SPEAKER_04: 0:00

The Pod News Weekly Review uses chapters, and so can you.

SPEAKER_01: 0:04

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

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I'm James Cridlin, the editor of Pod News. And I'm Sam Sethy, the CEO of True Fans.

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Let's do the publishing and let's do the analytics. And I bet you we can really start to solve, hey, what's working as a question.

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A brand new podcast host, but one with a difference. We talk to Rox Codes from Flightcast on the new video first podcasting platform. Plus, will podcasting be worth three billion dollars in the US this year? I think it will. If we know what podcasting actually is. This podcast is sponsored by BuzzSprouts with the tools, support, and community to ensure you keep podcasting. Start podcasting, keep podcasting with BuzzSprout.com.

SPEAKER_01: 0:49

From your daily newsletter, the Pod News Weekly Review.

SPEAKER_03: 0:54

This week there's some big announcements by a company called Flightcast. Well, it's about hosting. But before we get into that, I just want to look at some of the data that's being pushed out by John Spurlock on Livewire. It looks like the industry's growing. Tell me more.

SPEAKER_02: 1:09

Well, it looks like the industry is certainly consolidating. Obviously, what John Spurlock measures is he measures podcast hosts by episode share. So the share of all of the episodes that have been published and what individual podcast hosts have got for that. So obviously uh Spotify at number one. But there are some very interesting companies that are doing really well. BuzzProw, our sponsor, is has a record share of 10%. So congratulations to them. Spreeker has also jumped to a record. They are on uh almost twice as much, 17.1%. Now, Spreeker are the company that Inception Point AI uses, and we've already heard that Inception Point AI is publishing 3,000 episodes a week. So clearly that's going to make a big change, you would have thought to that. But also record numbers from Simplecast, from RSS.com, from Transistor, and from Captivate. So some really nice high numbers, I think.

SPEAKER_03: 2:10

You said consolidation. So consolidation says to me that smaller hosting companies are going away. Or is this that the overall industry size of the pie is growing?

SPEAKER_02: 2:22

This is, I mean, if the size of the pie grows, that won't change these particular figures. So these are, you know, just a share of the of the uh number of episodes which are out there. And you can actually very clearly see. So LiveWire has a really good sort of set of graphs where you can see the top three, and the top three are so far away from everybody else Spotify, Spreaker, and BuzzBrowt, so far away from anybody else. And then you start digging into the other ones, and there are lots of companies which are going down, particularly the heritage brands. So you can see Podbean going down, you can see interestingly, megaphone going down. They their high was uh in the middle of 2023, but you can also see a significant amount of other people. I mean, Libsin on their worst ever figures, Podbean on their worst ever figures, and so on. So actually, there is an awful lot of smaller companies and SoundCloud, obviously, as you would expect, because they don't really care about podcasts anymore. But you can obviously see that there are lots of the smaller companies who people are turning away from. And unfortunately, that does include people like Libsin in there. So I I think it's it's it's basically it's a tale of two of two sides of the industry. One side of the industry being, you know, the the large companies that people are consolidating to, and the other side really being the heritage older companies that haven't really been offering anything particularly new recently, and you've seen them, you know, very much uh go away.

SPEAKER_03: 3:56

Now, one of those companies that's doing very well is Usha over in France. What have they been doing? Or what they've been saying, I suppose, more to the point.

SPEAKER_02: 4:04

Well, yes, exactly. I mean, Ousha or Usha, depending on how you wish to pronounce it. I'm gonna have to be pronouncing it a lot in the Pod News Daily podcast soon, so I can tell you that. But they are a under one percent podcast host, so that's one thing just to bear in mind. They are relatively small. Having said that, uh they've just announced that shows hosted on their platform have surpassed one billion cumulative downloads, which is quite a nice big figure, isn't it? So uh it certainly makes for a good a good press release anyway. So one billion downloads is quite a nice thing. Buzzsprout, just to put that into context, does about a hundred million downloads every month. So it would take um ten months to get to one billion. OSHA, obviously significantly smaller, but it's it's good to see OSHA, you know, continuing to do well, continuing to, you know, seemingly increase in the amount of shows on that particular platform. So that's uh that that that's a good thing, I think.

SPEAKER_03: 5:05

Now, Todd Cochran obviously had said many times before in the past that he was not going to increase his price. In fact, they hadn't increased their price at Blueberry for 20 odd years. They have on their own website announced that they were going to increase the prices in October. I don't know if that's gone through yet. But our sponsors and Bos Sprout, our friends, have quietly increased their price back in August, James. So is the industry now beginning to say time to increase the price?

SPEAKER_02: 5:36

I think quite a lot of people are changing prices. So Todd made that decision that that was taken before podcast movement. So, you know, I've I think that there've been a lot of companies that have stuck with the same prices for 20 years, and clearly that can't work, you know, given how inflation works. So, you know, Blueberry putting up their prices, BuzzSprout changing prices for new customers, nothing to do with current customers at the moment, but for new customers, quite a change actually, moving from$12 a month for the base price up to$19 a month. The way that BuzzSprout charges for its podcasts is based on hours uploaded, which is a different model to many others. But that was interesting to end up uh seeing. And, you know, the there has been a bunch of other of other increases. Perhaps what would be an interesting article, and perhaps one that I should go away and uh and do some research on is what other podcast companies have done in terms of their pricing, because I think that there's been quite a lot of changes, particularly for new customers, over the last five years or so. So it might be worthwhile having a look at that and seeing what the changes are in terms of uh pricing there.

SPEAKER_03: 6:53

Now, one other thing that's going on is Transistor is showing that the number of downloads appearing from web browsers has increased by a whopping 173% since February. Okay, James, what's going on with web players then?

SPEAKER_02: 7:08

Well, what is going on with web players? Libsyn's stats have shown a significant increase for some time. Buzzprout's stats also show much the same sort of increase that Transistor has shown, jumping 163% since February. There's an awful lot of all of a sudden web browsers appearing in our logs, and I'm certainly seeing that in the Pod News Daily logs as well. So is there something going on? I think there probably is something going on, and I don't think it's actual real human beings. I think that all of a sudden a ton of these AI tools have worked out that they can just pretend to be a web browser, they won't get blocked, because if you pretend to be a web browser, then you won't get blocked. And they're then downloading shows. My suspicion on that is that if we were to look at, for example, any IP address that is coming from Amazon AWS, you know, coming from one of their EC2 instances, if you were to do the same for Google and a number of others, I suspect that we would see quite a lot of in Inverter Commas web browsers on those IP addresses that clearly can't be web browsers because they don't exist that way. So my suspicion is that uh quite a lot of this is automated traffic, which is being counted as downloads. Now, if you remember Janine Wright the other week talking about Inception Point AI and talking about how if she gets more than 20 downloads per episode, then she makes a profit. I uh uh kind of think that 20 is the is the amount of easily the amount of downloads that you will get from AI-based tools downloading stuff and you know doing transcripts and all of that kind of uh stuff. We know that uh Spotify, for example, downloads every single show. We know that Apple downloads every single show automatically, so there's two for a start, and there may well be other people who are downloading every single episode as well. So my my suspicion is that quite a lot of this is just noise of automated tools running in the the background, checking, checking podcasts and all that kind of stuff. And I'm not entirely convinced that all of this is real data. So it would be interesting to dive into that into that data a little bit more and see if we can actually work out whether or not these web browser numbers are actually real. Now, of course, some of those will be real, some of those will be coming from TrueFans, which will turn up as if it's a web browser in in most cases. And the same goes for a number of the other web apps, but my suspicion is that there are also an awful lot of other ones that really aren't those and are just you know scraping shows for content.

SPEAKER_03: 9:57

Do we use the Cloudflare capability to try and block the AI? I mean, that's one of the things that Cloudflare is trying to do. That's what we reported on a couple of weeks ago. Would that help here?

SPEAKER_02: 10:09

Well, I think that one of the difficulties with that is whenever you do that, then you end up blocking all kinds of other people as well. And so I wonder whether whether or not there is a simple way of looking at the IP ranges that are being used by things like EC2 and you know cloud servers in general, and going, if this is a browser and from a EC2 instance, then at least we should count that as a bot. It might still be a web browser that is downloading it, but it's much more likely to be a bot. And I think it would just be interesting for podcast hosting companies to do that work and to just see how many of those downloads from inverted commas web browsers that we're actually seeing out there are also, you know, are also coming from those services. And of course, you know, we shouldn't forget that there's been a bunch of people who have been doing, you know, slightly nefarious things in terms of loading a podcast on page load, which a big uh Spanish newspaper was doing last year. There's been quite a lot of that that's been going on, and again, that living in a in a web browser may account for a certain amount of downloads as well. But it it's just really noticeable, I think, in a lot of different stats that my goodness, there's an awful lot of web browsers out there downloading shows and what's going on there. I mean, I know that TrueFans is particularly popular, but you know Yeah, no, I even I can't spin this one to say it's me, mate.

SPEAKER_03: 11:38

I tried, I was thinking, how can I get that guy? Even I know that's not us.

SPEAKER_02: 11:43

No, indeed. So interesting. And I I would love to work with some podcast hosting companies that might want to actually sit and chomp through their log files and and see if they can actually work that those kind of numbers out as well.

SPEAKER_03: 11:57

Now, there's a new entrant into the hosting market. We talked about flight cast. This is from Stephen Bartlett and Rox Codes. Rox is the former engineer at Mr. Beast. What's going on with this one, James?

SPEAKER_02: 12:10

Yeah, so Rox has been at a number of big podcast conferences over the last year or so. We've known that he's been working on flightcasts for some time. And uh, I think he was at the podcast show London. Uh, he was certainly at podcast movement in Dallas as well, and I think was in Chicago too. And, you know, talking to a bunch of uh different people. Finally, it's launched. It is the podcast host of Stephen Bartlett, the host and creator of Diary of a CEO. Lots of really interesting ideas in there, but particularly, this is a video podcast host. It's the first video podcast host that exists. It will stick your video into YouTube and into Spotify automatically, as well as be a podcast host for audio as well.

SPEAKER_03: 12:58

Well, you know what? I thought I'd reach out to Rox and uh ask him what is Flightcast?

SPEAKER_00: 13:04

Flightcast, the video first podcast hosting and growth platform, does a whole lot of things. Mainly lets you publish video and audio everywhere. So that's video to YouTube and Spotify, audio to Apple and everywhere else. It makes clips for you out of your videos. It creates a whole clips channel with that that kind of lets you test different moments. There's a whole buttload of AI and a whole buttload of analytics in there. So it's got pretty much all the stats from every platform as deep as they go, and AI to sit with you and analyze those stats and really help you understand what's working for you and what's not, what's growing your show and what's a waste of time.

SPEAKER_03: 13:43

Let's unpack some of that, right? So let's start off with from what I can see, it's a video first hosting platform. Why video not audio? Why was the decision, I assume, on the white paper when you first met with Stephen Barlett, who's your other co-founder? Why would you say we were going to do video hosting first? Because everyone else is a predominantly audio hosting company.

SPEAKER_00: 14:04

Yeah, well, that was definitely part of the reason. I think a lot of the success of DOAC came from the video side, and the audio side still does great, but video is where they saw their growth. And I worked with Steve when I was doing my thumbnail test tool. He was a very early customer, so we worked closely together, and I got to see their whole operation. And my takeaway was, well, this is kind of annoying. This looks really not fun to do, you know, leaving computers on overnight, giant files and everything. So I said, well, surely we can we can do better than this, and probably we can do a whole growth platform, because I imagine a lot of people who are doing this audio stuff and are starting to do video probably don't understand video that well. And really, I mean understand YouTube that well because there's algorithms and all these things. So it was, well, we can kill two birds with one stone, let's do the publishing and let's do the analytics, and I bet you we can really start to solve hey, what's working as a question.

SPEAKER_03: 14:58

Now, one of the secret sources that I uh we we've talked, as I said, for about a year in the background, so I'm aware, was the ability for you to get an API from Spotify to directly publish video to them, which nobody else has.

SPEAKER_04: 15:13

How did that come about? I don't know how much I'm allowed to talk about that stuff.

SPEAKER_00: 15:18

So I've made it no one's listening, no one's listening. Don't worry, just say what you like. I trust me, they are listening. Spotify will hear it. No, but I mean we we chatted with Spotify and we've been working closely with them to get this over the line. So it's all using like official methods, I can say, for sure. Yeah, it was just a lot of conversations, and they've been very kind. We've been slowly working towards this for quite a while, and yeah, it's been great and works well.

SPEAKER_03: 15:44

Now, one of the things that you've got with the platform is also AI. So, first of all, give me some examples of how people might use AI on flightcast to help them with their analytics.

SPEAKER_00: 15:59

Yeah, okay. So the biggest thing that we have here is this really large AI chatbot, or really I guess AI assistants, probably more accurate, that can query into your entire set of data, all of your analytics. So you can ask very arbitrary questions. And it has like this entire query language it's programmed with to get into not just your YouTube data, not just your Spotify data, but pretty much everything. So you can ask everything from which episode had the most listens in the first three hours and 12 minutes, what topics do the best for me in the first 48 hours on YouTube. But you can go deeper. You can say like which episodes had listeners that have listened more than three times on average, you know, and like all of that analysis, I mean it'll go slower, but it does get through it. So we called this as like a multi-step, multi-function sort of experience so that it could answer really tough questions with time and it can answer pretty easy questions pretty quickly. And that was really kind of the magnum opus of what I wanted to do. Because to some extent, I've always wanted to build sort of an AI YouTube consultant, I suppose. Because a lot of YouTube consulting is when you've you know spent years listening to him talk, you get a handful of the things and you say, All right, this is just math. I could just do this math and give good insights. So I'm hopeful to really bring that across through this.

SPEAKER_03: 17:12

Now, what AI are you using? Can you reveal? Is it open AI? Is it Gemini? All of them.

SPEAKER_00: 17:20

All of them. All of your buttons. It's genuinely all of them. It depends on the function. Yeah. We we did like kind of what cursor does where for different things are using different things.

SPEAKER_03: 17:29

Now, when you upload video, I looked at the various pricing that you've put forward and we'll talk about that in a minute. But what on the entry-level pricing, you've got three terabyte of storage. So I assume that this is the upload capability because you as Flightcast aren't actually storing uh the video when it's distributed to other platforms. Because if I'm uh uploading video and it's then going to Spotify, I assume that that's no longer needed on Flightcast, for example, because it's now stored on Spotify. And if I do the same thing with YouTube, I'd so the original might remain on Flightcast, but you've actually co-distributed everything over to the actual different other platforms. You're no longer hosting it.

SPEAKER_00: 18:18

I don't have to. I still do. And it's a good question. Because I could just upload it to YouTube and then functionally delete the original MP4. But we fell into this realization that Flightcast could also be a kind of nice CMS just in general. And having all of those files in there and then transcoding to audio and then transcribing and then adding like search functionality, and you know, we have like retention graphs from Spotify and YouTube overlaid. And one of the many things I want to make is kind of an analysis chart for that. Imagine D script, but for analyzing retention. So it's that kind of UI of transcript video and everything. So, you know, that's one of the little fun secret things we're trying. So a lot of reasons came up for actually it'd be pretty great if we held on to the files. Because basically, I can become Google Drive, and at scale you can get quite quite cheap storage. So kind of why not? You know, like I think 50 bucks a month and you're getting three terabytes on top of everything else is like kind of nuts, actually. So maybe I can even get that higher as we scale up. But yeah, we we do hold all the video. And I think a lot of it also came from me really wanting to do video RSS eventually. And if I got rid of the files, I wouldn't be able to. So I said, okay, well, we're gonna hold these, and then one day when we want to do all this, and like video RSS gets accepted a little bit more, we can kind of just flip a switch and say, all right, everybody, if you want to go video, go video. And there you go. You know, and then suddenly there's a thousand video feeds out there.

SPEAKER_03: 19:34

Now, there's a couple of other things that you do. One of those is you create transcripts, and one of those is you create chapters. Is this AI automated chapters and transcripts? And again, how are you doing it?

SPEAKER_00: 19:47

Yeah, yeah. You know, some version of Whisper and then some giant AI, right? Like we we do put a uh uh too much effort into getting good chapters and good titles and good descriptions. Like, I think that's one of the really hard things to convey in like the landing page is it's not just this feature, it's this feature, but I tried really hard. So, like recently, like our descriptions used to be really bad. It took a lot of tries, probably took maybe five or ten versions of AI descriptions before we got something that was good, similar with titles, but now it's kind of like trained on your old stuff, and that ended up being pretty key. But it costs me a lot every time you generate one, right? So it's you get the higher quality, but you pay for it. So that's a lot of why we come in at that$50 mark is to say, okay, well, I'm gonna give you everything in the best version that I can possibly make it, but it's gonna cost me, so it has to cost you.

SPEAKER_03: 20:34

Yeah, yeah. And I think people are beginning to understand there are AI credits, and those AI credits cost real money. It's not, you know, you can get it for free. I think what's interesting is you've taken the position of including that all in one cost. I look at Buzz Sprout, for example, or Captivate, who will break out those costs into bundles. So they might say, our hosting is$19, but then you can add co-host, which is our AI agent, and then you can add magic mastering for another. And if you aggregate all those up, they probably get closer to the$50 that you were just talking about. So again, did did you think about maybe a smaller number and then bundled on, or was it a distinct decision that, yeah, no, we're just gonna be transparent. This is the number, these are the features, bang. If you can afford it, great. If you can't, don't worry.

SPEAKER_00: 21:32

Yeah, I I think my goal was not, you know, let me get the absolute minimal version at the absolute minimal dollars, because I think it's like you know, I I I always want to build I've always framed it as in my career as a tool builder, I build intermediate plus tools. And to some extent, what I wanted to say with this is like come here if you're serious about it. You know, like come here if you want all the tools that can be provided to make your life better. And that might not be the perfect take, and I get that. But like, you know, before this I built an A-B testing tool for thumbnails, right? That was like my first business was thumbnail test.com that did well, and it was 20 bucks a month, and I ended up getting a lot of people with like hundreds of subscribers, maybe a thousand subscribers. And at that scale, A-B testing in the way I was doing it was like kind of not very useful, right? It was a stretch. And I felt a lot of guilt about that. And I said, when I go to the next one, I'm gonna make sure that I'm really trying to say, hey, if it doesn't feel like you can put this much in, you probably won't get enough value out of this anyway. Because the people who are using it, a lot of our customers are at the highest price point. I would say like percentage-wise, not a lot are at the lowest. It is there. I want there to be that entry point, I want there to be that option for bulk, and I want there to be that stepping stone for people who say, like, look, yeah, I want to do all the video stuff, yes, I want to analyze this data, like I want to know what's happening, you know. I I want to treat it as a level up, I guess, in terms of taking the content side more seriously. So that was a lot of the theory in there.

SPEAKER_03: 22:58

So the last part is you've got some dynamic ad insertion capabilities for monetization. Have you partnered with Spotify and Megaphone to enable this, or is this something you're doing yourself?

SPEAKER_00: 23:11

I have done the regular dynamic ad stuff, I guess would be the quickest way to word it. Ever done not that complex of a take on dynamic, yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 23:20

So the last bit that I was curious about in the pricing was you have three terabytes and you go to six terabytes and you go to sort of what they call the legend version, which again is just more storage and capability. And I understand that. Did you consider having because it's only one podcast per account? Did you consider having multi-podcasts within the accounts as you scaled up at all? Was that an option?

SPEAKER_00: 23:45

Yeah, without getting too deep into it, the aggregate of the features gets quite expensive. To get a really good AI result, it might cost me a lot every time you click that button. So it was more of a I expect you to be burning a handful of dollars on each individual feature. So it just adds up to be an average podcast uploaded weekly, should land here-ish plus profit, you know. So that was where I landed with it. It was definitely a tough decision because everybody else is doing multiple. But I think the premium customers are more price insensitive. When we were doing beta, there was no entry point. When we were doing beta, we were starting at 250, right? And that was no question for a lot of people. But it was because we had all of the things. I don't think if we had done some of the things that that ever would have come across. So that's really what I want to do. I want to build the premium product.

SPEAKER_03: 24:34

We're both in a WhatsApp group which has got a lot of hosts in there as well. And I've seen some of the commentary back. There's been a lot of positive commentary from some of your early beta testers saying we've been able to this one-click distribute everywhere model. How have you found the beta feedback for yourself? What did you learn through that process?

SPEAKER_00: 24:54

That's a good question. I think a lot of people would underestimate how complex the thing is. A lot of people would be like, ah, just upload. But there's a million little things that get weird when you start to go to many platforms at once, a lot of generalizations that have to be made. And you know, like we were talking about before we even started, UX is just so massive. Like UX is is half of it. And so that was also part of the reason I decided to do these onboarding calls of the first few hundred customers is to just say, hey, let's make sure that you get it. And then if you have questions, then I can plug those into the tutorial or to the guidance or whatever, so that the next person just gets it. And we did a lot through beta to understand a lot of it, but there's still so much to go. There's still so much stuff going on. So yeah, important to UX. Is Flight Studio now all on Flightcast? DoAct is hosted directly, full RSS and everything. The rest of the Flight Story shows are using the megaphone integration that we have, where you basically, you know, you can think of it as like I post to megaphone and YouTube at the same time, and then I still aggregate all the analytics, and then I still have all the AI and everything else.

SPEAKER_03: 26:05

Now, one of the things that Diary of a CEO does, we've interviewed them obviously before, is they have this very clever panel for clip analysis. So from what I understood, they've got a panel of people who listen or watch the video, and at some point where they find it interesting, they give a space bar or a return. And what the team then at Diary of a CEO do is then aggregate that histogram into an aggregated view of what was interesting through, and then that's where they generate the clips. Now, from what I've seen of the product feature function for flight casts, that's one of the features that you've built in. Is that directly something that you took from the Diary of a CEO team, I guess?

SPEAKER_00: 26:49

Well, a fun story. The the sort of like pre-visualization tool where you send people an early edit is a different thing, but was actually the first thing I built with Steve when we were theorizing ideas. So yeah, we built that as an internal tool. And I said to Steve, let's start these as internal tools, and then if they look good, we can upgrade them. And it ended up being that Flightcast itself felt a lot more compelling than this early thing. Because I thought the early thing was like, that's a really, really premium concept. You have to have enough fans to send it to early. You got to get people like science stuff, how do you handle content security? There's a lot of complexity there versus publishing analytics, AI. Straightforward, you got it. The AI clip tool that we have there is unrelated to that sort of like pre-watch tool that we made. The AI clip tool that we made basically is every time you upload an episode, it will AI generate clips. It makes a separate YouTube channel for this, and then uploads clips one or two or three a day and just lets them run in the YouTube algorithm. And the basic premise is an AI clip isn't that great. So most people don't want to post on their main channel, but that doesn't mean that you can't learn from them. So if you're posting 30 or 100 of them a month on a blank channel you don't care about, and one of them gets 10,000, 50,000 views, you say, Hey, okay, that's something, right? I'm gonna take that, I'm gonna go edit that down, I'm gonna put that on my main channel, and you sort of get this like pre-validated content, right? So a lot of the real dream for Flightcast in my soul is it's an experimentation platform, and we're taking the steps now to start to get to that layer of it, but we had to really start as video, then move to growth, and then finally hit this like experimentation as the method of growth. So that's the first of many steps towards experimentation.

SPEAKER_03: 28:26

Given that you've also offered a migration strategy. So on your homepage, you've got all of the other hosts. How did you build the migration capability? Was that an easy thing to do as well?

SPEAKER_00: 28:41

No, it took forever. It took forever. I I would say genuinely one of my engineers has spent in the entirety of Flightcast probably 70% of his time on it. In in various maybe, maybe, maybe 50%. But yeah, we worked really, really, really hard on that. And we kind of went like platform by platform to make sure that we could like max out what we could get. Because I think that's the biggest hold off. You know, like that's the scariest thing is hey, how easy are you gonna make it to move over? And it's not just the audio file, it's like how much of my data can I bring with me? You know, am I just gonna like export a CSV or something? And you know, I have some aggregated download counts, but Flightcast tries to be like really, really granular with at least as much of the data as we can. So getting as much granular data as we can is the best.

SPEAKER_03: 29:21

Now let's have a look a little bit about your background, Rocks. You famously used to work with MrBeast for those people who don't know, one of the biggest YouTubers in the planet. What were you doing with MrBeast and how did you get to meet MrBeast even?

SPEAKER_00: 29:35

Yeah, they also reached out to me actually. I was a Twitch streamer for several years, sort of building tools live on Twitch. And I would just program for eight hours a day live on stream. And after doing that for a while, I had built up some tools for streamers, and then I built thumbnail test, and then someone from the Beast team basically saw a thumbnail test, saw me, and they said, Hey, we want to do this thing called ViewStats, but we back then it was called something else, and it was Like an internal concept. And they said, Hey, we think you're the guy to do it. Do you want to like come talk about it and come see what we can do? And so I went over there, worked with them for a while on like some proof of concepts for what they wanted to do. But at the end of the day, they weren't sure if they wanted to go public with it or kind of hold it internal. They had a lot going on at the time. Beast burger was still a thing. So after a while, we basically said, like, hey, I love you guys, but I want to launch a business. You know, I don't want to just be an engineer somewhere. So like left to continue pursuing things. Then the thumbnail test went pretty well, ended up selling that at the beginning of last year. And then Steve had reached out and he said, Hey, let's do something together. And I said, Hey, perfect. And here we are now.

SPEAKER_03: 30:39

Okay, excellent. Now, looking forward with Flightcast, I do want to take it. You and I were in London together at the podcast standards project meetings. We've been hearing from various people about supporting HLS, the HTTP Live Services, which is the Apple standard for streaming. There's the podcasting 2.0 namespace. We've talked about you supporting chapters and transcripts, but are they actually going to be podcasting 2.0 namespace RSS feeds that you're producing? Where are you with all of this?

SPEAKER_00: 31:12

As far as the 2.0 stuff, I have it like 85% of the way there. We got very, very close, but like just barely couldn't get it over the line before launch. So it'll be up within like the next probably 10 days. So we'll we'll have all of our transcripts and all of our chapters and everything in there. That'll be fine. I think that's a good thing to do. I don't want people to lose anything. So we're still storing it all. We don't lose it when you transfer. And as far as the HLS stuff, we messed around with it, but it didn't feel like it was worth pursuing on like day zero. We're trying so many other new things. I didn't want to add that complexity just yet. From my perspective, you know, I owe it to the customer to just make the best experience for them and worry about what's actually happening in the background later. So when people ask me for video on Apple enough, then we'll take a look at it. When people say, hey, you know, there's a handful of apps that are asking, or there's a dozen apps that are asking, then like I said, we can flip a switch and turn it on. That's why I keep all the files. That's why I have everything sort of ready to go with it. But it it's not gonna be day one from us for sure. So customers want YouTube, they want Spotify, and they want audio everywhere else, and they're pretty happy with that. I don't think video on Apple or video on the other places has become an expectation yet. So I'm gonna try and nail it as is for now. And then when the day comes that it's significant, we'll be right there. We'll we'll be one of the first for sure.

SPEAKER_03: 32:27

Yeah, I think that's a good way of doing it because as much as we think HLS might be the way to deliver video in the future because of bandwidth constraints that it allows, I think I'm I'm just surprised. Apple don't use their own technology, so they don't use HLS. They're not even promoting video on their own platform, although it is capable. I'm not sure that YouTube supports HLS, I'm not even sure Spotify support HLS at the moment. So it is chicken and the egg. We'd like to do this technology, but if the apps don't do it, then I guess realistically it isn't a priority.

SPEAKER_00: 33:03

Yeah, I I always think it's like you're your customers first and the industry second. It's all I'm gonna care about for a long time is what people are asking me for and making sure that I'm just giving them their money's worth and and make that product really good. And when that day becomes HLS, I'll be there. But for now it's AI and analytics and fun uploads.

SPEAKER_03: 33:22

So last question, something must have hit the cutting room floor as in feature that didn't make the cut for now. What's on the roadmap?

SPEAKER_00: 33:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 33:31

What should I say?

SPEAKER_00: 33:33

I'd probably say experimentation was was the big one. I really wanted to mess around with more of the A-B testing stuff. I still think there's some opportunities to do that in imperfect ways, but I'm a big fan of imperfect systems being better than no systems. And I think that that would have been the big dream is I would have loved to launch and been like, we truly do it all. Like truly, this is playing the game in a meaningfully different way. And I do still think we got there. I think with the AI chat and everything that we we passed the bar that I was shooting for, but there is a part in my soul that just says, man, we could be so much higher. But we will be. We will be. We got the team and we got the time now. And people finally get to use it. So I'm sure people will keep giving us ideas. Some of the coolest stuff we've made was just ideas that customers had. So maybe I'll say something different if you ask me again in six months.

SPEAKER_03: 34:15

The one feature that I probably would ask you to add is live. I think one of the things I've seen more and more, certainly on YouTube, and I'm pretty sure that Spotify will get into it at some point. They're not there yet, is live podcasting and live video podcasting. Is that something that you guys are gonna enable, or is that you're gonna leave it to the platforms to do?

SPEAKER_00: 34:38

For now, definitely leave it to the platforms. I don't know if Spotify even does that. I don't know. Yeah, you know, I know that there's like some magic. Yeah. So they bought a platform called Green Room and then just never used it. I've learned one thing, a lot of guys buy a lot of things, you know? I don't put a lot of stock in it anymore. Probably not. And I say that as a guy who was a live streamer for years. I don't think that's like the number one win right now. I think unfortunately there's probably 20 things that would be bigger wins for the customers. And yeah, I just really want to make something where people use it and they say, You saw that beta feedback? And they're like, this is great. And I think that's all I'll ever care about. That's the greatest achievement. I don't care if the whole world says they hate it, if all the customers say they love it, then we're winning. So I'm gonna lock in on that.

SPEAKER_03: 35:23

Remind everyone, look, I where would they go to get involved? Is there the wait list still? And what is the plan for opening up the wait list?

SPEAKER_00: 35:31

No, so a wait list is off as of now. I think I accidentally left it up for like the first 20 minutes, which was funny because I had the time zones wrong when the pod news announcement went out. I was in the shower and I went, oh my god, and I ran out of the shower and really quickly updated it. That's not a joke. It really happened. It was brutal. I hate time zones. The waitlist is off, so flightcast is entirely public. You can go in, you can sign up now. We're working on making it a little bit easier to kind of explore and poke around and get a better idea of what the whole platform does. Because it does a lot. And and I think the toughest thing that we pushed up against with this launch was the word hosting platform being not entirely perfect. Because it's really a growth platform, like it's there to help you grow and understand. And it happens to be a hosting platform that does these other things because that's the best way to make a growth platform. And so I want to give people the opportunity to dig in a little more. So if you jump in today, you can still get in. You can book an onboarding call with me, and I will sit with you. I will literally tell you the whole dang thing. You can book a demo call also, same flow. And probably within a week or two, you'll be able to just explore and you can actually poke around and just see the whole thing without even talking to me. But I'm fun to talk to. I don't know.

SPEAKER_04: 36:36

Talk to me. Well, I waited a year, it was worth it.

SPEAKER_03: 36:39

So thank you very much, Rocks.

SPEAKER_00: 36:41

Thank you for waiting. I appreciate it so much, man. Thank you so much for having me, dude. This is a goddamn pleasure. It's such an honor to be on this show. I've listened to I've been listening for a year and a half. It's I can't believe I'm here. Thank you, man.

SPEAKER_03: 36:52

Hey, pleasure and congratulations. I know how hard it is to launch products. So well done, mate. Thank you, man. I appreciate it. So, James, that was really interesting. I've been sort of trying to get that interview for about a year, as Rox said. We met we met in London when I first heard of Flightcast, and of course, it's been a while in the making. Couple of things that stood out to me. First of all, no support for Apple video. Rock said there's no demand for it. Do you think Apple will now turn on video having seen this solution?

SPEAKER_02: 37:24

I mean, Apple has video and but but it's just a standard MP4 file that you put in your feed. So from that point of view, you know, I think I think it's a case of do Apple take video more seriously and you know, and perhaps change some of the functionality that they have in their in their player. I'm sure that they are, of course, considering doing that, but you know, knowing the speed of Apple, they don't do things first, they do things properly. So my guess is that uh we're still a year, a year and a half away from that.

SPEAKER_03: 37:59

The other thing that was interesting is although they give you, let's say, on an entry price point three terabyte of storage, because it's so cheap these days, they actually pass through the video through to Spotify and YouTube. So it's Spotify and YouTube actually hosting your video, they're not serving the video from Flightcast. So you could delete the video locally, but again, that's an interesting, they're not actually hosting the video. So the storage isn't local to them.

SPEAKER_02: 38:30

No, they're not hosting the video, but they are, of course, hosting the audio. And this is a proper podcast hosting company, it's a premium podcast hosting company looking at the pricing. And uh, you know, and clearly we heard what Rox was saying there in terms of that as well. But I think uh yeah, it's it it's still, you know, still the the audio downloads are going to cost quite a lot of uh money, and so they need to fix that kind of uh stuff.

SPEAKER_03: 38:55

A couple of other things noted from the interview, they are supporting podcasting 2.0 shortly. They've got 80% of it done, so for trap chapters and transcripts, which is great. They won't be supporting HLS at any time soon, James. So there you go. None of that's gonna happen. Yeah, um, but they're happy to do it if the market moves. But I know and and I said to Rox in the interview, she heard basically Spotify, Apple, and YouTube aren't supporting it, so you know there isn't a big demand at the larger apps yet for that type of technology.

SPEAKER_02: 39:28

Yeah, I don't see that there's any reason at the moment to support HLS if nobody is really supporting it out there. And also, I don't think that the documentation's right yet. I don't think that the implementation is right yet either, actually. I think that we need to do a little bit of work with the alternate enclosure tag uh in order that that it can work a little bit better. So I think it's too soon to expect any of that. But uh yeah, I mean they do have some interesting things though in Flightcast that I really liked. There are some, so firstly, they clearly have access to a video publishing API at Spotify. Spotify have told me when I've asked them in the past that Flightcast are not the only people that have access to this, that they are working with a bunch of other podcast hosting companies to make that to make this uh API available to them as well. So it's nothing that uh Flightcast has that is unique to Flightcast, although I would guess that they got it first, which is potentially the other sort of side of that. The other thing that I saw, which I th I found really fascinating, was the AI analytics, which are really smart. And I think certainly judging by many of the different podcast hosts out there, all of them are trying to do clever things with analytics, but actually just being able to talk to your analytics and say, and say, you know, how did I do in the last 10 days? And can you show me, you know, the completion rates and blah, blah, blah. And you can just write that down and and it'll come back with the answer. I th I think that's really that's really smart. And I think it's uh definitely a different way of doing analytics than I've seen from whether it's from Bumper or whether it's from any of the podcast hosting companies as well. I think that that's very, very, very clever. So, you know, full marks on them, but you could definitely see Stephen Bartlett's hand in uh, you know, in uh how that bit works.

SPEAKER_03: 41:25

Yeah, I mean, I think voice-based interfaces are gonna be really interesting. I mean, this is on the creator side, on the hosting side. I still think, and I have said it in the past, I think voice-based interfaces on the app side is also gonna be something that we'll see in 2026 because yeah, we've seen it with Spotify with the DJX, and you know, it's fairly rudimentary, but again, it's a step one. We're playing with a technology that uses app, and it's really, really cool at the moment to play with it. It's not ready for mainstream, but you know, in the same way, how many episodes have I got? What did I what was my listen time? Lots of questions that you can ask from the user side just as well as you can from the creator side.

SPEAKER_02: 42:09

The big uh pain point of doing podcasting right now is the people that aren't using RSS, you have to then go to them directly and upload and fill out forms and everything else. And so anything that makes that easier, whether it's um Apple Podcasts, you know, their their direct stuff for you know paid podcasts, or whether it's this sort of thing as well for video as well, you you can definitely see this saving an awful lot of time. So hurrah for them.

SPEAKER_03: 42:39

Now, related to this, James, Global here in the UK, those that run the news agent and captivates part of it, has launched a video first podcast production company named Global Studios. Why and what are they doing?

SPEAKER_02: 42:53

Yeah, this is interesting. This is this was two releases in one, because basically they've never had. So if you look at the news agents, for example, they've never had a brand name underneath, you know, for they've never had a brand name for those particular shows. Uh, they've been kind of from global, but what what do you really say about them? They've got lots of different shows that are nothing to do with their radio stations, but are still there. So they now have a brand and it's called Global Studios, and that's lovely. And so Global Studios is now the home to Global's award-winning podcast slate, which is very exciting. But then, secondly, they've really pushed the fact that they are doubling down on video and they've acquired a really quite big creator network called the Fellas Studios, which uh has a top 10 show uh in them. So they seem to be doing really well. The Fellas Studios actually had a little bit of investment not so long ago, and you can see that it it's it's certainly worked for them. They've they must have spent that money, you know, quite nicely. They got about two million dollars investment back in 2023, but they seem to be doing, you know, really well. So Saving Grace being one of their top 10 shows that's been bought by Global, and I think you know, one of the things that Global does is they're very good at spotting talent and jumping in and going, we'll have a little bit of that. So I think that works well. They're a video podcasting company, they target 16 to 35 year olds, very much focused on YouTube, and yeah, they they seem to be doing really well.

SPEAKER_03: 44:31

Now, I assume the video element is done by Captivate or is it separate?

SPEAKER_02: 44:38

I mean, it's YouTube, so you know, so Captivate, uh, I know Captivate have have been involved in this in this acquisition, but uh but in terms of how the video works, obviously it's it's just a YouTube show. So, I mean, you know, one one show, for example, that they launched in uh in February of 2024, after the first month, got 1.5 million audio downloads and full episode YouTube views. So they did pretty well in terms of uh you know, in terms of what they're doing. But there's nothing different to them than pretty well anybody else. They're producing YouTube videos, which are presumably also going on Spotify. Yes, they are, but also they've been available as as audio podcasts. They were with ACAST, they are presumably no longer with ACast, you know, in terms of that.

SPEAKER_03: 45:28

Well, I only ask because we just talked about Flightcast being a one-click, you know, distribution service to YouTube, Spotify, Apple, and other RSS feeds. Surely Captivate will announce exactly the same feature function set, won't they?

SPEAKER_02: 45:43

I mean, surely that would make life easier and quicker for their own creators in Global Studios. So, yes, you I I'm I'm sure that you would expect that sort of integration to be going on as quickly as they can. I mean, Global is a fascinating company. They've got Captivate, obviously, is a podcast hosting company, but Captivate does an awful lot of other things too. They've also got monetization via Dax, which does all of the all of the dynamic ad insertion and and everything else uh in there as well. So Global's a fascinating company. I actually went round Global a couple of weeks ago when I was in the UK and I went into their into their podcast studio floor, you know, after having a look around all of the Swish the the Swish studios for, you know, Radio X and Capital and Tart and all of that, then going down and uh seeing their their podcast visualization uh studios, those are really smart. They're small, they're you know very bijou, but they work really well. And that's what you see when the news agents is being is being filmed and everything else. So you know, Global clearly pushing a pile of money into that. I think it's going to be hard if you're working at Global for the next six months because that entire building is being gussed and revamped, and it's never fun working in a building site, but I'm sure that they will get used to it. But yeah, you know, you can very clearly see that they see real expansion from spending money in terms of uh podcasts and video first podcasts, yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 47:15

Bijou, James. Were you ever an estate agent? My God, I've never heard that word used to.

SPEAKER_02: 47:20

Well, you know, they are tiny little uh studios because I was I was standing outside one of them and I was there going, Oh yes, this is the news agent's studio, or this was the the news agent's studio. Wow, that really is small. It's like a little cupboard. Uh it really is, but it it works fine. And they've got a big mixing, you know, the the video mixing console is is you know it is in the middle of the floor, and you've got all kinds of different, you know, different uh studios there. So uh yeah, no, it's a smart thing.

SPEAKER_03: 47:54

James, if the answer is three billion, what was the question?

SPEAKER_02: 47:58

Well, yes, this is what Matt Chapeau reckons podcast advertising will be in 2025. Now, who knows what he's classifying as podcast advertising here? I'm not sure that anybody knows, but uh Matt Shapeau, of course, being the man from the IAB, he was speaking at the IAB podcast upfront, which was last week in New York City. And he reckons that the total money, which is 2.4 billion at the moment, will be 3 billion by well, for for this year. We'll need to wait until April 2026, which is when the numbers come out. But yeah, so he reckons that podcasting is still growing. I think my question would be: does that include YouTube videos? Does that include advertising in there? What what what what's a podcast? And I know that people get very bored when people like me say what's a podcast, but actually at the end of the day, this is why it's important. This is why it's important for us to understand what a podcast is, because three billion dollars of podcast advertising, okay, what do you mean by podcast advertising? That's the important bit. So I think from that point of view, I I would love to know what the IB thinks podcast is. Because um, because otherwise this figure will be relatively, you know, relatively useless in terms of what it actually means. But, you know, still, there you go. Three billion, all awfully nice.

SPEAKER_03: 49:22

Now, this next story has me confused, I'll be honest. And I've titled it Why is Apple Doing This? Because I don't know. Yes. Podcast cross-promotion company, we've talked about them a few times. Podrol has launched PodRoll video promos in Apple Podcasts. And I was like, Well, how are they doing this? What's the relationship to Apple? Why is Apple allowing a third party to put video into it? Why haven't they built this as their own feature? So, confused of Marlowe asked James of Australia, what the hell is Apple doing? Because the last time they did this, they did it with Linkfire and I still didn't understand that deal either.

SPEAKER_02: 50:03

Well, what the hell is Apple doing? Nothing. This is nothing to do with Apple Podcasts. All this is, is it's a company called Podrolle, which has worked out that if they're clever, they can take a podcaster's RSS feed with their permission, they can then uh mirror that RSS feed, but add an extra episode as episode number two. And if you remember, the Pod News Daily used to do this for this very show. We used to have a promo for the Pod News Weekly Review as episode number two in the Pod News Daily feed. So it's much the same as that. In this particular case, if it's Apple Podcasts asking for the RSS feed, it shows you a video instead. So you get video podcasts into Apple Podcasts, which of course Apple Podcasts very happily supports. So there's nothing that Apple is doing here. I don't know whether you've tried it. There are a couple of examples.

SPEAKER_03: 50:59

Yeah, did it actually actually I got nothing? I got a blank, I got an image with a logo in the middle of it and nothing actually played.

SPEAKER_02: 51:07

Correct, because one of the things that Apple does is when it starts playing a piece of video in the Apple Podcast app, it doesn't full screen it. So it did actually play, but it was tiny in the left-hand corner of the of the Apple Podcasts app in the now playing bar at the bottom. So if you looked really carefully, you would have seen it. But yes, that was exactly what I saw in there as well. So it sounds like a really nice idea. The reality is that virtually nobody will see it because Apple doesn't automatically full screen a video podcast. It just assumes that any media it gets is audio and so hides that down in the bottom. So I I'll be I'll be you know frank. I I didn't think it was a particularly good, I didn't think it was a particularly good piece of work there. It's nothing to do with PodRoll, it's the way that Apple Podcasts plays video files. So I think it sounds very exciting, but the reality is it's not a very good implementation.

SPEAKER_03: 52:06

One of my predictions then for our show at the end of the year will be Apple will support eight the HLS, their own technology. Yeah, right. I'll lose that better as well. Um around the world, James. Uh let's start off in Spain. Spotify held a podcast live sessions event. Why in Spain?

SPEAKER_02: 52:27

Yes, this is good. Oh, I mean, why in Spain? Well, why not? Spotify is clearly very successful there, and they had an event over the weekend with a number of the country's biggest podcasters in a theater doing live shows. One in three Spotify users in Spain consumes podcasts, so they say the country is the ninth biggest for global podcast consumption, according to Spotify's data. But there were some nice pictures, and uh I thought it was quite a nice way for Spotify to get closer to some of the podcasts that they look after in uh Spain. So I thought that that wasn't a bad idea.

SPEAKER_03: 53:06

iVooks has published their fourth edition of the observatory report focusing on podcast consumption in Spain. They also are saying eight out of ten Spaniards listen to podcasts.

SPEAKER_02: 53:18

Yes, very high. And interestingly, listeners now spend an average of ten point five hours listening to podcasts and six point five episodes per week. Now, listeners now spending an average of ten point five hours isn't the same as every American spending whatever it was, seven hours with podcasting, which I think was the figure that came out of the US a while back. But even so, that is still a nice number, and six point five episodes a week as well. So I think you know, Ivuk's doing some really good work with their stats. It's the fourth edition, as you say. So you can download that if you speak Spanish from the Pod News website, but you can also read the automatically translated press release into uh English as well.

SPEAKER_03: 54:03

Has somebody in Spain got an award, James?

SPEAKER_02: 54:06

Uh I I I'm sure that plenty of people in Spain have an award, but the the one that you're talking about is it's a really good. I mean, I mean, honestly, if you were in Spain, it's like London buses, three big podcast events, all in much the same time. Yeah, podcast, uh the podcast live sessions with Spotify, podcast days, which we'll get onto in just a minute, the URA, and this this is the Podwoman event, which is this weekend, which is a an event specifically for women working in podcasting in the uh Spanish uh language. And Isabel Coelho has been announced as the recipient of the Podwoman Award for 2025. She put together a documentary podcast that explores violence in intimate relationships and the recovery process of the women who've suffered it. But it's it's great to see good podcasters being welcomed there, but also great to see, you know, there's a bunch of data which is going to come out of the Podwoman event this weekend as well. You can stream, by the way, the whole thing if you want to. You can find uh more information on the Podwoman website as well, if you speak Spanish, of course. And um I don't. No, well, and you were in Spain, were you not? You were in Madrid this time last week. Yes. One person has posted a very grainy photograph of you in front of the biggest screen in the world. It was, yes. How did that all go for you?

SPEAKER_03: 55:31

It was great, and thank you to the organizers, uh, Ruben and the team there. They did a brilliant job. The you know, they they picked me up at the airport, they got me there literally with like 10 minutes or 15 minutes to spare before I was rushed on stage. But it was lovely, and the the event was yeah, ow indeed, especially as I got up at three o'clock in the morning to get to the airport to catch a super early flight. So you can imagine how knackered I was by Friday. Um, but it was really well done. They had a translator who took my words, and then everyone had headphones on. So thankfully, because I do not speak Spanish, but yeah, you had iVooks there, ACAS was there, a whole bunch of other companies that were local to the Spanish market were there. I met up with Pod Squeeze, who came over from Portugal and we got an interview with them next week. So it was lovely, and we had a lovely lunch, and it, you know, it was just a well-done event. So congratulations to everyone there. I'd say that the interesting part was I had a chat with Megan Davis, who is a very smart lady. She runs ACAS international business, she speaks multiple languages, and it was so fascinating watching somebody just dropping in and out of Italian, then back to French and over to Spanish and then back to English. It's so clever. Um made me feel very typically British and inadequate, as I always do when I can't speak languages. But yes, once again, thank you very much for everyone for the invite. It was great fun demoing. What I do realize, and I've I it does make me stop and think sometimes we are so far ahead of where the mainstream is. We are just nobody. I mean, we we demoed, I I literally demoed topping up a wallet, streaming super.

SPEAKER_02: 57:22

I can see, thank you for the 11 sats, Sand.

SPEAKER_03: 57:26

Yeah, don't want to blow the budget, you know, James. Um but it it was and people then were just like, oh my god, we didn't even know this existed, let alone it works. And and then there were loads of questions about, you know, how do I do this and what do I do and yada yada, but it just made me realise we talk about this stuff week in, week out. I think we're two years away from where the mainstream is, maybe.

SPEAKER_02: 57:51

Yeah, yeah. And how how translatable is uh is the true fans interface?

SPEAKER_03: 57:57

It is translatable. I mean, one of the problems, and it made me realise that we I'm so anglophiled um in my thinking, because somebody did ask me that, and I said, Well, you can search for all the Spanish podcasts, and I I searched for one that they asked and it came up, and but of course, everything else was English, so we've not done any localization at all. And again, on on the list of things to do, is it is it my highest priority? Probably not, if I'm honest, but again, it makes you realise when you get out of your bubble, which uh you know I sit in quite often, how we've got to deal with this stuff. So, yeah, it's a it's another thing on the list, but yeah, we don't do a good job of it.

SPEAKER_02: 58:41

Now, Sam, I don't know whether you were at uh the cinema uh earlier on this week in the UK, but you you you didn't pop along, did you?

SPEAKER_03: 58:48

Well, now I I find this very funny. No, I didn't pop along. Now, Dover CEO put their show a night before into cinemas, and basically, even if even if I was excited, I would never go and see one direction or Taylor Swift. So, no, is the answer. Uh, I am going to go and see uh the ex-New Zealand Prime Minister, Jacinda Arden, and I'm looking forward to that one very much, but that's a different story. Now, you put in a report here which made me go, oh, okay. That well, I'm looking at the data here. It was basically in Glasgow, about 90% of the seats are sold. In Manchester, 80% of the seats are sold. But then some grumpy person, Nick Hilton, though, put out a video on TikTok that said only 39 people out of the whole of the O2 in London had bought tickets. So somebody's not got their numbers right. Either this thing is sold out or this thing is a massive flop, and I don't know which one it is.

SPEAKER_02: 59:54

Uh it it'll have been uh Nick Hilton not getting it right. He's a professional grump about the industry and No, I I went to the Cine World website, which by the way is blocked outside of the UK and Ireland, so that makes it very easy for me to check from all the way down here. But uh I went to the Cine World website and tried to book tickets for quite a few of the showings, and that's how I could see how many seats were sold. Now, this was still with 48 hours to go before the showing. And yes, and as I say, you know, in Manchester, 80% of the seats were sold. In London, one screen was entirely sold out, another was about 60% full, and then there was a big screen that I think cost a little bit more money, and not very many people had booked tickets for that, and that might have been Nick's thing. But yeah, I I you know, I if you wanted to go and see, if you were a big One Direction fan and you wanted to go and see Louis Tomlinson, who's never really spoken about his private life before, and you wanted to go and see Stephen Butler with other One Direction fans, then you know, spending$20 in a ticket's prob probably not too bad, really. Wasn't the first in cinemas, there was there was something not so long ago which was I think it was for I Sexted My Boss, the Audio Always show that was also in a cinema, it was the first in a Cineworld cinema, so Stephen Butler not entirely correct with some of his claims, but I think it was a good I think it was a good plan. And you mentioned Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift had a album sort of play out at cinemas worldwide. I mean, my daughter went because she's a big Taylor Swift fan and she wanted to be with other Taylor Swift fans and she wanted to sit in that cinema and hear the album for the first time with a bunch of other Taylor Swift fans. I think there's absolutely a lot to be said for it. So I I find it, I mean, Nick, Nick's article in the in The Independent was an interesting article. It was very focused on some of the other controversies that Stephen Bartlett has had with some of the slight quackery that he has on his you know on his show and all of that. But yeah, I I'm not I'm not I'm not sure that any of this showing a video podcast in a cinema for money is worthy of is is worthy of being mean about, to be honest.

SPEAKER_03: 1:02:26

Well, I I actually have a membership to something called Everyman, which here in the UK is a very nice cinema concept that came out a few years back, you know, nice sofas, a little bit of wine. Oh yes, I'm sure you do.

SPEAKER_02: 1:02:39

Yes, yes. Yes, very nice.

SPEAKER_03: 1:02:42

Ban popcur popcorn, please, in cinemas. That's my only request, says Mr. Grumpy. But I find I don't go to the cinema because nearly everything that comes to the cinema is available within a week on the streaming services. So these cinemas are quite empty. I think this is really interesting. If people are going to get into the idea, and I so my my point I'm trying to say is I'm not poo-pooing the idea. Look, if Stephen Bartlett's taking the time, energy, and effort to do this, and it looks like from what you're telling me it was nearly sold out or has been sold out, that's amazing because we've seen, you know, people from the rest is politics being totally gobsmucked that they've sold out the Royal Albert Hall, or people from Smartless or wherever it may be. So people coming to watch a podcast, two people on a stage talking about politics, for example. So if people are willing to go to the cinema as well and pay real money to go and watch a podcast, wow, I mean, yeah, what does this say? And maybe that's the future of cinemas, right? Maybe that's their because I know the Royal Opera does this for ballet shows where you can't get into the actual show. They rebroadcast them across the country.

SPEAKER_02: 1:03:54

Yeah, I mean, I you know, to me it comes down to tribes, you know, communities of common interest. And you know, if you're a Taylor Swift fan or if you're a One Direction fan, why not all get together and watch a film about that in a cinema and be surrounded by your tribe? I think that that's uh that's a fine thing. And you know, I I think particularly in the world that we're heading to where it's a much more lonely world for most people, I think the idea of being able to get together with other people who share the same interests as you do is a is a pretty good thing. So, you know, so I think I think hurrah for this.

SPEAKER_03: 1:04:34

I'll get on the phone to the O2 to get pod news meeting review.

SPEAKER_02: 1:04:38

Can you imagine that? Can you imagine that? The nylon.

SPEAKER_03: 1:04:45

James, let's whiz over to Ukraine. What's going on? Well, I don't want to ask you what's going on there, but what's going on there in the world of podcasting?

SPEAKER_02: 1:04:52

Well, yes, exactly. The fifth Slushno Awards, which is Ukraine's podcast prize ceremony. The winners were announced uh over the weekend. The lots of different shows. It seems to be a really vibrant place for podcasting. And of course, you would expect an awful lot of comment about the war, and uh of course, this was in evidence with the grand prize, which went to a show which is called the terrorist attack near the sports palace. It's a true crime investigation from a uh company in Ukraine about the 2015 Kharkiv bombing, which was back when the Ukrainians were protesting against the Russians and saying, if we're not careful, these guys will invade. And the and and some Russian terrorists actually uh set off a bomb. So all kinds of stuff, you know, of course, you know, happening there. But in terms of a really impressive looking podcast ceremony, you know, the pictures that we were that we were sent, we could only use uh some of those, but you know, I mean, what a great looking event. It's put together by a company called Me Gogo, which is an international media service. 670 Ukrainian podcasts have taken part so far, and this time around, 168 podcasts were submitted, 62 podcasts made the short list, and 20,000 votes were cast by the audience as well. So really, really impressive. So hurrah for them. There's a full list if you speak Ukrainian in the pod news newsletter as well over the week.

SPEAKER_03: 1:06:32

I nearly added it to TrueFans and then was realised we don't support Cyrillic. Correct. So you made me yes.

SPEAKER_02: 1:06:39

Well, I I was going to add the full list of of the winners and you know and do my normal l lookups of you know how how how the winners went and everything else. And then I realized that they had very carefully translated all of the titles into English. So I would then have to translate them back to Ukrainian and hope that they were the same. And I thought, no, we won't be doing any of that. But I thought that that was very kind of them. So yeah, but no, really, really, really impressive. So hurrah for them.

SPEAKER_01: 1:07:09

People News on the Pod News Weekly Review.

SPEAKER_02: 1:07:13

Yes, people news and shock horror, Sam. Uh, he only joined NPR in December 2023. But their big head of podcasting strategy, Colin Campbell, has apparently already left. We there were there was an email that came around a couple of weeks ago from NPR's chief content officer, who was a person called Edith Chapin. She has also left NPR since. But apparently, Colin Campbell is out. He is, quotes, pursuing an opportunity in news a little closer to home in California, which apparently, according to the New York Times, is at Apple. So maybe, maybe Colin Campbell will know a thing or two about HLS. Who knows? But changes at changes at NPR, and of course, massive changes at the moment in terms of NPR's funding. And also they've been rather misguidedly, in my view, suing various people because they want to keep running satellites to get the NPR audio out to people. What why NPR are still using satellites, heaven only knows, because you really don't need to use satellites anymore. But anyway, so all of that going on. So fascinating stuff going on at uh NPR. But as people leave, so people join. And The Guardian in the UK uh has a bunch of people who have just joined The Guardian. We've got uh presenters and producers and senior producers and video people and social video people and all kinds of folk. Uh it's a it's a it's a quite a cavalcade of names. So congratulations to all of that. But the Guardian definitely seems to be rank definitely seems to be ramping up their podcast uh strategy, which is really interesting.

SPEAKER_03: 1:09:02

Let's move on to awards and events, James. What's going on?

SPEAKER_02: 1:09:05

So the winners of the British Podcast Awards 2025 were announced at the 02. If you want to hear interviews with some of the winners, then go and find the Media Club podcast with Matt Deegan, friend of the show. You'll also find a full list of the winners, of course, in the Pod News newsletter. Now, the podcast of the year went to Kill List, and Killlist was a show that was put together by uh Wondery, but was also put together by one of Wondery's uh who was it, Novel was the company that put that together. Now, it's interesting that because if you have a look at the Golden Globes, which announced their 25 eligible podcasts for the inaugural Golden Globe Award, all that they did is they looked at the top 25 podcasts in the US and they said, those. So therefore, any of the interesting podcasts like Kill List, completely ineligible to enter. They will not be winning any awards. It's just the boring stuff like Joe Rogan and the Daily from the New York Times and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So frankly, not that exciting. Quite a lot of people quite upset about that. And you can kind of understand why. I mean, even New Heights isn't in there, but there's no limited run narrative podcasts in there, in there at all. So that was a bit of a shame to see. I think the Golden Globes have have missed a trick there. I suppose that they had to have a list of eligible podcasts, but if you have a look at the list of eligible movies and TV shows, well, that's really easy. You know, has it been produced or released in this particular place at this particular time? Uh yes, it has, in which case it's eligible. But they just looked at the top 25 and went, we'll have them, which I think is a bit of a miss.

SPEAKER_03: 1:10:52

Did someone say myopic?

SPEAKER_02: 1:10:53

Yes, indeed. I think that that could well be the case. Elsewhere going on, the Independent Podcast Awards in the UK, they announced their 2025 shortlist. The event is on October the 15th in London. If you want to see Sam Sethy in the flesh, then bring your bring your binoculars. And I got a binoculars.

SPEAKER_03: 1:11:13

Two things, first of all. Yes. Don't put people off coming just because I might be there. That's the first thing. And secondly, yes, well, you might need to get your binoculars because I've lost weight. Ah, there you go.

SPEAKER_02: 1:11:24

Well done. Well done. Well uh that should be that should be good fun. You and I were there last year. It's just you this year. But uh still, but there we are. So have a wonderful time. It's on aug it's on October the 15th in central London. All kinds of other finalists being announced and and all kinds of other things. The only other one that I'm going to mention here is uh the New Jersey Web Festival, which announced its 2025 Audio Fiction Award winners. And the best of the best went to Howl. Howl is a single podcast, it's or a single episode within a podcast. So don't go thinking that you have to release 200 shows to be eligible for one of these things. If it's a great piece of audio, then that's absolutely fine. Uh Howl is a lyrical dark fairy tale for everyone who has ever had their voice silenced. And in terms of events, if you want to relive podcast movement, then you can. Videos are now available for free for every session from Podcast Movement 2025 in Dallas. They're available to everybody on the YouTube channel. You can also sign up with Supporting Cast and get them straight into your podcast app as well, which is a fine and lovely thing. But some real gems in there, you can go back and see me game gamefully interviewing uh Jack Davenport from Goldhanger and various uh other things to go and take a peek at that.

SPEAKER_03: 1:12:49

Now, James, I know the answer to this. These are stories from the Podosphere. I saw your response on Mastodon. So it was Gary V says your next podcast co-host won't be a human. What was your response to that? Who cares? Yes. Who cares? And I think it was more what Gary V says. That's what I was gonna say. It's not who cares whether it's gonna be human, it's who cares what Gary V says. Yes.

SPEAKER_02: 1:13:16

Um that man would uh yes, say amazing things about self self-closing envelopes if if he if he had money in there. Yes, no, he has been predicting that creators will launch podcasts with AI co-hosts that they fully own because he's an idiot. And yes, we've had all kinds of this kind of stuff. Tilly Norwood is the latest thing that everybody is getting very, very, very excited about. She is an artificial intelligence generated character. She's been marketed as an actress. She's appeared in an AI-generated comedy sketch called AI Commissioner and in various promotion and in various promotional and social media content. It's all very T very tedious. Lots of uh people have got very upset about it, and quite rightly so, but very, very, very dull from my point of view. But uh, what do you think of it all? Are you a little bit more more positive?

SPEAKER_03: 1:14:13

No, I'm not. I mean, I I still think it's, you know, I I think I put up this morning actually, I'm I'm quite saddened. Somebody said they went to see an event with, you know, an AI character who was answering questions. And I just thought, is the goal at the end of the day for all of this stuff for companies to build agentic AI so that we can answer questions of avatars of people who aren't James Cridland but pretend to be James Cridland? And are we just building agentic to agentic AI e-commerce platforms? I'm just thinking, my god, that's a dull future that we're building. And it doesn't surprise me we're building that future given the people who, like Musk and Zuckerberg, who've got no humanity and zero personality. So I'm sort of I love technology, that's not the issue. Uh I'm just worried that we're just building a world that seems very dystopian to me. Tilly Norwood, as an actress, is basically taking what is the golden mean. It's a number where you can identify perfect beauty. We see it instantly as humans. Don't know why we see it, but we do. It's 1.68. And the idea is they've smashed together all the best bits of female attractiveness into this one AI character, and of course, we as humans have recognize that 1.68 golden mean number, so we find that person attractive, and therefore she's put into scenes, and it's like you can see the studios going, oh, we don't have to pay millions to all these actresses and do uh this, that, and the other. And it's like, where's the humanity of it all? I don't know. I'm yeah, I've I've you know, Scott Galloway had Google build an AI version of Scott Galloway to answer questions, and he had it up for 24 hours, and even he said, Look, kill it, I don't like it. I don't know. I think we're building something that we don't know where we're gonna end up with. And I just don't know, I'm beginning to get a little bit sort of anti it all.

SPEAKER_02: 1:16:13

And and yeah, I th I I think what's interesting is that the conversation really over the last couple of months has turned from being, oh, isn't this interesting what AI can do to oh my god, this is awful, and lots of people saying that sort of thing, and the conversation beginning to be more angry, where you get people on one side, Janine Wright being a great example from Inception Point AI, who was very bullish to the point of being insulting against people that didn't like AI. You know, very, very bullish about what she what she believed, and anybody that didn't believe that AI was the future was a a lazy Luddite. And and I think you know, if if you're gonna have those conversations, then you end up it ends up being a more you know, a more difficult conversation than it really needs to be. At the end of the day, if you listen to well, one of my favourite podcasts is The Rest is Entertainment. And version of this show this week, by the way. Oh well, well there you go. I'm looking forward to it. And they start talking about AI an awful lot, and Richard uh Osman's view on it is that AI will do a lot of the beige stuff, a lot of the dull stuff, a lot of the boring stuff. But the real benefit for you if you are a human is the fact that you are a human, the fact that you have human understanding and human relationships that AI simply doesn't understand. And so actually, that's the benefit that we all have as human beings. And we should lean more into the human being stuff. And you know, it's it's one of one of the reasons why the Pod News newsletter has the occasional opinion in there, it has the occasional rather rude comment about about people, it has the occasional bit of humour in there, because I genuinely believe that that is the thing that changes a an experience from being something which any AI tool could do into something which is worthwhile reading every single day. You know, and and and I think that that's that's the main point here. And, you know, I absolutely, you know, I mean, we talked about a while back about Mamma Mia in in Australia who had a voice called Sam, which was a blended voice of all of their female hosts, and they and this blended voice essentially does quite a lot of the host red ads on that network. I think that's absolutely fine. I haven't got a problem with that at all. I think that if you want to use AI voices to do weather forecasts or traffic news on a radio station, then that's absolutely fine. Where it crosses the line for me is when you start having actors or or or podcast hosts, the person that's doing the job of the human, and you try and replace that with AI, because that's just not going to work. And that's simply, you know, and we shouldn't be doing that anyway.

SPEAKER_03: 1:19:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 1:19:16

So yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 1:19:17

I mean, you know, let's let's be clear, we're not AI Luddite because we you know we we've just applauded Flightcast for using AI for analytics. We have talked in the past of where AI has done a great job, our sponsors Buzzsprout, with transcripts and chapters. So there is a place for AI. I just think we are not agreeing with Gary V on this one. Well, we probably wouldn't anyway, that your next podcast co-host will be human. But you know, that said, it may be that we are just going through a phase where adoption is just, you know, people will adopt it. I mean, we suspend reality when we watch films like Lord of the Rings, Star Wars. We know that they aren't orcs and we know that that isn't a flying spaceship, right? We know that. So can we suspend reality and know that it's not a human, but it has enough information that we take on board? I don't know. We'll see.

SPEAKER_02: 1:20:16

Yeah, no, you you are you are absolutely right. And you know, I mean the one the one thing that frustrates me is that the Luddites weren't against technology. What the Luddites were against were automated things that would make uh the quality of the product worse and that would mean that people got paid less. That's what the Luddites were against. I am there for a Luddite, and I'm very, very proud of being a Luddite. You're from Yorkshire now. Because that's worse. We're not against new technology. And now the term is used for those opposed to the introduction of new technologies. It's not really what the original Luddites were there for. They were concerned that the product would get worse, and they were concerned that workers would get paid less because of the because of the new technology which was being used, which is a subtle difference, but we should probably not forget that.

SPEAKER_03: 1:21:20

Okay, so we've just smashed AI and let's do more AI then. Right, brilliant. You know, just you know, who's the producer of this show? Sackum, that's what I say. Um Spotify announced a little while back that they were going to be experimenting with podcast recommendations using AI. This week they've announced that they're now going to integrate your accounts with ChatGPT and you can prompt it to find new songs, artists. But the bit that was most interesting was podcast episodes as well, James.

SPEAKER_02: 1:21:53

Yes, I I I think you can ask ChatGPT. So I think the way that you do it is you say, ask Spotify for a you know, a song about cheese, and then ChatGPT will uh get a song about cheese from Spotify. Uh yeah. Don't don't really don't really kind of I mean interestingly, YouTube music has had that sort of thing for a while, where you can type in, you know, music for a rainy day and it'll work out what that might be and um and give you a playlist for that. So potentially it's Spotify playing catch-up against YouTube for that. I don't know. But yeah, I'm I'm you know, I I'm I'm certainly not overwhelmed, I'm not even underwhelmed, I'm not even sure I'm welmed at this point.

SPEAKER_03: 1:22:40

That's Michael McIntyre once said, yes, no one's overwhelmed. Yes. But I do think again, look, we we're looking at assistant intelligent agents here. It's the idea of DJX probably in the future adapting to be able to use it where you can ask it more questions of the music you want or the playlists you have or the podcast. I don't know whether you'll eventually get to ask a question like give me all the episodes that James Cridlin's a guest on. I don't know if that's a a question that you'll eventually be able to extract using OpenAI and Spotify.

SPEAKER_02: 1:23:17

Yeah, I mean, I I would imagine probably, but I would imagine that you can probably do that anyway. Uh I I wouldn't have thought that it it needs it needs AI for that sort of thing. So yeah, who knows really? But yeah, I'm I'm you know, I mean, uh with quite a lot of this, I think that the you know that this is being talked about primarily to bump up a stock price because the people in the in the stock market aren't clever enough to realise that AI isn't a good thing. And so I suspect that that's really the real reason why quite a lot of these AI announcements are being are being made, because you know, investors expect people to be investing in AI here because they keep on being told that it's the future. Ed Zitran writes really good posts. You should follow him on Mastodon if you're not if you're not already, writes really good posts about open AI, about AI in general, and basically pointing out all of the fallacies and all of the mistakes that uh they are currently making. And uh, you know, it's definitely worthwhile a read. But yeah, I'm I'm still not particularly taken with it. You know, I'm I'm taken with some of the some of the things that Flycast has done, as you know, as we were saying, but I think that that's about as far as it gets.

SPEAKER_03: 1:24:29

What's scary is 40% or more of the American GDP is based on open AI, or not not open AI, or based on AI investments into data centers.

SPEAKER_02: 1:24:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 1:24:41

And a lot of the other industries that they have are not doing so well. This was a recent report from the FT, and it's scary because if we have an AI bubble and a burst, it'll be a massive shock to the US system.

SPEAKER_02: 1:24:56

Yes. Oh, it really will. It really will. And I'm sure that that is coming as well. So, yes, we need to be we need to be very careful in terms of that.

SPEAKER_01: 1:25:05

The tech stuff on the Pod News Weekly Review.

SPEAKER_02: 1:25:10

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

SPEAKER_03: 1:25:16

Well, a little snippet that Justin Jackson put out. I'm not sure he's officially putting it out, but we're just sort of going to tease it. He's created a cover art generator, similar to what Headliner does, similar to what I do using Canva. Have you played with it yet, James?

SPEAKER_02: 1:25:32

I've not played with it. I've I've I've taken a quick look at it and and and given a little bit of feedback, but it's yeah, it's quite it's quite nice in terms of taking the podcast person tag, which you have to have for this to work, and then grabbing the images for those people and making some nice cover art for that. So it's very much for that particular use case, but seems to work quite nicely.

SPEAKER_03: 1:25:58

It's a bit rudimentary at the moment. I think it'll get better. I still use, I think Headliner still does a better job, personally. I think also the interesting part, this is one of the other things I just wanted to raise. We don't seem to be using the soundbite tag very much across the industry. One of the things that BuzzSprout does is allows you to create a soundbite, an audio clip. It's again, I think hasn't been touched or upgraded or improved for at least two years. I'm pretty sure on that. Soundbites, a bit like cover art, where we had cover art for episode art, was a great step forward. I think sound bites in our industry seems to have stopped or stagnated, and yet we know video clips on Reels, TikTok, and other places generates engagement consistently to the full product. And I'm not sure why we're not really as audiophiles pushing sound bites better than we do. I just don't see a lot of it. We look for it in RSS feeds all the time, and on TrueFans, we can't find a volume of them anywhere. It would be lovely to create a page of sound bites on TrueFans or at least bring them to the forefront or do something with them to help promote podcasts, but people aren't using them.

SPEAKER_02: 1:27:19

Yeah, yeah. No, I I think you know, I think we understand v the benefit of a soundbite. We also understand that actually we have to upload those to TikTok and other places, and the the middle ground there of podcast apps using them probably hasn't really hasn't really appeared.

SPEAKER_03: 1:27:38

Yeah, I mean Fountain does a good job of creating soundbite clips right in their own app. We do an okay job. I wouldn't say it's the best or worst, and I'm not sure of the other apps, I don't really look but again it it feels like this is a a part of the industry where it's related to promoting and helping discover podcasts that we're not doing anything really around. And I I I don't know if there's a worthwhile conversation to be had of how do we get more sound bites into the RSS feeds.

SPEAKER_02: 1:28:12

Yeah, no, indeed.

SPEAKER_03: 1:28:14

Your favourite app, James, has a new version, Audacity.

SPEAKER_02: 1:28:20

Yes, I'm not sure it's my favorite app, but um they are they are doing some really interesting work in terms of a redesign. So Tanta Krull, who's the man who is now the product manager of Audacity, has uh shared uh quite a lot of detail. I mean, 50 minutes worth of detail if you want to watch it on YouTube, about the new design for Audacity. But also he goes into a lot of detail about how people use Audacity, what they use it for, you know, how they're actually using it. Most people, 80% uh plus of people who are using Audacity are really using it to top and tail audio. So they're not using it for really anything more than that, which is interesting. But it does look very, very beautiful, so it's worth a peek. You may find some reviews of it on YouTube. It is available as a pre-alpha. Pre-alphas mean that not everything works, and uh and so therefore I would ignore that, but I would certainly have a look at the Tantacral YouTube piece because uh he does go into an awful lot of more information in terms of that. Other things getting benefit in terms of uh new redesigns and upgrades. Whisper CPP, which Pod News uses for transcriptions, and I know that a lot of other podcast hosting companies do as well. That has just been updated to version 1.8. It's got performance improvements in there. For me, it's much, much, much, much, much faster again. So that's quite nice. Yahoo is um apparently wanting to sell AOL to Italy's bending spoons. Ah, that's that lovely VC company that in shittifies everything for 1.4. Billion dollars, why would you want to buy AOL for heaven's sake?

SPEAKER_03: 1:30:04

Well, but anyway, I read the full report, and fundamentally what they're doing is they're scooping up everything. It looks like anything that used to be a Web 1.0 brand name practically is going scooped up by Bending Spoons. We're going to aggregate them together to then go and do an IPO. That's fundamentally the gameplay.

SPEAKER_02: 1:30:27

Right. Well, that makes sense then, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_03: 1:30:29

None none at all. Because who who the hell would you? I didn't even know Yahoo still existed, let alone AOL. It's like somebody put them down.

SPEAKER_02: 1:30:39

Indeed. Yes. Well, there's a thing. Yes, so watch out for that. So so that so that's one thing. And in terms of the Pod News Daily podcast, I mentioned last week that we were now available in HLS. We have two streaming formats for audio. You'll find that in the alternate enclosures in the RSS feed. You may be interested to know how many people have played the version from uh Tuesday. Sam, how many people do you think have played that version? Yes, correct. Interestingly, though, we did get on the Monday, we did get one play for that, which is nice. And I also noticed that we got play on the third of on the third of October as well, the high version, whereas the version on the 1st of October got both plays for the high and the low. So there's an exciting thing. There appears to be something called HLS Livewire.io, which is presumably something else that John Spurlock is doing in terms of in terms of playing back HLS podcasts and things in there. So I'm guessing that it it is in there somehow. I should go and uh take a peek at that.

SPEAKER_03: 1:31:54

I think what you're identifying is the the two things. Okay. First, is there a custom customer demand for HLS? And I'd say no, there isn't a customer demand right yet. Secondly, are people aware that the alternative enclosure exists and do apps make a good job of making or highlighting that capability? I'm I'm not saying that it's it's the best way that we do it right now. I think we could improve that as well. But I don't think people naturally would go to the alternative enclosure when they click play, it just plays what's there, right? So it's it's that trust element for putting in the primary enclosure is what we want.

SPEAKER_02: 1:32:36

So you're putting we're not gonna that that's that's a long, long, long way away. But you can but you can well see that for certain podcast apps, they would they would want to choose the primary one being HLS because that would work better for them. I think I think there are a couple of things that we need to fix first. One of them is to agree what the you know how big the HLS chunks are, because there's no real guidance in terms of that yet. Secondly, we we need to also make it visible within the RSS feed what is available in the in the HLS master playlist. Because if we don't do that, then we're just making it harder for podcast apps to be able to know what is in there. And there is probably an easy way that we can do that without changing anything to do with the alternate enclosure tag to make that visible and readable from the RSS feed. Of course, we need to bear in mind that the RSS feed is probably written by something different than is writing the audio, so we need to bear that bit in mind as well. But I think that with those two things, and we should probably agree on what codec that we use and and the types of you know, the types of bitrate that we might want to support. But I think as long as we get quite a lot of that bit fixed, then we can then we can move on. It's probably needs a bit of a bit of work in terms of just working out what the best practices are and then moving forward. By the way, you know, it is completely automatic on my on my service, so therefore I'm just producing HLS versions from from here on in. And it doesn't really cost me anything, so I'm absolutely fine with that. So I I don't really care if anybody uses them or not, because it's quite nice to have them there. But yeah, I think it's we are still certainly a long, long way.

SPEAKER_03: 1:34:27

Yeah, I look, I think we have to take these baby steps first, right? Which is putting it in the alternative enclosure, not to break the primary RSS feed for apps like Spotify, Apple, etc. Because you know, you could put it into the primary now, and then those would break within those apps. So I think it's a good thing to do. So, for example, you and I were testing it with TrueFans, it worked, it's in the alternative enclosure, happy days. That itself was a tick box for me that we got it to work, right? That we got it to play the master manifest file, right? And then we we could read it. So those are wins, and I think once we got those wins under our belt, then it's beholden to the PSP, maybe, or somebody else to knock on Ted's door at Apple and say, Hey, come on, Apple, be the first to support HLS, and then maybe the likes of Spotify and others will follow soon. So, you know, we we've got to be ready from our side before we go and knock on the door for Apple to say, come on then, it we're ready. Do the business, right?

SPEAKER_02: 1:35:34

Yeah, no, indeed. No, we we do need everything to be working well, and the only way that we will get everything working well is if we're actually doing it. So I think, you know, it's great that we are, you know, it's great that I'm I'm doing it, it's great that that that there's a bunch of of other folk playing around with this and certainly looking at uh what Soundstack are doing and various other people, you know. I think it that that it is absolutely right, but we do need to make sure that everything works the way that we want it to work prior to prior to going and talking to Apple. I think that that's a good plan.

SPEAKER_03: 1:36:06

Lastly, I'm just asking the question has Rode run out of road? Road the producer seems to run out of ideas very quickly because now the only thing they've come up with is different coloured mics. Can they do anything more with mics, James? Have we got to peak mic development?

SPEAKER_02: 1:36:26

Oh, I'm sure that uh Road will be continuing building new and interesting things. I mean, you know, they they seem to release new products every couple of years that people go, oh wow, about. The Rodcaster video, not so exciting from podcasting's point of view, but I have seen a lot of those in various places as I've been wandering around around the world. So the Rodecaster video seems to do incredibly well. The Rodecaster itself, the audio, the audio thing appears to be in use everywhere as well. So you can you can certainly see that that will continue to be, you know, changed and upgraded and so on and so forth. I don't think that you know that there's anything particularly to worry about there. They're a very interesting company. They've just integrated with yet another company in terms of in terms of audio stuff. So I'm sure that you know that they will be surprising us once more in the future.

SPEAKER_01: 1:37:23

Boostigram. Booster, 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.

SPEAKER_02: 1:37:36

Yes, so many different ways to get in touch with us. Fan mail by using the link in our show notes, super comments on TrueFans, boosts everywhere else. You can also comment in Spotify, and you can use email weekly at podnews.net. If you send us any money, then we we share that too, just Sam and I. We got some boosts, haven't we, Sam?

SPEAKER_03: 1:37:55

Well, super comments looking at it, give given it's all true fans practically. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Right. 43 Sats from Lyceum. Could a reply become a super comment with a payment? Will James see it on his radar? Did you see this, James?

SPEAKER_02: 1:38:12

Oh, I mean, I did see the comment. Yes. I I I love the idea. I've always loved the idea of comments having a monetary amount attached to them. I think that that that that's a really interesting idea. And this is basically what a boost is, or or a super comment if you insist. And so I think from that, from that point of view, yeah, I think that those are very I think that those are very interesting. So yeah, yes.

SPEAKER_03: 1:38:37

Basically. Yes, and you got uh 43 sats received from Sam. I don't know if this is me or not. The critical factor will be how much does flight yes, it is from me, because I remember writing this. The critical factor will be how much does flight cast charge. Sometimes you have to remember what you wrote. Yes.

SPEAKER_02: 1:38:54

Um Well, thank you, Sam, for your 100 sats. And by the way, it's the little the little number at the end rather than my particular share. So, yes, and we do know what flight cast charges, and that's all good. Bruce, the ugly quacking duck, still there using podcast guru. Thank you. And also sending us some sensible amounts. So thank you for your row of ducks, 2,222 sats. Using AI to help is great, letting AI do it for itself is dangerous. I am human, thanks. 73. Correct, totally agree. That's exactly that's exactly it. I think AI as an assistant is brilliant. AI as a thing that takes the human being out is not so great. And uh Neil Vellio commenting on something that I said last week. 558th SAT. Thank you, Neil. Absolutely, he says, talking about Inception AI. I was, he agrees with me and says there's literally no consider there's literally no consideration for the audience. Bingo. So uh excellent. Thank you, Neil, for that. And look what else we've got. We've got comments in Spotify, Sam.

SPEAKER_03: 1:40:03

Okay, come on. This has got to be a first.

SPEAKER_02: 1:40:05

Yeah. Well, actually, we've had quite a few comments in Spotify. It's just I've never been bothered to look. So if you go back a couple of months, thank you, Dave Campbell, who uh commented after the version of this show that we did while I was in Jakarta in Indonesia, and we were talking about hosting sites raising their prices, which is exactly what we've been talking about this week as well. Dave says if we don't need any of the bolt-on services, there should be a basic plan without all the bells and whistles. And I would agree with that, and I would say yes, but that's what Spotify has. And their basic plan without all the bells and whistles is free, and it's called Spotify for for creators. And why would you spend 10 bucks a month for a basic service that is offering you nothing that Spotify for creators isn't offering? Would be my answer to that. But I'm grateful for you leaving a comment on Spotify two months ago, and also grateful for StrawPile, whoever Straw Pile is, who listened to our interview with uh Janine Wright uh from Inception Point AI the other week and said, Was this interview generated by AI? Hey! To which I replied, the interview itself wasn't, but actually I did use AI to fix some audio issues. So uh so there. So thank you to those. If you have to, you can leave comments on Spotify or presumably on YouTube as well. My goodness, imagine that. And uh thank you to our power supporters as well. These are people who are paying us with real money. Much appreciated. There are 23 of them, including John Spurlock, but also John McDermott, David John Clark, Mzileen Smith, and Jim James, many others. Thank you all so much for doing that. Weekly.podnews.net is where to do that. So, what's been happening for you this week, Sam?

SPEAKER_03: 1:41:54

Well, as I said, podcast date in Spain nearly killed me. Getting up at 3 a.m. Blimey by by Friday. I was knacking. But the driver I had, Rafa, was brilliant. He plays Padel with the crown prince of Abu Dhabi. It was hilarious. Some of his stories. He's also Mr. Ibiza. He he basically stocks up all the big ships. So he's got a concierge service. He was a fascinating guy. So yes, love that. So thank you for everyone for inviting me over there.

SPEAKER_02: 1:42:26

Gosh, well, there's a thing. Also over there, you mentioned Megan Davies. Uh, also over there was Eric Newsom uh as well and uh many other speakers from Spain. Uh, presumably Well you you weren't wearing your your ridiculous spy glasses in Spain, were you?

SPEAKER_03: 1:42:42

I was. I mean, as I said, being a typically yeah Anglophile Brit with no language skills, my meta sunglasses came in handy because I have live translation on them. So yes, work very well. And and that and that actually worked. It worked, yes. Wow. So I had my phone out, and basically someone had talked to me, I'd hear it translate, then I'd say something and then show them my phone. And basically, that's the best way we could do at lunch for having a conversation. Wow. Well, there's a thing. Uh not perfect, but not it was better than nothing because it would have been silence otherwise. Yes.

SPEAKER_02: 1:43:19

Excellent. And have you been to any any fancy events recently?

SPEAKER_03: 1:43:23

Well, I'm off to one. I'm off to Ireland for a wedding this weekend. Uh friends, daughters getting married to an Irish guy. I'm really looking forward to it. It's two days on the beach in a lovely venue and uh drinking proper Guinness. So, yes.

SPEAKER_02: 1:43:38

Where where where are you going?

SPEAKER_03: 1:43:40

Where whereabouts? It's about an hour north of Dublin.

SPEAKER_02: 1:43:44

Oh, an hour north of Dublin, my goodness. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 1:43:46

Well, there you go. So cool. Um they are going swimming in the sea on one of the days, and I'm like, bugger that, I'm gonna be drinking a nice little coffee, reading the papers and chilling out. There is no way I'm going in.

unknown: 1:43:59

Yes.

SPEAKER_02: 1:44:00

Or playing paddle, presumably.

SPEAKER_03: 1:44:03

Well, no, I'm playing later today, but I can't play, I can't play over the weekend on banned. Yes, right.

SPEAKER_05: 1:44:10

Yes.

SPEAKER_03: 1:44:11

And then on a technical note, we got LN address to work, which is great.

SPEAKER_02: 1:44:16

Oh, right, yes. So so you can so you're now correctly doing the splits in terms of in terms of LN address as well as as well as the other one. Yes, key centers. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 1:44:27

Yeah, and we also obviously support secure RSS as well, so L402. So yeah, it's quite nice. So the Lightning Network we're gonna support now all three formats. So yeah, very pleased with that. Very good. Very good. Now, the other conversation I had on Mastodon with Alex Gates and Chad F was quite an interesting one. We created an awards page last week or the week before, and one of the things we did was uh import and export using OPML, but we also do export using the podcasting 2.0 playlist format. So we would have say Medium Equals Podcast L in this case for a playlist, and Alec caught a little bug that we had, which is brilliant, so thank you for that. But it was interesting that so few people use that medium format for playlists, so few people use, I mean, we have pod roles, but we don't use publisher feeds and and artist feeds and all of these types of different things. And then there was a whole conversation about, well, there are RSS feeds, these are standalone RSS feeds, they're fully formed, so why don't we publish them to the podcast index? And we don't yet at the moment. And I think again, we're missing a little trick here. You know, I talked about sound bites, but I think we're also missing a trick here with pod roles, playlists, and publisher feeds. But I don't know what we can do.

SPEAKER_02: 1:45:55

That's yeah, that that is really interesting. Uh, there there is there is so much that I wish that we could get out of the podcast index. One of the things that I've been, you know, asking for every now and again is an API into location information so that we can begin to build all of those maps and things like that. We don't quite have those yet. Maybe there's another way into that data. But at the moment, in order for you to draw a nice map of all of of where all of the podcasts in the world are from or where they're all about, then you need to essentially pass every single RSS feed that that that there is out there, which is quite hard. And so it'd be lovely given that the podcast index is already doing that. It'd be lovely if there was a way of doing that sort of uh thing. But yeah, no, lots of really interesting things. So yeah, it'd be nice to uh nice to move forward on uh some of those things.

SPEAKER_03: 1:46:51

So what's happened for you, James?

SPEAKER_02: 1:46:53

Very little has been happening for me, which has been very, very nice. We we ended up we ended up over the weekend going out to normally we meet up with lots of people from the coffee shop every single morning, and we see the same people at the coffee shop every single morning. And uh one of us thought, why don't we meet up in the afternoon in the bar? So we met up in the afternoon in the bar and we actually had things that weren't coffee, which was very exciting. So so I very much enjoyed that. But apart from that, it's been nice and and and uh quiet here, which has been which has been a good thing. I've been spending time seeing if I can work out how to get the Wi-Fi working better, which is always uh always a thing. Getting the Wi-Fi working next to the swimming pool is is my current job. Not because I want the Wi-Fi to work well next to the swimming pool, because it already does. But what I want the Wi-Fi to work is to work next to the filter pump, which it doesn't, because there's a big swimming pool in the way. So I I need an extension of the Wi-Fi just to work round there so that I can then control the pool heater and stuff like that through the through the home assistant.

SPEAKER_03: 1:48:05

On your balcony, from the balcony, turn it up, it's not warm enough yet.

SPEAKER_02: 1:48:09

No, through through through the home assistant, damn you, Gene Bean. Yes, but uh yes, so that is my plan. And uh we did also get uh something that was very exciting this week from sponsors at Buzz Sprout. We have hit uh a quarter of a million podcast downloads. So uh hurrah, we got this thing saying congratulations from Buzzsprout, which was nice. So we ended up sharing that. So hurrah for you, uh Sam, for your quarter of a million of production and and all of that. No, I think that's a good thing.

SPEAKER_03: 1:48:42

It's amazing how many cousins I have in India.

SPEAKER_02: 1:48:45

It's amazing having you. Quite possibly. So, and that's it for this week. All of our podcast stories taken from the Pod News Daily Newsletter at Podnews.net.

SPEAKER_03: 1:48:55

You can support this show by streaming Sats. You can give us feedback using the Bus Sprout thumbnail link in our show notes, and you can send us a super comment or a boost. Better still, become a power supporter like the 23andme PowerFans at weekly.podnews.net. PowerFans.

SPEAKER_02: 1:49:12

Our music is from TM Studios, our voiceover's Sheila D. Our audio is recorded using CleanFeed, and we edit with Hindenburg. And of course, we're hosted and sponsored by Buzz Sprout. Start podcasting, keep podcasting.

SPEAKER_01: 1:49:24

Get updated every day. Subscribe to our newsletter at podnews.net. Tell your friends and grow the show. Support us and support us. The pod news weekly review will return next week. Keep listening.