they like the content, they don't care that it's AI.

JamesCridland 20:19

In the same way as there's an explicit tag in podcasting where you can mark if you use sourcy language or or adult discussions, some people have been calling for an AI tag to help audiences or advertisers programmatically filter out majority AI content. What what's your what's your view on that?

JeanineWright 20:41

I think that we're in a moment. Well, I mean, first of all, I think that some people are trying to capitalize on the fear around this conversation to make news for themselves. The conversation is if you have people who are really thoughtfully engaging in this conversation, I think the conversation is much more complicated, right? Because if you're using, you know, Chat GPT to make a script, but you're actually reading that into the mic, is that materially AI generated? If you're, you know, actually write the script but you use a synthetic voice, is that materially AI generated? If you're doing an interview and it's a real person that's interviewing a digital person, is that AI generated, materially AI AI generated? It's getting to the point now where it's so nuanced. I mean, I've actually had people reach out to me, some of these people who are in this space making commentary that, oh, I can't believe they're doing this, or they need to have disclosure, or you know, more disclosure, advertisers aren't gonna want this, right? I have people behind the scenes emailing me saying, I work at this company and we're using AI in our process. Right. And and basically every podcast that I'm doing, some people, you know, going for the jugular, asking me the tough questions about controversy in this space. And then we get off the call and then they say, How do you think that I can better use AI in my process to make my process more efficient? Or could you all recreate my voice? And what would that sound like? And maybe I could actually take a dedication sometime, right? The creators are going to be, this is the most powerful creative tool that the world has ever seen. And creators are going to be leaning in to this technology very quickly, and this conversation is going to go by the wayside. But in the meantime, as people are interested in, we will we will follow the guidelines as to as much disclosure as you want us to have. The reality is we've not heard any pushback from any advertiser ever. And we are not finding that we're missing out on audiences.

JamesCridland 22:59

Janine Wright speaking to me a little bit earlier this week. I've got uh obviously opinions on what she said, but it would be unfair to jump in after the interview with my own thoughts because she can't respond to them. But I'm really grateful to her for her time. I've also been sent an email, Sam, and I've been asked to read this out. Opinions in this podcast and in the Pod News newsletter are not the opinions of podcast movement. Sounds profitable, or any associated brands. How delighted I am to read that out. Anyway, I've read it out now. Let's move on together to a totally different story, and this one is about corporate censorship.

SamSethi 23:35

Right.

Censorship

SamSethi 23:36

I've put this story in, James, about corporate censorship because I'm asking the question is podcasting sex truly censorship resistant? Right. In the light of uh things that have been happening in the US with Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel. So censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance.

JamesCridland 23:57

And I'm quoting who's that a quote from it's it's unknown, so I don't know.

SamSethi 24:03

I love that. But I love the I love the sentence. Look, Jimmy Kimmel is back. I think that was more to do with Disney seeing $4 billion worth of subscriptions removed, not to do with the, oh, we think Jimmy Kimmel should come back. So let's be critically clear. That is you know the reason why he's back now. But i i I don't want to get into the Kimmel, Cobert, ABC, you know, Disney World. That's that's outside of it. I wanted to one know, will this affect podcasting? Could this happen in the world of podcasting? Could uh the FCC, the Ofcoms of the world, yeah, could they block, remove, ask Apple, Spotify, Podcast Index to remove a podcast?

JamesCridland 24:50

Yeah. Now I know you don't want to mention Kimmel, but obviously Kimmel is back, and podcasting got a shout-out in his opening monologue.

JimmyKimmell 24:57

Should the government be allowed to regulate which podcasts the cell phone companies and Wi-Fi providers are allowed to let you download to make sure they serve the public interest? You think that sounds crazy? Ten years ago this sounded crazy.

JamesCridland 25:11

Yes. I looked at at all of this and yeah, I mean, the First Amendment stops the US government from doing anything here. So TV is a little bit different, and hence why Kimmel and to an extent Colbert is being talked about, because it's public spectrum that they broadcast on. Cable TV can do whatever it likes. And the FCC only said last week that podcasting is the same. I heard Brendan Carr from the FCC speaking on CNBC.

BrendanCarr 25:40

Broadcast TV is different. We're on a cable show right now. You don't have an FCC license. You don't have an obligation to serve the public interest. Podcast don't either.

JamesCridland 25:50

So really the US government is unlikely to stop uh anything there. I mean, I suppose, you know, the interesting thing from my point of view is that the US used to have the fairness doctrine for broadcast media, which required media to fairly reflect differing viewpoints. So it made it the law essentially to present contrasting views on air, which is very similar to how Ofcom works in the UK as well. But that was abolished in 1987 by Ronald Reagan. And that means that essentially that that led to things like Fox News, very unbalanced output uh and to be fair, you know, CNN, which is very unbalanced the other way. And so, you know, from from that point of view, that that's where the US is uh going. But you know, in terms of podcasting, is the podcast index really censorship r resistant, you were asking? I think it probably is, uh but I don't necessarily think it is when it's surfaced in an app. I mean TrueFans, presumably, you can choose which of the shows you want to appear on uh your app, right?

SamSethi 26:55

100%. Yeah. Yeah, we have we have final control. Yeah.

JamesCridland 26:58

Yeah, yeah. As do we. I mean, uh you know, Pod News uh, for example, has a directory which is based both on the podcast index and on Apple Podcasts. We have a blended uh results for that. There's there's one show, for example, that if you search for it, I've never made it into a story because I didn't want to uh uh I didn't want to excite the uh the lawyer too much that spent three m three uh three emails shouting at me. But uh yeah, there is a pay there is a podcast if you search for it, and it takes you to a page which is called this page is not here anymore on the podcast website. And it basically says, look, you know, the podcast owner uh employed a lawyer to threaten us to take it away. And they said that the only place it was available it was on Apple Podcasts. And so I just embedded the Apple Podcast player to have a look at that, right? Yeah, and then and then stuffed that. But yeah, so you know, so we've had to do that sort of thing as well. So I I think the index is censorship resistant, but uh it's kind of up to apps and websites like us to work out which we want to uh link to. And I think that that goes for you know Apple and Spotify too.

SamSethi 28:07

Well, again, I think we will see Jimmy Kibble and Stephen Colbow, they've hinted at starting their own podcast network poster.

JamesCridland 28:15

Um of course they have. Um but but you know they could very easily just go on uh go onto cable and there wouldn't be anything in terms of there wouldn't be anything in terms of the SEC that would be able to harm them. It comes down to uh it comes down to you know the the the corporate stuff. I mean I suppose you know you could look at Apple and Spotify, uh or indeed YouTube. They make choices about what to promote and what not to. So they're already putting a thumb on the scales, I guess. If you look in Canada, where I was last week, the government there is wanting control over what Apple or Spotify promote. The CRTC has basically said that. So we're seeing talk of similar rules in other countries like the UK as well, in terms of, you know, yes, everything might be available, but undue prominence for public service broadcasting is what they're talking about in the UK. So, you know, I mean I guess I guess it's a different conversation. But the podcast index uh you know the they're un very unlikely to take shows out, although they have taken shows out in the past, but they're very unlikely to take shows out for specific political reasons such as that. So, you know, but yeah, it's really what happens to the to the apps at the end of the day, isn't it?

SamSethi 29:30

Yeah, well we we we've seen Facebook remove lots of content based on government requirement. We've seen Elon Musk use Groc recently to stop it reporting on certain activities in release. I it it's a worrying thing for me. I I and this is not a political show, so we will move on. But I do think that uh the the way that governments, not just the US, but governments around the world are now uh censoring or applying fear to media. Companies so that they tow the line. They might not actually say we're banning this, but they will make it very clear that if X doesn't happen, Y will occur.

JamesCridland 30:09

Yeah.

SamSethi 30:10

And you've seen that with the you know the oligarch text bowing down in the White House. And it's just, yeah, I I I do worry. I do worry. Which is why I raised the question. Could podcasting go down this same road? That was all.

JamesCridland 30:24

Yeah, uh I I think it's definitely something just to bear in mind. And you know, I mean, we should just m bear in mind that the reason why Jimmy Kimmel and all of that stuff came up is not really because of the content of Jimmy Kimmel, it's really because Nexstar, who owns a large number of the ABC affiliates, they're currently in the middle of a $6.2 billion takeover of Tegna. Tegna is another rival broadcaster, and uh if they need to get that takeover through, then they need a couple of laws changing, and the FCC needs to give them the go-ahead. And so, you know, it it's not particularly helpful to them if they've got one of their major talent. Although I did watch Jimmy Kimmel, I did find him tremendously unfunny. But anyway, you know, if it's not particularly helpful to them if one of their major talents is very negative towards the folks that they need to r rubber stamp that particular takeover. So yeah, I think I think you know this will come through regardless of whether or not, you know, a government is particularly, you know, eager or not to ban certain things to be uh said. If if i if it's business at the end of the day, then I suppose it's business at the end of the day, isn't it?

SamSethi 31:37

Yes. I was gonna say something about the UN, but I will move on. Right. Um I mean comedy out there anyway. Moving

Descript changes

SamSethi 31:46

on. Dscript has a new CEO and some new prices, James. Now, the new prices were announced on Tuesday, and there's a couple of things that I find quite interesting about the pricing. They're moving to something called media minutes and AI credits. Have you had a look at this at all?

JamesCridland 32:04

I've had a look at, I mean, the AI credits are roughly how Wondercraft is charged as well, and I think it probably makes the most amount of sense. You know, it's where the costs are to them. So therefore, you know, that's probably the right way of uh charging for it. But yes, it's it's an interesting change to how things are are uh billed for anyway.

SamSethi 32:25

I I like the use of media hours. I mean, again, one of the conversations you and I have had is about does the way hosting charges work? So, in the sense that today a MP3 file is fully downloaded, and therefore it's the number of downloads. So Captivate will talk about the number of downloads, Buzzsprat will talk about the number of hours uploaded, but actually I think there's a change maybe coming, and I think it's the number of media minutes that you consume or get downloaded and streamed by you as a podcaster. I don't know. I'm I'm I'm fascinated by this. I'm I'm gonna be looking at this more closely anyway. I thought I'd just raise it.

JamesCridland 33:09

Yeah, it's definitely interesting in terms of a uh charging thing. Uh you mentioned that Andrew Mason is no longer the CEO. There is a new CEO, Laura Burkhauser, who has worked with D scripts for a while. She was actually named CEO at the end of August, turns out, and Andrew Mason is now executive chairman. So there's a thing too. Do we know anything more about Laura?

SamSethi 33:32

Well, Laura was previously working for Twitter and other companies, so she's been very good in the product role. Andrew Mason said, quite quite Andrew Mason-ish, the very short answer is Laura's the better CEO for D Script. The longer answer is we are at an exciting moment in D Script, $55 million in average annual revenues, growing 75% year on year, and we're beginning we're at the beginning of a transformative shift in the company with the launch of our AI video editing agent. Look, Laura's going to be on the show next week. I'm excited to have her. She's going to be talking about her new role, but also future plans, and I will be asking Ellen much more about the way that they're charging now for uh media hours and AI credits.

JamesCridland 34:19

Excellent news. Well, I'm looking forward uh to that.

Interview: Stuart Morgan, AudioAlways

SamSethi 34:23

Now, one of the things that you reported in Pod News Daily was help, I sexted my boss. The podcast has unveiled a major new 2026 arena tour. What are they doing, James?

JamesCridland 34:34

Yes, so the last tour sold 15,000 tickets in three hours. This time they are taking the live show to Cardiff, Glasgow, Manchester, and London, hosted by William Hansen and Jordan North, of course, and produced by Audio Always.

SamSethi 34:52

Yeah, and now one of the interesting things, Stuart Morgan, who's the managing director and founder of Audio Always, pinged us about some news that they have in terms of growing their team. But I thought it was also a good time to catch up with them because they do things such as producing radio shows and audiobooks. And I think the line is blurring between what is a podcast, what is a radio show, and what is an audio book. It's content on demand. So I started off by asking Stuart to remind us who is Audio Always?

StuartMorgan 35:25

Yeah, so Audio Always, we are a production company based in Manchester and London. Started at Media City in 2012 when the BBC started to move some money from London to Salford with Five Live and the various bits that moved up here to Media City. And over that time, we've grown from being a production company that primarily worked on short form audio, trails, station sound, commercial advertising into a business that now spans content in terms of radio and podcasts and audiobooks and studio facilities. And we've kind of grown and evolved as the industry have as well in terms of Manchester and generally the rise of opportunities around audio and audio content and audio production. We've been part of that and I've been part of it since we started.

SamSethi 36:09

Give us some of the names of the podcasts that you've been producing.

StuartMorgan 36:13

From a podcast perspective, so we work on both commission podcasts, so people who want to pay us to make podcasts and also original pods. So commission pods, lots of stuff for the BBC, so Alice James and John Robbins, and lots of stuff for kind of BBC bite-size and factual stuff for Radio 4. We had a great series called The Human Subject, where we looked at the intersection between inical trials and the morality of it. So lots of kind of podcasts in the commission space. And in the original space, podcasts like Help I Sected My Boss, for example, get a grit with Angela Scanlon and Vicky Patterson, all the way through to parenting podcasts like Secret Rum Club and Made by Mammoth, and also actively in the storytelling and true crime space. So stuff like the Pitcane trials and Carrie Jade does not exist, and also always on factual true crime like uh UK true crime and murder mile, I'm all part of our network. So, yeah, a wide mix of, from a podcast perspective, both commissioned and original pods in a couple of different verticals.

SamSethi 37:13

So you've done something new, you've expanded your team at Media City. What have you done?

StuartMorgan 37:19

I think it it's reacting really to that sense of the changing world between commissioned pods and and original pods, and also just that kind of trying to take away some of that sense of podcast and radio. You know, I think you speak to most managers of audio production companies, it's always kind of hard to find that balance of what do you integrate podcasts into radio and how do they intersect? And what we try to do is sort of remove some of those barriers between the skill sets that go into creating some of our radio shows, some of radio strands, bringing that experience into podcasts, and vice versa, as that kind of convergence between radio podcasts and audiobooks happens across the industry. So we've got three great new content directors who are working across all of our projects, all of our radio podcasts and audiobook projects, bringing a vast amount of experience. We've got Sam Davis who's been across Art Six Music Content for many, many years here in Salford. So he's looking after our commissioned content. Linny, who before us was doing a great job at Folded Wing, another fantastic indie, and do amazing stuff in that commissioned and original space. He's looking after commissioned and original content, and also Ben Cartwright, who is our content director specifically around original content. He's been part of the team right since the inception of How Bisected My Boss, which is a kind of a big hit commercially successful original podcast for us. So he's bringing that experience across all of our originals, man.

SamSethi 38:42

I like the way that you talked about the convergence because I had a radio station where we did 40 live shows a week, but we then automatically turn those into podcasts. But you can look at radio for scheduling, for example, and they will have a program that's pre-recorded, which you could argue is that a podcast? Is it dumped into the schedule so it appears at the time? So the Friday Night Comedy Podcast, for example, is not live often, it is a pre-record. So where is the line blurring? For me, I always say separate the content from the distribution. So the content can be the content, it could be a show that you've recorded. And then is it distributed via FM, DAB, or is it distributed by the web or an Alexa, or is it distributed by another means? So is the line for you as someone who's producing for radio and producing podcasts, is there a difference anymore? I mean, you talked about the skill sets transferring between radio and podcasting. What differences do you see?

StuartMorgan 39:47

I don't think the audience care, really. I think you know we get obsessed with these words because we are audio people and we love it and we know radio, we know podcasts, and we're in it to a listener. They don't care how it's categorized, they just want to, as you say, press play wherever they're pressing play and get the content they want. And you look at examples like James and John Robbins on Five Live, you know, it's on Five Live, but for most people they're consuming it on sounds or on RSS feeds, and they don't really care where they're getting it from. So I think the convergence from an audience perspective is sort of happening already. And I'd say the same with audiobooks and podcasts. You know, we produce audiobooks here at Audio Walways, and we do a lot of stuff out of Solford with northern authors, northern uh publishers, northern readers. But we also have podcasts which are in effect audiobooks. They are people telling amazing stories that, if it was written down on a piece of paper, could be published. And we're seeing that in the podcast space that people are pressing play on podcasts that sound like audiobooks, and then on Spotify they're clicking to an audiobook. So I think that convergence from an audience perspective has been happening for a long time. For us, there are some kind of internal distinctions that you just have to make, and I think part of our thinking is yes, there are some skills and experience that go with intricacies around distribution channels and commercialising stuff in different ways, but we're trying to align our production processes as much as we can because the efficiencies that we can make and the industry can make in terms of blowing those lines are important. But there's also a lot learned from radio. You know, my before audio always I spent my years pre-indie sector in commercial radio, and a lot of what we are doing now from an original podcast perspective is it's the same fundamentals that we were doing on breakfast shows in major markets before podcasts were what they were.

SamSethi 41:34

So coming from a commercial radio background, here's a question for you. Have we got the same level of advertising saturation within podcasting? So radio used to be for me every 15 minutes you'd have a bank of ads, and then every 15 minutes there'd be the news and whatever. Are we going to end up with that element of radio commercialisation coming to podcast commercialisation?

StuartMorgan 41:57

I think a lot of that is the interpretation of what is saturisation. I mean, there were times radio stations I worked for where we were on 12, 13, 14 minutes of ads an hour. Was that having a detrimental effect on the audience? Sometimes, sometimes not. With podcasts, I think we're existing in an interesting world of podcasts because I think the audiences that are happy to have that level of saturation, however it's described, come together on RSS. I think there are intricacies around paid-for models where maybe if you are happy to get the content and pay for it but don't want the adverts, you can get it. There are platforms that are offering ad-free. A lot of our pods are licensed on BBC Sounds and they're ad-free. So I think the the difference for me is there's probably just an additional level of choice that audiences now have in terms of where they're consuming their content and how willing they are to have that level of commercial content. But I always think some of the creative stuff that we do, we work a lot with ACAST, there are some amazing examples across the industry of how that commercial messaging and how those revenue models can be integrated into content in ways that doesn't feel like the music stopping and you're just getting a load of adverts and then it's coming back. A lot of our revenue streams from a podcast perspective come from subscription and from live touring. And we've just announced a big live arena tour for one of our podcasts. You know, I think that's where hopefully podcasting won't fall into that trap of we just need to just put adverts in between songs to make it work. But I also think it's fair to say that commercial radio, I feel like is doing a better job of that as well as they look to ways of diversifying their models to make it so the audience are not bombarded with commercial messaging.

SamSethi 43:46

I've always said podcasting is a digital second-class citizen. In that we now accept we will pay for music, we accept we will pay for films, audiobooks and other means of content. But the perception has always been that podcasting is free and is ad-supported. I know there's a big move towards subscription base now. But why is audiobooks treated differently from podcasting when I think you said earlier, fundamentally they're the same thing in pretty much the way that they're produced and also distributed?

StuartMorgan 44:18

I think it's just because at the start of that process that there were major publishers involved, and they still are, that the model and the route to get in that line, you know, people paid for it. That's what people expected. You buy a book and you can either buy it in paper or you can buy it in your ears, and that's just what the audience expectation was and still is. I think podcasting, the brilliance of podcasting is that it started as a cottage industry, and it was people in the bedrooms, it was people doing it and recording it, and that's where that expectation has come from. Does it always have to be that way? No. Is it good that it is really easy to start one to be able to get it? I think it is, so I don't necessarily see it as I think it I think it's it's it's a challenge to make a direct comparison between those kind of models for me, because you could say the same for radio, you know, why would simply listen to a BBC station versus commercial when they're getting ads on one and not the other? I think it's a lot of it is is just down to what people are used to, and podcasting started in a way that meant that it was free and it was easy to kind of press permit. Although, interestingly, we find a lot of research we do is there's still quite a large proportion of the audience who don't realise that podcasting is free and you have to pay for it. So I think the educational journey that the industry has to do as podcasting grows in the same way that audiobooks have to communicate to their listeners and in that audience that you can get audiobooks as part of a subscription on Spotify, for example. This stuff will always move and change, and I think it's on us to be with it and help hold listeners' hands as stuff evolves, really.

SamSethi 45:56

Talking about change and evolving, when are you renaming to video always? Will you be a video platform? Where is audio always in the video discussion?

StuartMorgan 46:07

Audio always, video most of the time, but I wish I had a crystal ball 13 years ago and coming up with a name. I think we are, in terms of our original podcasts, you know, we are we're video across everything in visual podcast studios. We've got staff working across video and the same way we have staff working across audio. So as a business, we are very much delivering video in the same way that a lot of our competitors are and are doing a great job. You know, we're nominated in the video innovation awards that the VPA is coming up, we're proud to be part of that. I think the thing that we say is though that we're not a video company, and I think that's a distinction that we make with our name, and what we do is that that kind of audio product does come first. We want to make sure that things you know sound great technically, but also the route is audio, it's it's what we do and it's what makes us different. Video social, the stuff that goes around it is all about enhancing and amplifying that. So would we be going out and pitching for TV shows? No, that's not in our world. Do we want to be making a YouTube series without that kind of audio crossover strategically? No, not right now. But if we have an amazing audio podcast and we've got an audience that we know would want to get more of that on YouTube, then we're absolutely behind that. And I think that it's wise for all of us in the industry to be embracing all of those ways that listeners can consume what we do, where they are and where they're you know, where they're where they're listening, watching, and consuming that content.

SamSethi 47:34

Now, the other hot topic, of course, is AI. I don't have any issue about AI in the pre-production and post-production of podcasting as in research or editing. But I don't know whether you call it the creepy line or people's dislike to the sound. But where do you stand on using AI for hosting?

StuartMorgan 47:55

I mean, I I don't I don't believe that audience would want to listen to an AI host. You know, there are intricacies and beautiful things that come with human interaction that just can't be replicated. So I think it feels like certainly for us, we're a long way off that in terms of that kind of you know, the host, you know, AI in a production process, we use it, it makes it more efficient in certain places, but you can never get away from that kind of human touch, that list and how stuff feels, and what's that mood and that tone? And I think that's where you know AI isn't doing that job, and I'm not sure it will in the next couple of years. I think it's more interesting for me in that kind of audiobook space. Again, does somebody want to listen to 8,000 audiobooks read by AI? Probably not. When stuff's written, the nuances and the beautifulness of some of the text that we work on here, you just couldn't replicate that, especially at the moment in AI. But is there a longer way of being able to deliver longer form content to audiences with the help of AI, maybe? But who knows? I think the world is moving quick, and all we can do as an industry is be part of it and do what feels right, I think also especially with what the audience wants. And I'm a kind of a techie geek and I love trying all these things out, but for me it comes down to what does that listener, that viewer, want and how can we best deliver that? If it's AI, then great. If it's not, then we stick to stick to what we do.

SamSethi 49:26

And you talked about live events as a means of merchandising and monetization. Do you, as audio, always look at anything to do with live podcasting? Again, I only mention it because of your background in radio, and I'm a firm believer that I think the lines will blur quite quickly between what is radio when you say it's distributed over FM or DAB, but what is radio when it's distributed over a podcast app, because live podcasting would be the same thing. So, do you have any work that you're looking at with live podcasting, or do you don't see anything on your horizon right now?

StuartMorgan 50:05

There are a couple of examples. On Friday night, we're doing a live stream for another podcasts on Instagram. Is that a live podcast? Probably yes, in the minds of the audience. Are we defining it as a live podcast? Probably not. Could we overthink how we're defining this stuff and get caught up in it? Probably. Back to what I said earlier. I think if we are able to give the audience what they want where they're listening in audio form or audio and video form as we're doing with the live stream, then it works. I think the interesting thing as well for me is around how we can use events and live and that as a revenue stream whilst also generating revenue. We work with Drunk Women Solving Crime as an example, and a big part of them is residency in terms of live. So they will, in effect, rather than record their podcast in a studio, they will record it in front of an audience. And there's a f some really interesting examples across the industry of that. And also, we did have our sex with my boss live into cinemas last year in the same time as we were doing it at the Palladium. So I think although we don't strategically try and do it, I think those lines are blurred, and for us, it's about going podcast by podcast. There are some podcasts that work well in that space, there's some that wouldn't work well. It's just about making sure that we're reacting and putting that content live pre-recorded where we know the audience will be.

SamSethi 51:24

Stuart Morgan, managing director and founder of Audio Always. Thank you so much. Congratulations on the new hires and come back sooner than two years. I think it's been since you were last on. So yes, you're always welcome.

StuartMorgan 51:36

Thank you. Thank you, having me.

Announcement 51:37

The Pad News Weekly Review with Buzz Sprout with Buzz Sprout. Start podcasting, keep podcasting.

Round the world

JamesCridland 51:46

All right, let's move on. And congratulations in Barcelona. Congratulations, Barcelona, particularly Ivoks, who has unveiled a new brand identity, and they are celebrating their 15th anniversary. I really like their new brand identity. It looks very smart. You can see it linked from Pod News this week. They have, of course, a big Spanish language podcast platform. Fascinating company. It'd be really interesting to learn more about how they work.

SamSethi 52:12

Yeah, gonna be in Madrid next week. So I'm hoping that I might be able to catch up with the iVooks team and maybe get them on here to do an interview.

JamesCridland 52:22

Yes, that would be that would be excellent. See whether you can do that. Let's go and have a quick look at some uh jobs. And Jonathan Mengivar has been hired by The Guardian to produce the Guardian's first US video podcast. He was with Pineapple Street Studios but has also worked in public media in the US as well. Uh, Audio Boom has named Craig Eastwood as Vice President International. Uh, he was uh previously commercial operations director at Adolitis, uh, which uh Audio Boom acquired in July, which is exciting. Uh, let's have a look for some awards and events. And the Independent Podcast Awards announced its 2025 shortlist. The event is on October the 15th in London. Harriet Kemsley will be one of the big stars at the Independent Podcast Awards she is uh hosting. She, of course, not just an excellent comedian, also an excellent podcaster as well. Another one of the stars giving out one of the awards is going to be this very podcast's Sam Steffi. So that'll be exciting, won't it?

SamSethi 53:24

Yes, only because you're not available again.

JamesCridland 53:27

Yes.

SamSethi 53:28

Who said Tomto? Right. Yes. There we go. Yes. The seven annual Afros and Audio Podcast Festivals taking place. It's Uniting Black Podcast. That'll be in Baltimore, Maryland, USA on October the 16th.

JamesCridland 53:44

Yes, and it's their final one as well. So I wish them all of the best for that. The Signal Awards has also revealed the finalists for this year's awards. They've opened voting for the Listener's Choice Awards in every category as well. You've until October the 9th to vote, if you wish. And the winners are given away on October the 15th as well. I was talking about the uh Independent Podcast Awards and how good it was that they'd managed to get a storefront in the Apple Podcasts app. And uh you you've managed to get uh storefronts for uh a bunch of different awards in TrueFans, haven't you, Sam?

SamSethi 54:18

Yeah, we've just launched our new awards page. We we do it in a different way. So each award page is a dedicated page and it has a carousel of all of the awards. So we do it first of all, the nominees, and then we will whittle that down to the finalist, and then we'll whittle it down eventually to the winners. So it'll be constantly edited. But what's nice about it is you can create a single playlist from it. So we have made it a playlist that you can then click. So if you just want to hear all the award winners from, let's say, the British Podcast Awards, you click the playlist and it'll play one after the other, and it'll play the latest episode as well, because it's what we call a dynamic playlist.

JamesCridland 54:57

Yes, very fancy, although that's a lot of hard work.

SamSethi 55:00

But uh yes, yes, but you know, I think it's worth it because what we Yeah, and I think it what's nice about it is we link it back. So when you become a nominee for whatever award, we then put a a logo on your podcast page saying that you're now a nominee for this award and you're whatever. So again, you know, trying to highlight podcasts that are doing well and and promote them.

JamesCridland 55:26

Now,

Events

JamesCridland 55:27

a couple of events to talk about. Podcast Days in Spain is a month or so away or in Madrid on the 2nd to the 3rd of October. Some of the uh incredible international stars that you can see there include Megan Davis from ACast, uh Eric Newsom from Magnificent Noise, and Sam Sethi from this very podcast. So that should be fun. Also, you know my intro is gonna be I'm so sorry, James couldn't make it. I wouldn't say that. Uh also Squeakfest, October the 10th in Houston in Texas, the night of the living pod, a fun-looking podcast conference there. Italy's podcasting festival has returned for its tenth year. It's on right now. There'll be a big global online event on September the 30th. I'm going to be one of the speakers there.

Interview: Dylan Haskins, All Irish Podcast Awards

JamesCridland 56:15

And in Ireland, a new two-day podcast summit has been launched. The event is called Soundwave. It'll be held in November in Adair, I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly, in County Limerick. Apparently, it's Ireland's prettiest village. So that's exciting. And included in that is the All Ireland Podcast Awards. And head judge for that is Dylan Haskins, who is also commissioning podcasts for BBC Sounds and Radio 5 Live. And Sam, you managed to catch up with him.

DylanHaskins 56:46

So it is the inaugural year. It's the first time we've done this. Um there's been various kind of iterations of different podcast awards in Ireland over the past few years that um kind of Ireland, there was a big kind of gaping hole there that we thought that's crazy, and we really ought to have an awards that celebrates the industry on the island of Ireland and the full island rather than just kind of the Republic of Ireland. So that's kind of why it's the All Ireland Podcast Awards as well.

SamSethi 57:12

Yeah, there were an Irish podcast awards from PodPod a few years ago. I don't know what's happened to those, but the event that you've got is when and where.

DylanHaskins 57:22

The All Ireland Podcast Awards are happening together with Sound Waves, which is a new two-day conference that's happening kind of on the business of podcasting, music, and sport, and kind of looking at all three of those together. But the awards are are on the night of the 13th of November, and they're happening in a day in Limerick, which is one of the most beautiful villages in Ireland. So what's happening is we have people coming in on the Wednesday, and the Wednesday night, there'll be kind of a small kind of music trail in the town, which should be good fun. Uh, and and then on the night of the 13th, as I said, yeah.

SamSethi 57:57

Now, what sort of categories have people been entering for these awards?

DylanHaskins 58:02

We we kind of you know, you can kind of have an infinite number of categories, and it's really hard to try and pick ones that kind of that cover enough. So we've we've got uh there's eight at the moment. So we've got a current affairs and politics, which kind of covers all of your new stuff and your more opinionated kind of discussion about politics all in the one. There's an audio drama and documentary, so that's kind of unusual, I suppose. We we lumped the narrative stuff into this one category, looking really at kind of scripted and non-fiction narrative storytelling. There's a new category, an entertainment category, which would be quite one of the quite broad ones, a sport category, business innovation, conversation, which should cover quite a lot as well, and then a kind of spotlight award, which is the judge's kind of discretion one that's not not one for being kind of uh people submitting themselves for all the other categories. People have been able to nominate themselves for it's been free to enter for the first year as well, because we want to kind of get as many people involved as possible as well. So we've we've had a ton of entries. The entries have actually closed now for this year, so it's too late if anyone's listening to enter, but I hope this will be the first year or something that will continue into the future.

SamSethi 59:17

Podcast hostel producer holds an Irish passport. The podcast hostel producer is a resident of Ireland, and the podcast production takes place in Ireland. So it's very clearly the all-Irish podcaster walls. There is no one sneaking in on the back of that one there.

DylanHaskins 59:30

No, and there's also there's quite a few Irish connection or Irish perceived podcasts or produced podcasts with Irish people that are produced from the UK, for example, something like My Therapist Ghosts Me as well, which is one of the biggest podcasts in the UK. You know, it's made for global, but it's also two Irish hosts on it as well. So we kind of we wanted to think as broadly as possible than just those who are in Ireland at the moment as well, because we're thinking more about what's listened to in Ireland as opposed to just who's always just based here as well, you know.

SamSethi 1:00:00

The event that's running alongside it, Soundwaves, I think you've picked three really hot topics, obviously podcasting, music and sport. They seem to be the real trendsetters. What's the sort of discussions you're hoping to have around those three topics?

DylanHaskins 1:00:14

The one thing that's kind of common in all of them, really, is how do you make a living from these industries and how do you do something in a way that's viable and sustainable? That's absolutely the case in music, and it's the case in podcasts as well. So thinking about all of the different ways that you can make a living and monetize podcasts and IP is, I think, one of the biggest topics in the industry generally, but it's really important to be thinking about that in in the context of Ireland as well. You know, a lot of a lot of ad buys are sold by kind of bigger networks across a range of inventory. Um, and that that that works in in you know in certain markets as well. Um, it mightn't always be the right fit though, as well. Some people have really, really dedicated for you know audiences or subscriber-based shows as well, and are doing deals directly with brands themselves as well. So there's a kind of a whole range, and in a market that like Ireland that's relatively small compared to the US and even to the UK. And the UK, the UK is small relative to the US, and Ireland is small relative to the UK there. And a lot of the infrastructure that kind of supports the Irish market flows through the UK or through through European companies as well. So really just trying to get all of the industry together and start talking to each other and kind of advocating for the industry as a whole. Um, and and also seeing what we learn from kind of comparable industries. Music is a really interesting one. I've always thought about the music industry in terms of how you market a podcast, for example, and thinking about how when you've got an exciting new band, you don't necessarily want to have a load of billboards around from day one because none of the cool people will want to listen to something if it's if it's on billboards from day one. So you kind of start with building that fandom by seeding it out and you grow it, and then you do the billboards when you've kind of reached a critical mass, if you can at that point. And I've always thought about that with how record labels would have managed bands, putting a seven-inch record out on a small kind of indie label first, even if they were signed to the major, and just thinking about a longer-term view of how you grow an audience around a podcast and market it. So that's just one example of you know where I've seen parallels in the industry as well. But um, sometimes when you have people from different but adjacent industries, you can learn a lot from each other, more so even than when you're just with people who are in exactly the same area as you.

SamSethi 1:02:47

Monetization comes later from that. You don't want to start day one monetizing. I mean, some people may be able to do it, but most don't.

DylanHaskins 1:02:56

Well, actually, there's quite a lot of Irish podcasts that do really well with subscribers, and it might be, you know, three to five thousand subscribers that is sustaining an entire show and the kind of team behind that as well. So that bit is something that is kind of quite strong in Ireland as well, and hopefully people can kind of learn from each other about different strategies as well.

SamSethi 1:03:19

We have a weird point where we might have too many podcasts. Do we have saturation or oversaturation? When I think of sports podcasts, I've heard about seven women's new sports podcasts launching, I've heard about ten men's rugby podcasts launching. It seems anyone who's ever played the game launches a podcast. Anyone who's ever, I don't know, been in the music industry has a podcast. You know, are we reaching a point where there are too many podcasts out there?

DylanHaskins 1:03:48

There are definitely there are definitely a lot of podcasts out there. But I think I think the proof is always in the audience and the numbers, and do people want to listen to and and also having volume kind of raises the bar for everyone as well, because to cut through, you need to be better, you need to make something that is more compelling than the other stuff. And so that is I I always find that quite an exciting challenge. It's gotten harder to cut through than it was maybe five years ago, you know. And in some in some areas, actually, I would say maybe in the narrative space, it's not as hard to cut through now because far few people are making and commissioning big narrative series now in the past two years, you know. So actually, there actually isn't there isn't a saturation in narrative series at the moment. There is in probably the always-on kind of conversation series. There's a lot, there are a lot of them, but but it's it's it's a kind of um it's a few small ones at the top that probably have the massive share of the listening there, and then a lot of a large kind of tail of of much more modest listening, you know.

SamSethi 1:04:53

Again, looking at the monetization element, is there anything other than talking about advertising? Is there any talk about subscription-based models or micropayment models? How are you going to look at monetization?

DylanHaskins 1:05:04

Yeah, well, I know that the micropayment models is a topic close to your heart for sure. Um it's really looking at the range of all the different ways. So absolutely subscription stuff, absolutely kind of ad sales, working with brands in a more kind of direct way, looking at the kind of full package around IT. So looking at live shows and how you do live shows as a more longer term rather than kind of a one-off thing as well. Um, and there's lots of really great people who can speak to that so well. So, you know, the Sound Waves conference as well. Uh, one of the organizers on it is Joe Clark, who's one of the managers for um uh one of the pods that he manages is the two Johnnies, which is you know the biggest podcast in Ireland in terms of its listening. They have some incredible stuff, like three, let me just check what it was. Yeah, it was yeah, they had some incredible stuff, but it was like three out of 10 18 to 25s in Ireland would identify the listener of the podcast. Crazy, crazy stuff. Um, I'll source that directly to Joe. Um, they actually did a Red C poll on that. So um there is uh they've been really successful and having someone like Joe involved who's been very much behind kind of the business side of that show as well in the awards as well, will really kind of I think lends kind of credibility to who people will be hearing from in these discussions, and there'll be a ton of people that have been kind of invited in to speak on the on the various kind of panel discussions as well. And it'll be relatively small, like we're probably looking at around 200 people for the conference. So people should be able to talk to each other as well. This isn't going to be a big, you know, um a massive conference with thousands of people coming coming through the door. It's it's relative model, and we just want to get the all of the kind of main people who are who are doing doing this and trying to make make it work in Ireland together, as well as the kind of international people that they work with and the different various different companies that distribute podcasts or host podcasts as well.

SamSethi 1:06:55

Dylan, thank you so much. Look, remind everyone why is the website, where they can get tickets.

DylanHaskins 1:07:01

So the website is soundwaves.ie. It's on the 12th and 13th of November. And the tickets, there's kind of there's three different so conference only is 75 euro, or there's a two-night accommodation package, which is 280 euro, and there's also a 180 euro one night accommodation package as well. So that's basically um, you know, you kind of want to come over, do the two nights, go on the music trail, have a good time in a dare, which has some great clubs and is a beautiful village. But also the awards, we've closed the entries for the for the awards now, but I'm hoping this is the first, this is the first of many years. I know with the conference it's it's something we're hoping to do for a few years. The reason it's happening in Limerick is the rider cup is coming to Limerick in 2027. So we've had some kind of funding and support around around that for bringing the conference to Limerick as well from the county council and city council there. So get booking your ticket.

SamSethi 1:07:53

Kevin, thank you so much. Good luck with it all. Cheers, Sam.

Announcement 1:07:56

Thanks

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Announcement 1:07:57

for being Hey, you at the ears. If you like this show, you'll love the Pod News newsletter. It comes out every day right in your email. It's got news about the industry and events and jobs and occasional sarcastic opinions, which apparently we need to make clear aren't the opinions of anyone other than the editor. You can subscribe for free to the pod news newsletter today at podnews.net. Right then. Back to these two guys. The Pod News Weekly Review with BuzzStrozzrout. Start podcasting, keep podcasting.

Podcastthon

JamesCridland 1:08:33

Right, something exciting is happening in March next year. Uh, I will be in Riga in Latvia, possibly. But also, pre-registrations are now open for the fourth edition of the charity podcast movement, Podcast Thon. This is a fascinating thing. It's basically a way for podcasters to talk about their favourite charities, to dedicate one episode to a non-profit of their choice. Now, last year, 1,500 podcasters from 40 countries took part. This year it should be even bigger because for the first time the event is also welcoming Spanish-speaking podcasters as well. It's uh worth a peek. You can find out more information just by searching for podcastthon and finding out more uh information about that. And obviously, you know, take part if you can. That's a wonderful thing. Uh, what else is going on? There's a fascinating story, not very much, frankly, to do with podcasting, but kind of is, I suppose, a fascinating article by Ryan Farley, worth a read. It's called The Story of How RSS Beat Microsoft. And uh you had a hand in uh a little bit of that, uh, I think, Mr. Sethy, didn't you?

SamSethi 1:09:45

Yeah, I was involved in the uh browser wars. They were fun, it was great times. Um Microsoft did everything they could to kill it from introducing ice, which was a really poor idea, introducing ActiveX. No, yeah, if you remember ActiveX, and also, I mean, and it's public domain, so I'm not gonna get sued, bribing certain corporate companies like the BBC to remove Netscape's browser and replace it with IE because they had deeper pockets than Netscape. So yeah, Microsoft did everything they could. I mean, the eventual goal was to have a closed proprietary environment called MSN. That was the original Bill Gates goal. The walls of that came down when they lost, and you know, obviously the European Union and then the DOJ removed Microsoft power of the IE browser. But you know, it's a fascinating history story. Um yeah, have a look at it.

JamesCridland 1:10:42

Yes, and uh there's some some wonderful things back in the histories in the history books. Uh like for example, and now how do you pronounce this? Zd net? ZD Net? I would pronounce it ZDNet, but is it really ZDNet? Gosh, there's a thing. Anyway, um uh a piece from 1997 where somebody from Netscape, Sam Sethi, marketing manager, uh ends up being uncharacteristically rude about uh uh about uh Internet Explorer, which was made the default browser for the Macintosh. Gosh, I don't even I don't even remember that, back in 1997. And Sam Sethi is quoted here by as saying Microsoft was giving away the browser and now they're paying people to take it. Bill probably earned that much in his sleep last night. Gosh. So so there's a thing.

SamSethi 1:11:33

Yes, Apple Podcasts, the iE circle podcast. Sorry, did I say that again?

JamesCridland 1:11:38

Gosh, there's a thing. Uh anyway,

The Tech Stuff

JamesCridland 1:11:40

let's move on.

Announcement 1:11:40

The tech stuff on the Pod News Weekly Review.

JamesCridland 1:11:44

Yes, it's the stuff you'll find every Monday in the Pod News newsletter. Here's where Sam talks technology.

SamSethi 1:11:50

Well, maybe I shouldn't. Right. Pocket cast. We've talked about how they added ads into the app and there's been a backlash. But also one stage further, James, somebody called Matthew Brunel has done something different. What's he done?

JamesCridland 1:12:06

Yeah, well, he has said, well, the uh the code for the app is open source, and so therefore I can just uh pop into the code, make a fork of the code, and get rid of the call for the ads. And hey, presto. So I'm I'm I'm and I'm kind of looking at that and thinking, I'm I'm not so sure that that's the the the right plan. I mean, firstly, his the premise of what he's saying is that uh pocketcasts have changed the rules. I bought this app a long, long time ago and now I'm seeing ads in it. Well, my understanding is that if you are a grandfathered paid account, you don't get the advertising anyway. So, you know, they've not really changed anything. But also, secondly, is it really the plan to use the fact that pocketcasts have very cleverly made the code for their app open source so that other people can add additional features into it? Is the plan really to punish them for that and get rid of the ads? I think, you know, I mean, really, Matthew, if you if you if you're going to do do something, then either just pay the money because it's a really good app, or go away and use, you know, the Apple Podcast app if you're on iOS or AntennaPod, which is which is the one that I would recommend if you're on Android. Those are both great apps. They both work in much the same sort of way. Both of those don't have advertising in them. You know, I think that's probably a good thing. So I'm I'm a little bit grumpy, Matthew, for doing this, but I'm sure that he feels very clever. To be fair, what he has done is he said how to change the code, but what he hasn't done is just uploaded an APK for you to download onto your Android phone without the ads, because I think that would be a little bit cheeky. So at the very least, you still need the intelligence to go in and work out exactly how you're going to rebuild, you know, recompile the app and all of that kind of uh thing. But I do think that that's a little bit cheeky. I don't know what you think there, Sam.

SamSethi 1:14:01

Uh no, I think it's I think it's just maybe throwing a shot across the bow at podcast saying, look, hey, think about what you're doing, because we can do this because you've made it open source. I think he's not trying to undermine Pocket Cast completely, he's just showing it's possible. I think your point within it though, in the article was podcasts do need a way to earn money, right? They don't earn. I don't believe pro accounts Pocketcast put out some numbers. I'm not sure I fully agree with the numbers in terms of how many people are paying for their pro account. I'd be surprised if the numbers are factual. But that said, they may well be. So, but I I've talked to Oscar, I've talked to other app developers, and the number of people who pay for pro accounts is very small. So that's not how we're generating our revenues. It's gonna come from other mechanisms. Now, if this is the way that PocketCast thinks they can monetize, or like YouTube and like Spotify, put in enough embuggerance, you know. Oh, here's an ad, here's another ad, here's another ad, I'll bugger it, I'll just pay the pro account. Which is what I do with YouTube, right? I I couldn't use YouTube the way it works, so I paid my $16.99. I'm waiting for the $7.99 account, but $16.99, and it's now a usable app. So maybe they're doing it for that reason. I don't know.

JamesCridland 1:15:27

Yeah, I mean, you know, I I think, you know, at the end of it, nobody wants to work for free. So uh either we have great podcast apps, or we just allow Spotify and YouTube and Apple to run this world. You know, I mean the exciting thing is I was I was in Canada, for example, last week. I did some work with OP3 to discover that over a typical week, I think 94 different podcast apps are used in Canada alone. Now 94 is a pretty nice large number. And if we if we don't want to benefit those podcast app developers at all, then we will essentially uh s continue seeding the entire industry to just Apple Podcasts and Spotify and YouTube, and that's not a particularly healthy place to go. If podcasting is a seven billion dollar industry, which apparently it is, then that seven billion dollars uh by making podcasts, surely we can sh share some of that with the podcast app developers to actually to actually work on our future there. And and unfortunately, it's not going to be done with you know streaming sats because that's never going to hit the mainstream. So therefore we kind of need to work out on to work out other things. I mean, to me, one of the simplest and most obvious things is that if is is some kind of share in the money that podcasters are paid by audiences, so whether that's your own secure RSS thing, whether that is just a simple affiliate deal with uh sporting cast and those sorts of uh people, or indeed, you know, I mean Apple Podcasts has its own affiliate, but obviously it that only works in Apple Podcasts. So, you know, but uh but whether or not it's a in it it's an affiliate deal like that or or something else, I don't really know, but some way of sharing in some of the revenue would be would be good so that podcast app developers get money depending on how much the podcast app is actually used.

SamSethi 1:17:38

I I I heartily agree with what you just said. I think if you remember, I proposed a podcast fund when the PSP was part of what I was doing. And my thoughts there were look, you look at Mitch Downey at Podverse, you look at Oscar and and Nick over at Fountain myself, you look at, you know, Jason at Podcast Gura, etc. etc. Podfriend is now pretty much gone. There's no work been done on it. Uh, we haven't heard anything from Mitch Downey. I haven't heard anything from Fountain, actually. Maybe other people have, but I haven't heard anything from those guys for months. I'm I'm not saying they're going away, but they seem very quiet. All of us are trying to make a living. We're all trying to support the podcasting 2.0 namespace. We are trying to make our apps more attractive than the mainstream apps. And, you know, it does take time and it does take money and effort. And one of the thoughts I had was the money currently in the ecosystem is with the hosts. That's where the money r resides. The pro accounts aren't going to work. So and the micropayments thing, as you said, you know, isn't going to pay the bills. So there are two things to it. One, hosts could, I'm not saying they should, but they could put a a small fund together that would be like a seed fund. Now I'm not saying give us money for nothing, but it could be done on the number of tags that we support would mean that we'd get an increase in the amount we get paid. That would be an incentive. We could give equity away back to the PSP as a fund owner, so they would be the angel fund owner. And, you know, if we then did grow and sell in the future, that money would then come back into the PSP for the next round of developers. I'm just saying we need to think differently because the money is not going to come from Spotify, Apple, or YouTube to any of the podcasting 2.0 apps. And if we all go away, and we could, you know, we the elastic string is not forever and a day. That's what you will be left with Spotify, Apple, and YouTube.

JamesCridland 1:19:41

Yeah, no, I I I do think that there's something worthwhile having a think about. And it might be advertising funded, but I I can't really see that. I'm not sure that the host should be paying because the host seemed to me to be right at the bottom of the value chain here. Nowhere near the top, which is you know, the money from advertising and the money from paid subscriptions coming in. I mean, to m to my uh view, uh the success here is probably through companies like Patreon, uh, supercast, supporting cast, and and similar ones of just okay, put a great big button in there, use the funding tag to link to supporting cast and Patreon and those sorts of things. Make sure that that funding button is as big as you possibly can, and we will give you the first month of support, for example. If you're a podcast app, we'll give you the first month of support for anybody that comes in through your app. I mean, that to me is a really simple, straightforward way. It would mean that the funding tag would get much more promotion anyway, which is a good new good news for everybody, but would also mean that money comes back in terms of affiliate deals, which are, you know, everybody understands how how those work. So I mean I think that would be a a simple way. Interestingly, one person contacted me and said that why don't pocketcasts just put ads in front of the in front of the podcast? So you press the play button and you hear an ad which is paid for by pocketcasts, and then after that it plays the ad. And I thought, well, that's dreadful. And then I thought, well, hang on a minute, YouTube does exactly that, and we seem to be fine with it on YouTube, but we don't seem to be fine with it in a podcast app. What what what's the deal there? I think that's an it's an interesting question, isn't it? Why is it okay for sp for YouTube to do that, and indeed for Spotify to do something similar to that, but it's not okay uh for a podcast app to end up uh uh doing that?

SamSethi 1:21:44

Well, that's because need and must, right? You don't need the podcasting 2.0 apps. There are plenty of apps. 94, I think you said in Cameroon alone, you were looking at. So so the alternative is we yeah, as truth fans, I could do that, and then everyone goes, ah, bug bugger you. Uh I'm gonna go and use fountain, I'm gonna use somebody else, I'm gonna use whatever, right? So it has to be a collective or not at all. Whereas when you've got a mass audience and you are a big player, or maybe the only player in the market like YouTube, then you can do whatever you like because the embuggerance of getting to the content is enough, and and there's an alternative, which is pay us, and then you don't get this problem. So I don't think we can in the podcasting space do this. I think the thing that you mentioned about Patreon and Memberful, that's where I see the biggest money for certainly true fans with my hat on as a CEO. That's the money I'm after. I'm not after the advertising money, I'm after the subscription-based, regular, recurring uh revenues. And I think at the moment, I don't know if Patreon would do an affiliate deal. I you know, maybe I've got to go and knock on the door and ask. But I certainly believe that secure RSS, which is something I'm certainly going to be focusing on for the next six months heavily, is where I think the money will be because that is people not using the funding tag for me as TrueFan, sending the user across to another site to register to then get a private feed to then work. I I I don't mind that whole model.

JamesCridland 1:23:16

Yeah, indeed. I think No, I I I can see that that works from a business point of view. I suppose the question is, you know, you you you need you need something that works that works everywhere. And I suppose that's the question there.

SamSethi 1:23:30

Well, does Patreon work everywhere?

JamesCridland 1:23:32

With the exception of yes. I was gonna say with the exception of uh Spotify, but no, it works in Spotify as well. So yes.

SamSethi 1:23:40

Yeah, well, as we've said before, I think Spotify maybe with SOA having a look at the revenue that it's giving Patreon and saying, hello, why are we doing that? I think that's gonna be a big change. But anyway, let's do that.

JamesCridland 1:23:52

Anyway, I should just I should just say, by the way, uh 94 apps uh in Canada. I I forgot what the global uh number uh was. This is just in a typical week, in a typical week, the global number is 185 different apps are being used. 185. That's a pretty impressive number, isn't it? And yes, uh if you look at downloads, Apple Podcasts and Spotify by themselves account for almost two-thirds. But that means that a third, or slightly over that, is being used by all of the other apps out there. And that's a and that's a tremendously vibrant uh industry. And what we don't want to see is that to go away.

SamSethi 1:24:32

No, I agree. Now, uh talking of money, James, Olby have announced that they're looking at adding bank accounts to the Olby Hub.

JamesCridland 1:24:41

Excellent. I'm I'm sure I'm sure the two people that use uh the LB Hub will be delighted.

SamSethi 1:24:50

No, okay. Yeah, obviously True Fans does, and and it works for us. But the bank account thing is quite interesting because the way that we have to top up the Olby hub right now is through Moon Pay or third-party banks, right? And what would be nice is that we would have an Olby hub and an Olby bank account, and therefore we could set it up as one hit, and I don't have to keep going back in and doing KYC to the Moonpay accounts and all the rest of it. So I don't know. It's an interesting thing. That's all I thought. Uh yeah. And Google has announced an agent's payments protocol, which, sorry, I'm not really excited about. This this reminds me of the Microsoft Ice. It's a payment protocol that will allow agent-to-agent confirmation. So their view of the future is that we will have agents who will be our concierge acting on our behalf, buying or selling stuff for us, and therefore we need to have some protocol. Now, Adam Curry was the one who highlighted this to me on Mastodon, so I thought I'd have a look at it. I'm not sure whether this is going to be the replacement for lightning. I'm not sure whether this is a replacement for stable coins or whether it will use micropayments, bitcoins, and stable coins. It's too early. But if you're interested, this is the tech section. Then it's called the agents payment protocol AP2. Go and have a look at it. It's from Google.

JamesCridland 1:26:18

Yes, and uh the there is something which uh may or may not be part of that, but uh Carji, the the website that I use as a Google replacement for search because it's much, much better. Cargi has done something interesting only in the last month or so. In the AI answers, if you end a query with a question mark, it will go off and use its own AI and give you an AI uh answer, but it gives you the references obviously underneath. Now it's giving you proportional source attribution. So it can actually say, okay, I got 63% of the information that I used to produce this answer from this website and 20% from this website, and so on and so forth, which is interesting. And then they added underneath that, more importantly, this technology paves the way down the road for Kaji to share profits with publishers participating in our AI answers. This would happen automatically for all websites with no deals and no contracts needed. Now I've no idea how any of that works, but but in terms of the idea of okay, I've got 63% of this information from this website, so therefore any money that I've earned from that search, I should share 63% with that website. I think that sounds quite interesting. So there's definitely something going on there. So, you know, again, worth a worth a peek at to what the mad fools at Kaji are doing, which is always a good thing.

SamSethi 1:27:48

No, it's very similar to what we did with the wallet splits. Yeah. The ability to, you know, have multiple recipients in the value tank. It's quite interesting. No, I think there's definitely something there. What else is going on, James? In the other news, Pod Analyst is a brand new tool launched today. Who are they, James?

JamesCridland 1:28:07

They are well, it's uh it's an interesting new product that helps podcasters unify their analytics across Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. It's next Odyssey exec and an X Cadence13 exec, is my understanding. And uh, if you are a podcast with under a thousand listeners, you can use that product free forever. Well, forever until you get more than a thousand listeners, one would assume. But it's it sounds like you know, a bumper dashboard if you can't afford a bumper dashboard. So that looks quite interesting. Also in the news, a thing called Clear My Voice, which says that it'll eliminate noise, filler words, long pauses, and mouth sounds and many more. You get a 30-minute free trial, and the service is five dollars for five hours, five dollars fifty for five hours, which is uh interesting to take a peek at. I would also point out that Orphonic gives you two hours free every single month, which is worthwhile as well. And the conversation with Janine was uh treated with uh Orphonic after I managed to do my usual and uh record using the wrong microphone. Uh so uh that was a thing. And finally, talking about uh AI audio enhancements, here's another one from Podsquee. This one's uh entirely free, and uh that removes background noise, filler words, and silences. You can go and uh give that a play if you like. You'll find it at uh on the PodSquee website. And yeah, it looks uh it looks quite smart if you want to give that a go too.

SamSethi 1:29:34

I I like the fact that people have done these things, but I just go, they are just features of a bigger function, right? Or an app.

JamesCridland 1:29:41

I agree.

SamSethi 1:29:42

So I don't quite understand why you do them as standalone things, because it just adds more work to the podcaster who then has to take the content from A to B back to A. I mean, I call me old fashioned.

JamesCridland 1:29:52

I agree. I mean, if you want to eliminate noise and filler words and long pauses, then just turn on the co host feature in BuzzSprout, because Buzzsprout will do exactly that for you. As soon as you upload a podcast, as soon as I upload this one, then it automatically does all of that stuff. We either we even use it to remove filler words as well. Uh and it does a pretty good job of doing that too. So give that a go with our sponsor, or you know, obviously there's a bunch of other uh tools doing that too. And I would agree it works much, much better if it's just built into your podcast hosts. It makes makes total sense.

SamSethi 1:30:28

Now, uh a couple of things that I spotted around the web. The European cookie law that made a mess of the internet looks like Brussels wants to fix it. If you're in Europe and you go to any web page, practically you get a banner appearing which says accept or reject the cookies, and nobody knows why they are accepting or rejecting it really. So they all click accept or they try not to, and then it says you can't access the page. This doesn't happen obviously in the US, but a lot of US companies then withdrew their access in Europe to the pages because of it. So it looks like the EU is considering removing the need for cookie banners. Hooray, at last, thank God.

JamesCridland 1:31:06

Yes, although, you know, if if you coded your website properly and stopped spying on your visitors, you wouldn't need them anyway. Exactly. So I don't I don't use them. And so therefore there's no cookie banners on the Pod News website. That much I can tell you because we don't use any any sort of tracking from that point of view. So yes, but uh good news for that least. Also, good news if you like AI voices telling you something that you're too lazy to read. No, there may be a good reason for that. Uh not least if you can't see very well, or indeed if you are currently, you know, driving somewhere. Uh, if you use Chrome on Android phones, you can now use a built-in feature in Chrome to listen to an AI-powered overview of the web page that you're reading, which is quite uh smart. So you can give that a go. That's just recently been uh rolled out. It's essentially Notebook LM, but uh built into uh Chrome. So that's uh an interesting thing.

SamSethi 1:32:00

Now you spotted something from Dave Weiner. What's Rumpel Stillskin up to?

JamesCridland 1:32:06

So he has produced feeds from a new product of his. One of the RSS feeds that he's producing has a thing called source colon markdown, which is the description element, but the description element in Markdown. So Markdown, if you don't know, really easy, simple, straightforward way to write for the internet. It includes links, it includes, you know, things like bold and italic, but it doesn't include everything that you will get in HTML. And more importantly, it's uh humanly readable as well, even if you don't have markdown. So that looks quite interesting because a current practice of uh HTML in the description fields for podcasts does actually make it very difficult if you want to do a decent job of showing what those show notes are in a podcast app. And so if you just had markdown and it was simple, straightforward markdown, then that would be much easier to end up showing. So so I thought that that was quite interesting. It turns out that uh Nathan Gathright tells me that I I I shouldn't be excited by it. So uh that's it.

SamSethi 1:33:15

Although it's not a good thing. I'm gonna do like Nathan because you know he he did point out that um when we were talking about the AI tag stuff and the person tag, he said TreeFans has already implemented. I went, yes, we have. And somebody quite nicely said TreeFans AI already implemented. Anyway,

The inbox

SamSethi 1:33:32

moving on.

Announcement 1:33:33

Boostigram, boostergram, boostigram, super comments, zaps, fan mail, fan mail, super chats, and email. Our favorite time of the week, it's the pod news weekly review inbox.

JamesCridland 1:33:46

Yeah, 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, or boosts everywhere else, or email, and we share the money that we make just between Sam and I. For this is a licensed product of the pod news world and not part of PodNews itself. So uh tons of boosts and super comments, which is very exciting. One, two, three, four sats from Silas on Linux saying, I'm incredibly upset hearing James have faster and more stable internet on an aeroplane compared to my crap German internet connection at home. Well, there you go. Sorry about that. That's just the way that it works all over. Sure.

SamSethi 1:34:26

Starlink works at home as well if you want to pay for it, Silas.

JamesCridland 1:34:28

Yeah, I mean, it was it was Nazi internet though, so yes, you don't get it.

SamSethi 1:34:33

He's in Germany. You can't say that. You can't say that.

JamesCridland 1:34:35

Oh no, you're uh no, you're absolutely right. Too soon. Too soon. Uh a row of ducks from the ugly quacking duck. Ah, it's nice to hear from Bruce again. I hope that my wallet is working again. It is. Keep pod news going, 73. Thank you very much. Yes, that it's wonderful to hear from you again and hope that things are good. That came in through Podcast Guru. Uh, 1,000 uh sats from Fountain from RW Nash. Go podcasting, I think. Yes, go podcasting, exactly right.

SamSethi 1:35:04

2,596 sats from Seth. Happy birthday, Sam Sethy. Thank you very much. Yes, happy birthday to me. Sh next year we'll talk about it. This year is just a next one number. Minor number. No pension required.

JamesCridland 1:35:15

Neil Vellio from something that we uh covered earlier on in this very show. 347 sats. Thanks, Neil. Very generous. Uh he says uh this whole inception point story highlights something that just makes me bloody angry. Not because the tech is bad, not because AI is a bad thing for podcasting, but Neil Vellio continues in his own opinion. Entitled people like Janine think that they can make bad product after bad product and carry on with their self-serving agendas, and there's nobody keeping them accountable. And that's why I love this show, Pod News, and what James is doing to help rid our industry of these bad actors.

SamSethi 1:35:54

Oh, James, right. I've I've got nothing to do. Hello, Tonto.

JamesCridland 1:36:01

Neil Velio with his own opinion there. Uh Silas on Lilux, a row of ducks. Months ago, James said, Visa and MasterCard are the internet's money. A take that I strongly dislike, even if for many areas it's true. There you go. Doesn't mean it should be that way, but because it is. And one final set of sats, 5,150 from Matt Cundle, who I saw last week in Calgary. Thanks for your words on Todd Cochrane. I recall there was a time when Todd didn't see the value in value for value. Then he listened to a few people and pivoted into being one of its biggest supporters, agreed. And I think that the art of changing your mind is a good thing for everybody. So I'm pleased to see that and pleased to see you recognize that. And it was uh excellent to see Matt at in at Calgary last week as well.

SamSethi 1:36:49

Can I can I just point out one observation, James, from what you've just read out? We got sats from Fountain, Podcast Guru, and TrueFans. And we have not seen in previous weeks many uh payments from Fountain, many payments from Podcast Guru. I think it's great that it looks like the the SATS and the payments are coming in from multiple apps, not just from TrueFans, which has been the case uh for the last couple of weeks.

JamesCridland 1:37:17

Yes, no, it's uh really good to see all of that money coming in. But you're right, it's really is only those three apps which are being used, but three is better than nothing. Mike Dell was the last person to send us uh SATs all the way back in July from Castomatic. So, and I think Mike was the only user of Castomatic to have boosted us certainly over the last six or so months. And similarly, we're seeing exactly the same sort of thing going on in terms of uh streams as well. So, yes, worth a peek. You can support us that way. You can also obviously support us by becoming a power supporter. Weekly.podnews.net uh is where to do just that. Thank you to John Spurlock, the the brainiest man in podcasting, for being our 23rd supporter. So thank you for that. Thank you also for other supporters, including Rachel Corbett, uh, Neil Vellio, and Jim James for your very kind uh support. And uh I th I think my I I think Mr. Kundle is in there as well, isn't he? Somewhere. Matt Cundle, yes, hidden away in there somewhere. I can't quite see him in front of me. But yes, so all of those lovely people, uh you can join them too. That would be super helpful. And my goodness, we might need it soon. So uh so uh see what you can do there. Weekly.podnews.net would be very

Sam and James's week

JamesCridland 1:38:37

helpful. So, what's happened for you this week, Sam?

SamSethi 1:38:39

Well, I we pushed out the new dedicated awards page, which is great. And and yes, you said earlier that it will take a lot of work. What was most annoying is none of the awards sites contain an OPML export option. The only site Apart from Well, as I'm going to say it, apart from yours truly, Pod News Days. Thank you. Yes, well done.

JamesCridland 1:39:01

Yes, we've got uh OPML exports for any list of podcasts that we make. The code is really simple. If I can see more than one podcast being linked to on this page, make an OPML uh export, but it seems to work quite well. It does so yes.

SamSethi 1:39:14

What's nice is we we also have an OPMX OPML import and export on the playlist page. So yeah.

JamesCridland 1:39:21

Nice.

SamSethi 1:39:22

Well, that works. We've added support for private feeds, so me harumphing about Patreon earlier, but we have to support it because it's the way that people do it right now. But I do not like pay private feeds, I do not like the way that we do things. I think RSS has to support both premium and premium within the same feed. I believe that we do it really well with chapters, we do it with transcripts, we do it with pod rolls, we would do it with well, we do publisher feeds, nobody else doing it. And I think adding premium content or secure RSS is something hosts should be doing because I think there's money in them hills. Why give it all to Patreon? Why can't Buzzsprout or or you know um RSS Blue or or any of them, right? Implement it and then they get the premium content actually in their hosting service rather than sending it all over to Patreon.

JamesCridland 1:40:17

I don't know why you've never mentioned this before, so do you think I've got a little bug bear? Maybe. Anyway, James, what's happened for you this week? Um I have flown home. I ended up just basically going, you know what, I can't be bothered to fly all the way home from Calgary to Chicago to London, then over to Singapore, and then and it was going to be like a day and a half in a plane. And I thought, you know what? No. So I ended up at the very last minute, just buying myself a quick flight home the quick way round from Calgary to San Francisco and then home from there, which was definitely a good idea, even if, as you can probably tell, I've I've caught quite the cold. Um, so so there we are. But yes, and I was in the back seat of one of the big planes, and and that was and that was interesting. I've never been in the back in the back row of a long haul flight before. Turns out that if you are a platinum flyer in the back row, you get treated like like like some like somebody else. It's it's amazing. You get you get special special treatment all the time. Right? Yeah, so that was so that was definitely a good thing. If you want to read a a trip report, some people like them, so why not? Uh you'll find that on my personal blog, james.cridlin.net slash blog, where you can read that and also read other tedious things about radio and all kinds of things.

SamSethi 1:41:43

The only thing I've ever caught on a plane's COVID, and that's coming to see you.

JamesCridland 1:41:48

Well, yes, I I was genuinely thinking that this was COVID, but uh because because goodness, uh, you know, I couldn't really do very much yesterday. Anyway, feeling much better today, and uh both of the tests that I've taken so far tell me it's not COVID, so that's all right. And that's it for this week. All of our podcast stories taken from the Pod News Daily Newsletter at Podnews.net.

SamSethi 1:42:10

You can support this show by streaming SATS. You can give us feedback using the Buzz Brow fan mail link in our show notes. You can send us a super comment or boost, or better still, become a power supporter like the 23andme Superfans at weekly.podnews.net.

JamesCridland 1:42:25

Our music is from TM Studios, our voiceovers, Sheila D. Our audio is recorded using clean feed. We edit with Hindenburg, and we're hosted and sponsored by Puzz Sprout. Start podcasting, keep podcasting.

SamSethi 1:42:37

And that's disclosure for you.

Announcement 1:42:38

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