Announcer: 0:00

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

James Cridland: 0:11

I'm James Cridland, the editor of Pod news.

Sari Azout: 0:16

Knowing what moments resonate is very valuable. And so it seems like there's an interesting way in which podcast magic can help identify those interesting moments.

James Cridland: 0:25

Sari Azut on Podcast Magic, Sublime App, and Attention Data. Plus, TikTok gets into podcasting. And is video worth it? This podcast is sponsored by BuzzSprout with the tools, support, and community to ensure you keep podcasting. Start podcasting, keep podcasting with BuzzSprout.com.

Announcer: 0:45

From your daily newsletter, the Pod News Weekly Review.

Sam Sethi: 0:50

Everyone's jumping on the bandwagon, it feels like. And the latest to jump on the bandwagon is TikTok. It seems it was only a matter of time before they launched a podcast network, and they've done it with iHeartMedia.

James Cridland: 1:01

Yes, in a uh incredible uh coincidence, they announced this on the day that uh iHeartMedia released its uh financial report. Who would have thought it? But TikTok is coming to podcasting with the announcement of the TikTok podcast network. They are working with iHeartMedia. iHeartMedia are apparently making some studios uh for them uh in LA, in New York, and in Atlanta as well. There's also radio stations and live events. Interestingly, we've had a TikTok radio station here in Australia for the last uh seven or eight years, I think. And it seems to, you know, trundle along and seems to be quite good. So there's a thing. But clearly, you know, TikTok getting all excited about podcasting.

Sam Sethi: 1:44

Yes, but I'm a little bit sceptical. Is this going to be TikTok clips, full episodes? Given the ownership currently of who owns it, will it be censored? Because the algorithm is heavily censored now. So I'm not a very big fan of this at all. Gosh. No, I think TikTok is now a political pawn that's owned by certain people, and I think this network is going to be heavily censored.

James Cridland: 2:11

Wow. Well, of all of the things that I thought you were going to be upset about, TikTok getting involved in podcasting was not on my scorecard. So my understanding of what they're doing is they've basically got some TikTok creators. They are going to be making, it says here, up to 25 new shows, so somewhere in the region of 20 new shows by some of the big TikTok creators. I'm not quite sure quite how, because if you are a creator on TikTok, then presumably, you know, just like any other platform, TikTok gets your IP just for the stuff that they can do on TikTok and nothing else. So I'm presuming that, you know, I don't know, maybe iHeart gets the email addresses of these TikTok creators and then does deals with them. I I don't really understand how that bit works. But yeah, I mean, there are clearly some TikTok names on there. They could clearly do a very good podcast, maybe, and certainly a podcast that will get listeners. And so presumably that's how that's going to work. I mean, I think it's interesting. The radio station that we've got here, which you can have a listen to online, I'm sure, from anywhere in the world, is very interesting in that it is uh all of the jingles are voiced by the TikTok lady, you know, that slightly weird Canadian robotic voice that uh comes on.

Tik Tok Lady: 3:32

This TikTok voice, this one.

James Cridland: 3:34

It's done with people who are doing actual shows, but all of the shows are TikTok creators, but basically doing radio links, talking about what they've been doing, and it's quite a good listen, to be honest. It's all it's all pre-recorded and all, you know, nicely produced and everything else. So if that's what they're doing in terms of podcasting, and certainly in terms of radio stations, I think it's quite a smart thing. But I would come back to they announced this on the day that they announced their financial information, and their financial information basically said that you know the revenue is down yet again for all of their radio stations. It's only podcasting which is uh really growing in the company, but podcasting is still pretty small. So it's from memory somewhere in the region of 11 or 12 percent in terms of in terms of the total revenue coming into that coming into that company. So it may just be a little bit of a financial smokescreen of, oh, look over there, we've just done a deal with with uh TikTok. So uh maybe that's the way to have a look at it.

Sam Sethi: 4:37

I think there are some positives. Okay, like I uh have a lot of negatives on that platform, but the positives are the TikTok shop is doing really well. Amazon should have bought TikTok really in this round, and I think it's a threat sometimes to Amazon. And I can see from what YouTube announced a couple of weeks back where you could have links within the podcast or the video which would be available within the YouTube app. And then we saw Apple with timed links that we talked about last week. So I can see more and more people beginning to use e-commerce or third-party links out to you know make affiliate purchases or whatever it may be. And I think TikTok with the TikTok shop with a podcast layered over the top of it could work well. The other thing that I found interesting is one of the mentions was they were going to be talking about the music tracks. Now, TikTok's been really good at music discovery, and a lot of young artists, unlike on Spotify, are putting their stuff up on TikTok and finding they're getting hits and making their content available to other content creators so that they can use it as the backing track. And so there's been several tracks that have gone very viral by making their content available for other creators, and so the radio stations, from what I understand, are going to allow you to do what I think Adam Curry was trying to do with Booster Ground Ball, which is create a podcast with music in it and maybe even a sell tickets or link to the music to download. So I think it'll be interesting. Whether they can make a dent into YouTube and Spotify will be interesting. Yeah, but I'm not a big fan of the platform anymore.

James Cridland: 6:18

No, well, I've never used I've never used it. It's it just looks annoying to me, so I've never bothered. But but but but you know, I mean, if if there's one thing to be said, I think that it will turn on a new audience to podcasting. And if that's a good thing, then that's a great thing. You know, if you if you follow a particular creator on TikTok that then starts talking about their podcast, this is the important thing. The podcast won't be on TikTok, the podcast will be on anywhere that you get your podcasts, and presumably the iHeart player. So therefore, that that's where that's where you will have a listen, and I think that's good news. So from that point of view, great. The more people making shows and pushing people towards the Apple Podcasts app and other apps also exist, then uh fantastic.

Sam Sethi: 7:09

Okay, well, let's talk about the the platform of the moment that seems to get a lot of airtime, Netflix. We've covered the fact that it's you know looking to put podcasts they've put a bit more meat on the deal now. The platform's looking to build numbers of around 200 podcasts, they're looking to license other content and they're looking for originals as well. The one thing that stood out from the Bloomberg report that I read was they're looking to make changes to the interface to better highlight these shows, which again, I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing, but it shows that they understand that it can't be business as usual.

James Cridland: 7:48

Yeah, I think that bit was interesting. The other bit that was interesting in Soundbite from Ashley Carmen, friend of the show, is that these deals are just one year long. They are not deals that are lengthy, and quite a lot of this seems to me to be Netflix dipping their toe in the water and going, I wonder if this is going to work. And we may well see at the end of next year, all of the podcasts, or as I call them, cheap TV shows, because they're not podcasts, but all of the cheap TV shows coming off Netflix because nobody's really w watching them there, and all of the creators getting getting particularly upset because they're behind a paywall on Netflix, which means that they're not reaching a bunch of people that they used to reach for free on YouTube. Because, of course, you know, part of all of this deal is you have to take the full show off YouTube. So I think it's gonna be fascinating to watch. They seem to be talking to all manner of exciting people now, but we will see which cheap TV shows they end up buying.

Sam Sethi: 8:52

For a hundred million, James, I'll take us off YouTube. You know, we'll go exclusive on Netflix probably. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. And that's the point, isn't it? Really? Those shows that are gonna go exclusive will be paid a big chunk of money. Some of them won't care about the fact that they've lost audience and they'll go and do what Joe Rogan did, just go back onto YouTube, post the money in the bank, and say, Yeah, happy days, we moved on again. Yeah, no, indeed. Now, moving on from that, there was a report out this week from Chris Stone saying that publishing video clips to social does not drive podcast listens. What was he talking about, James?

James Cridland: 9:31

Yeah, so he's done quite a lot of research into uh because he works at the New Statesman during the day, which is quite a large magazine in the UK, a bit like uh Time, I guess, or something like that. And the New Statesman had their best ever week of over a million social video views. But then when you have a look at the podcasts that these social videos were coming from, they've seen pretty well no change in the amount of consumption. And so he says that actually these things don't drive podcast listens directly, and then says, and I'm not sure I go with it, but he says something like, But they're really important to put up there because people will begin to understand what your brand is about, and maybe in the future that they will start to consume all this stuff. Yeah, dunno. But um, from you know, it's it is interesting seeing basically people turning around and saying, Yeah, just putting video on doesn't necessarily mean that your podcasts get a bunch more audience.

Sam Sethi: 10:34

I think we've had interviews from the guys who own Patreon talking about the funnel, you know, and the algorithm algorithms within the funnel. So create TikToks, create reels, create uh, you know, short clips, attract them into your brand, get them to go to Spotify or YouTube for the algorithmic discovery, and eventually bring them onto your own platform, something like Substack. And that that sort of path to community ownership and monetization is where we think you know people are going. I I was speaking to, I met up with a friend in London who runs a big publishing creator for uh podcasts, video podcasts, and he he's saying, you know, look, we do four days work with a client and we build them the clips and we do everything to flood the zone. That was his words. Yeah, of course. Flood the zone. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, I think that that's where we we're getting to, right? You know, where clips are important. I think most people say they don't listen to Stephen Bartlett or Joe Rogan for the full three hours. No, but they listen to their clips.

James Cridland: 11:41

No. And of course, as a production company, he can charge for making those clips. Let's not forget that, because that's another important part of the of the deal here. But yeah, you know, I mean, clearly, you know, clips work. Clearly, we know that audio itself, very unit's very unlikely for audio ever to go viral. Clearly, we know that. And so we have seen that video clips seem to go more viral because of products like TikTok and other ones. So, you know, I mean, I I I would certainly agree that it's a very useful tool to get more new listeners to find your stuff, as is, by the way, YouTube. I mean, YouTube has very high numbers for people consuming, but very low numbers for actual consuming, if you see what I mean. So, yeah, so people will find the podcast on YouTube, but then they will probably actually only only consume it on the podcast player of their of their choice.

Sam Sethi: 12:41

So, another question I've got then, James, is one of the tags from the podcasting 2.0 namespace is the soundbite tag. Just my observation, there's been very poor adoption of it by creators uh and limited support by hosts.

unknown: 12:57

Yeah.

James Cridland: 12:58

Why is that? Because I think that the soundbite tag was it's one of those proposals that was put together without really talking to creators. And I think all the soundbite tag is, is it basically says from the podcast audio, choose from here to here, and here's a title. So all it will give you is it will give you a little clip of audio, which we know doesn't go viral. Clips of audio don't go viral. There's no way currently in the SoundBite tag of linking to a video file, and so actually it's not that useful. Uh, it's one of those, you know, it's one of the things that podcasting, you know, 2.0 has made up as a proposal that nobody's really using, because actually, at the end of the day, it doesn't really tick any boxes in terms of a useful feature. Hence why there are two podcast apps that support it, Podverse and TrueFans, because obviously. And uh in terms of obviously and in terms of hosting tools, I mean Headliner supports it, which is brilliant, as you would expect. But you know, the the hosting tools, I mean, BuzzBrow, our sponsor, do support it and more power to them for doing that. But then you've got Blueberry, RSS.com, and then quite a few of the quite small ones. So, you know, I I think it's just a problem that actually if the soundbite tag was looked at so that you could also link to you could also link to video, uh, then maybe that's the way of actually fixing that. So that you've got both a start time and duration, but you've also got, and here's the URL of the video version, if you want to end up doing that. Oh, and by the way, this is you know, this is landscape or this is portrait video, I guess you would you would also need. But yeah, but at the moment we don't necessarily have any of that stuff. It's uh it's you know, it it's one of those, you know, this is we'll get on to Marco Arment later from Overcast. But this is one of those, you know, proposals and ideas that I don't think ticks all of the boxes. The the podcast standards project uh hasn't gone anywhere near it, and I don't think it's really what anybody needs. Sorry.

Sam Sethi: 15:22

So, James, let's move on. Threads has come out and said that it's going to be supporting podcasting links. What are they doing now?

James Cridland: 15:30

Well, this is very exciting, except is it? So, Threads, if you don't know, it's Facebook's Twitter-like clone. I refuse to call them Meta. So it's Facebook's Twitter-like clone and uh refuse to call it X as well. It's called Threads, very lovely, and they have announced a test that is support for linking to podcasts. Now, you can actually link to a podcast on Threads perfectly happily by sharing the URL of your podcast website. Buzz Sprout, our sponsor, will give you a beautiful podcast website, weekly.podnews.net is where to have a look at that. So you you can do that anyway. But uh what threads have announced is if you mention that you have a podcast in your profile, then it will stay in the profile all the time. And if you link to your episode on Spotify, then it will look slightly nicer because it only supports Spotify, because of course it does. So, I mean, it looks a little bit nicer, and that's basically the extent of the support for threads. You clearly can't listen to the show within threads, it will kick you out to and open your Spotify app. But you know, we shouldn't probably forget that Threads apparently have 400 monthly active users, so you know, anything that makes links better for people is a good thing. But I I think I I saw lots of podcasters getting very excited about threads, and and it was kind of well, well, what what what are they really doing here? They're not really doing very much at all, so but you know, but you know, good on them, I guess.

Sam Sethi: 17:06

Yeah, I mean, one of the things I've done with TrueFans is we've created the ability to auto-publish your activity, both as a podcaster or creator to social web endpoints. But what we've found is an absolute nightmare in ability. So with Mastodon, it's a real painful way. We had to run our own server in order to post. With Blue Sky, it doesn't support OEMbed, Threads doesn't support O Embed. And again, do we do TikTok? Do you know how many other endpoints do you do? I don't I and one of the things I find myself now doing is not using the social web because I think it's become so fragmented. I don't really want to go and start collecting my own social graph again and again and again on every new network. I'm just bored of it all, really, if I'm in truth be known.

James Cridland: 17:56

Yeah, no, and and I think you and quite a lot of other people. I certainly, you know, I use Mastodon a lot. I occasionally go on to Blue Sky because weirdly I get more interest on Blue Sky for some of the broadcasting stuff that I write about than I do on Mastodon, but that's kind of it, really. So yeah, I can I completely agree with you. I mean, it's weird that so OIMBed, if you're a listener that doesn't know, then firstly, many congratulations on having a life. And secondly, um, it's a way of it's a way of embedding a player or a piece of media content in a standard way. It's supported by things like medium, so you just paste in a a URL and it automatically makes a nice player out of it, but none of the podcast, none of the uh social media services really support it anymore. So yeah, it'd be nice if if they did. There have been a few sort of fiddling around with linking from Spotify to WhatsApp, I think the Spotify to Discord as well. If you're a 12-year-old kid who likes playing a lot of computer games, um, then that's fine for you. So there's a little bit of that sort of thing. I believe that Spotify also has links into TikTok as well, which will let you, you know, share music and therefore presumably podcasts as well. But that's about as far as we, you know, as far as it goes. And there's very little evidence that um many people end up using these sorts of things. So um, yeah.

Sam Sethi: 19:25

I do, I do think they had the potential to be very useful for discovery. I mean, I still I still think the soundbite tag is something that we should look at again uh and enhance rather than just you know put it on the scrap heap.

James Cridland: 19:40

Oh yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. But if you remember a year ago, everybody was up in arms about the idea of enhancing a tag and changing the spec. Everybody was up in arms about that. Now that we've actually seen two examples of that, firstly the podcast location tag, which will always be a slow burn because it's not really for podcast apps, and then you've got the other one, which is the podcast images tag. Or is it podcast image now? Anyway, it's one of those image without an S. It's one of those where you where you needed to nuke it from orbit and start again. I think the Soundbites tag would be really easy to enhance in the same way that the location tag was enhanced, breaks nothing for the three people who are using it. But now you can add a whole heap of other things. So yeah, I th I think I think there's nothing wrong with that. And I think now at least we've got the precedent of being able to show that we can do that, and it doesn't, you know, and the world won't end if we change some of the specs as we move forward.

Sam Sethi: 20:40

Now, moving on, James, video and podcasting can really work well together, according to new research from Sounds Profitable and Owl and Co., which is the Hernan Lopez company. What are they talking about?

James Cridland: 20:54

What are they talking about? Well, they so firstly, this piece of research in Sounds Profitable was talking about those companion podcasts. So a podcast for, you know, the uh the only murders in the building or whatever it's called, only murders in the building, isn't it? And then the companion show, which is produced by Rob Walsh of Libsin, I discover. Wow. Yeah, and so and so apparently keep himself busy with something. And so apparently these things work very well together. So 16% of podcast listeners have actually bought a streaming subscription after hearing about a show that they want to watch. Forty-four percent of listeners to a podcast about a TV show or a movie talk to their friends about the TV show, which I guess you might kind of expect because they're invested enough to listen to a podcast about it. But uh, yeah, you know, I mean, clearly the UK has seen some cheap TV in terms of trade uh in terms of traitors uncloaked, which called itself a podcast but wasn't actually ever available on a podcast platform, but yet won lots of podcast awards. Who knows how that works? But anyway, you know, and and and and clearly we're seeing Apple TV Plus doing a lot of these things, or is it Apple TV these days? I don't know. But we're seeing a lot of companion podcasts going on in that way. Fun fact Netflix makes companion podcasts for its TV shows. And here's a more fun fact you can't actually consume those podcasts on Netflix. Well, that's maybe why they're moving into podcasting terms. I mean, come on. That's probably it. But uh yeah, so that's sort of one sort of side, but I think also some really interesting stuff coming out of radio stations and radio companies again getting excited about podcasting, but also helping advertisers to buy both. So iHeart's CEO, Bob Pittman, ended up crowing about the podcast revenue for the last quarter. He said this.

Bob Pittman: 22:57

We believe we have the most profitable podcasting business in the United States. In Q3, approximately 50% of our podcasting revenue is generated by our local sales force, up from about 11% in Q3 of 2020, demonstrating the unique advantage of having what we believe is the largest local sales force in media with a presence across 160 markets in addition to our strong national sales force.

James Cridland: 23:20

Bob Pittman, you can you can take a radio person away from the radio microphone, but my goodness, you can't take the voice away. Wow, what a thing. Anyway, one of the interesting things I thought there is what he's just said, half of iHeart's podcast advertising revenue came from their local sales force. So that's a big thing that iHeart have, that Spotify doesn't have, that many of these other companies don't have, is actually a ton of local sales teams running around talking to individual people. So that was very interesting. And very interesting as well was to combine it with their multi-platform group, which is the part of the company that owns the radio stations. Their revenue went down 5%, and there will be more job cuts to go. They're wanting to save another $50 million next year. Who would work in a radio station these days? But yeah, no, I thought that was really interesting seeing iHeart's um iHeart's financials.

Sam Sethi: 24:18

Yeah, I think hyperlocal advertising is the way forward, and I know Adam Curry and Dave Jones think that with their godcaster platform. No, I think one of the things going back to the Sounds Profit all report, so we're saying, or they're saying, that a companion podcast has a resulting effect to go and watch the actual TV show. And I go back to the clips. So we don't think though, according to what was said earlier by the new statesman, that clips generate actual podcast listening increases. So how can one short clip not lead to the other? But one companion podcast can lead to a successful watch of a TV show. I I don't get why one leads to one, one lead doesn't lead to the other.

James Cridland: 25:07

Well, and you're the person talking about uh talking about attention time all all the time. And it and it is just purely that, isn't it? It's if I'm if I'm going to sit and listen to a 30-minute show about friends, for example, that will remind me then to go and watch Friends as well and watch it back on the on the TV too. I think it's just purely the amount of time that we're actually uh spending with this sort of thing, which is why you know branded podcasting works so well as well. And moving on, we we've actually seen, talking about radio, we've actually seen two other things, which is just interesting just to keep an eye on. JET is the UK radio trading system that uh everybody buys radio advertising uh through. That has just added podcasts in there as well. So if you want to buy men age 35, but but you want to buy them on a podcast as well as on the radio, then you can do that with Jet. What Jet doesn't do is it doesn't let you buy individual shows, but you wouldn't kind of expect to do that anyway. So it's interesting seeing radio in the UK getting very into programmatic advertising for podcasts, and the reverse happening in the US, with iHeartMedia now allowing advertisers who are buying into podcasts to also buy onto live radio as well. A company called StackAdapt introducing an integration with them. So there's clearly two sets of you know media which are colliding right now, podcasting and live radio. And lest we forget, live radio is still absolutely massive in the US. 64% of all daily ad-supported audio listening is to AM FM radio, and podcasting is less than 20%. So it's um it's still absolutely massive in terms of uh reaching audiences, although reaching quite a lot of older audiences these days.

Sam Sethi: 27:04

So in the report card, where would you put live podcasting these days?

James Cridland: 27:10

I mean, I think it's it's not really a thing yet. I know that there are a few of them, but I don't think it's necessarily a thing that that is particularly large right now. You know, I wish it was larger. I wish that more people were doing it, and I wish that um more podcast apps and things like that supported it. But right now, yeah, you know, I mean I I think it's a sleeping giant one day, yeah.

Sam Sethi: 27:37

I I because I I my my opinion is the FMAM D A B transmitter is very expensive. The content is the content is the content, whether it was transmitted across FM or web. And I suspect that with closing down of local radio stations and the costs live should be the new radio. But it as you say, adoption is very slow, right?

James Cridland: 28:01

Yeah, adoption is very slow, and I think things like Godcaster, which sort of merges the idea of on-demand content and live content, there's you you know you can tune into what to all intents and purposes is a live stream in that, but it's a live stream of on-demand shows in in most cases. I think that's absolutely the way, uh the way that we're going. And I would suspect that more radio companies are going to be having a look at that. The one thing I would say though is FM or DAB transmission is actually that there's a there's a sort of there's a point at where it becomes incredibly cheap. So, and it really depends on how many people you have consuming. If you're a radio station with over with over 100,000 people tuning in at the same time, that is very expensive in terms of streaming and can be done very cheaply in terms of an FM, you know, transmitter. So it's really it's really knowing where you're headed there. But most radio stations don't have that sort of audience at the same time. So yeah, so it's uh it's an interesting thing, isn't it? Moving on now.

Sam Sethi: 29:09

Look, there's a product that we we've been nudging about called Podcast Magic for the last few weeks. I haven't really had a chance to look at it, but you have, James. What's going on?

James Cridland: 29:20

Yes, I have. We mentioned it a little bit last week, and this week I thought I would reach out to the CEO of Podcast Magic and also of Sublime App, which is a very smart thing. She's called Sari Azut.

Sari Azout: 29:37

I am the founder of Sublime.app and Podcast Magic, and we make personal knowledge management tools for knowledge workers and creative professionals.

James Cridland: 29:48

So, Sari, you you launched Podcast Magic, I think, last week. Tell us what that is, first of all.

Sari Azout: 29:53

Yeah, so podcast magic is the easiest way to capture insights from podcasts. It comes from a compulsive listener of podcasts that wanted to have the Kindle highlighting equivalent of her podcast. Anything else that I look at or see online, I can mark when it comes to podcasts, sharing the podcast episode doesn't feel like it captures like this one moment that really truly resonated. And you know, the the solutions to this stuff, if you're really eager for, you know, after the run, which is you know, where listening to podcasts, I run to my computer, I find a way to get the transcript, and I copy paste it to my app of choice. Or there are some like dedicated apps, but they're not platform agnostic, so it's like a more cumbersome process. And so we just wanted to do the more natural things that people already do, which is take a screenshot and then use AI to go from that screenshot to extracting the text and generating an eclipse. And I mean, really, it solves for people the ability to retain more of what they listen to, right? If you're spending several hours a week listening to podcasts and you can't remember a lot of what you listen, then a lot of that is lost. So there's that sort of retaining of information. There's also the sharing piece. Sometimes I'm listening to a podcast, and there's an incredible insight I want to share with my team. I know they're not going to listen to the full two-hour episode. How can I best share this one moment? So that's really kind of the problem space that we're after. And we found as we've put it out there that there's a sort of like separate parallel problem set for podcasters that we're excited to dive into as well. And I'm happy to talk about.

James Cridland: 31:45

So, in terms of how you use it, you literally just take a screenshot of the podcast as it's playing, and then and then you just email it through to you. Is that that that's basically how it works?

Sari Azout: 31:56

Yeah, you are listening to a podcast on any platform. It really works on Apple, Podcast, Spotify, Overcast, and you just take a screenshot when you hear something you love. It could be from the lock screen or the podcast player page. As long as there's a visible timestamp and a partial sort of podcast title or an episode name, that's all we need. And then you just email that screenshot to podcastmagic at sublime.app. And then within 30 seconds, you've got an email with the transcript of the moment and a video clip that you can share across any platform. And then, of course, it syncs to your Sublime library optionally, where you can smart search all of your podcast clips using AI search. You can also click into any podcast clip and see what related clips people are saving. So there's that downstream stuff. But the basic thing is just take a screenshot. Now we do have an iOS shortcut. So what I do now is I just say hey theory podcast magic. So if I'm cooking, that when I say hey theory podcast magic, it just triggers a shortcut. Nice. It takes a screenshot and email then. So for the power users, there's a hands-free way to do that as well.

James Cridland: 33:09

Nice. Uh that's it. That's uh that's always a always a plan. Yeah. So what's the the the business model for this?

Sari Azout: 33:15

Yeah, so it's important for us to make it super simple. And I think the reason we went with no app, meaning it's just an email, no login, meaning you don't need to remember your email or password to add to these clips, and no subscription is because people hate downloading new apps and they hate subscriptions, recurring subscriptions. So it's a one-time $20 payment for unlimited moments, and the first three moments are free. So the idea is fall in love, let us prove that it works, and then if it does, pay a one-time $20 fee for unlimited moments.

James Cridland: 33:52

Now you you've been mentioning Sublime App in all of this. What what's Sublime App then?

Sari Azout: 33:57

Yeah, so Sublime App is a way to collect and connect anything interesting you come across. So it goes beyond podcasts. It becomes your sort of beacon brain with your podcast clips, it connects to your Kindle highlights, your Twitter bookmarks, your Instagram bookmarks, and then we have a browser extension where you can see anything from anywhere. So Sublime is like a digital hole for your mind. All of the interesting content you come across is smartly searchable, connected. And so you don't you can use podcast magic without Sublime, but if you don't want these podcast clips to just live in your email, and you they can just sync directly to to Sublime. And I think a lot of people are finding that handy. And and just for context, the idea behind Podcast Magic came about because we were seeing people add a Spotify link to their Sublime library and then had a note saying, you know, minute 1114, James is speaking about, you know, future of radio or whatever. And so we were like, people really want to capture this one moment, not just the the full episode. So that's sort of where this like pain point was born.

James Cridland: 35:05

Yeah. And so I guess part of the part of the plan here is to get more people using using the whole suite of um of of uh tools as well. Uh it's it sounds like a bookmark, a bookmark system for life.

Sari Azout: 35:18

Yes. I mean, podcast magic is independent, but we do think of it as part of the sublime ecosystem, and we're hoping that it can become an on-ramp to Sublime if people would like. But but the product works independently of Sublime as well. And I suspect some people will want to only want the podcast solution. What's interesting about podcast magic is that we've partnered with a few podcasters that are sharing the tool with their listeners. And what we're finding is that for them, knowing what moments resonate is very valuable, especially because there's a whole industry around clipping for distribution purposes and having to kind of, you know, after recording, cut it out into like bite-sized clips for sharing. And so it seems like there's an interesting way in which podcast magic can help identify those interesting moments. There's also one of the things we've heard is that it's very hard for podcasters to get first party data, like just emails of who is listening to my podcast. And so this is this is uh podcast magic is an idea, maybe it's still very nascent, but we're excited as we roll this out to solve pain points for podcasters so they can help us in turn distribute this tool.

James Cridland: 36:36

Yeah. So you so you could see a future where a podcaster can sign up to know when people are interested in what they hear, but also potentially be able to contact those people directly with their permission, I'm guessing. And and that would then, you know, enable all kinds of conversations to start on there as well.

Sari Azout: 36:55

Yeah, I mean, I my sort of view is informed by the fact that I've been writing a self-stack newsletter for five years and I've experienced firsthand the value of an email address. And for podcasters, like they don't they can't reach those listeners directly. So I don't, you know, I can't, I don't, I won't make any promises. There are some kind of privacy issues and it will evolve, but I do think it's very interesting to I mean, I'm obsessed with the best ideas traveling for, right? And you know, ideas are what move me in general. And so in the case of podcast magic, that means helping podcasters identify those ideas, helping listeners share those ideas more widely, return to those ideas in their life and work. And yeah, and I think you know, to the extent that we can, we're actually already doing this where we have about 2,000 people that have used the tools so far. Pretty, pretty new. We can see what people are clipping, and we send emails to podcasters saying, Hey, by the way, you know, here's like a dashboard of what people are clipping from your podcast. And we don't share the emails just yet, but I can imagine or I'm seeing enough interest from podcasters in and saying, like, wow, this is interesting. It's cool to see that somebody like sent a screenshot and took time of their day to say like this was interesting.

James Cridland: 38:18

Next, potentially, you know, quite a few of those of those tools. Where have you where have you come from? You're clearly a podcast listener yourself, but have you been working on the Sublime app for a long, long time? Or what what's a bit of your background?

Sari Azout: 38:33

Yeah, so I I've I've been sort of like in the tech, like a bit of tech, so working in startups, in venture capital, in strategy roles in a lot of tech startups. I also love writing. Like writing has been sort of like something I've I've done always in my career. So I've had a substantial newsletter for many years. And yeah, I would say like Sublime was just born from this pain point I had of I want to have a better relationship to the internet and to the ideas. I consume it's so easy to just be a passive consumer and scroller on the internet and just everything and and and constantly just be consuming. And I think for me, sublime is actually the thing that helps and inspires me to create because the more I can curate ideas, the more inspired I am to create. So yeah, I sort of like dropped everything in my life and I said, in order to like the next leg of my life and my journey is downstream of me being able to control my attention and my information diet. And yeah, Sublime is sort of a sandbox to experiment with those ideas.

James Cridland: 39:42

So if people want to learn more, where whereabouts do they go?

Sari Azout: 39:46

Yeah, so sublime.f to try sublime, podcastmagic.f to get a refresher on the instructions. And then we write a weekly newsletter at sublimeinternet.substack.com.

James Cridland: 40:00

I shall sign up. Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.

Sari Azout: 40:03

Thanks so much, James. Delighted to chat with you.

Tik Tok Lady: 40:06

Amazing thing, a free daily newsletter about podcasting. It's called Pod News. Subscribe now at podnews.net. Everybody is doing it. If you don't subscribe, you're so sketchy.

Announcer: 40:19

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

Sam Sethi: 40:28

James, measured by the cost of an hour of attention, there's a report out that says producing video as well as audio for your podcast costs are whacking great big 77% more than audio alone. Now we we thought audio production was fine, we thought video production was much more expensive, but I never put a 77% lift in in doing it.

James Cridland: 40:51

Yeah, well it's a 77% additional cost, but that's only an additional cost if you look at it in terms of cost per attention. Because if you add video, you do get more people consuming your stuff. I mean, that much is very clear from all of the from all of the data. Now what we do know, though, is that when you are producing when you are producing video, it costs significantly more. It costs 3.6 times more to produce a video show than it does to produce an audio show. But more people consume it. So in total, you end up with that 77% figure, which is significantly lower than 360%, which is what the actual costs are. It's a really good piece of data put together by the podcastmarketingacademy.com, Jeremy Enns with the finest beard in podcasting, apart from Stephen Robles, of course. Let's not forget him. But it's a really good piece of uh data. He ended up talking to over 300 podcast creators who are making both audio and making video. Got lots of information back from it, and it's uh well worth a read. But if you're wondering whether or not it's worthwhile to do video and whether or not you will get more money if you do video than if you just do audio, the quick answer is probably not, but it's probably quite worthwhile.

Sam Sethi: 42:20

Okay, now this is a report that you had in Pod News Daily from AliToo that I actually, when I saw it, sort of put my brakes on a little bit. 85% of indie podcasters aren't making money, according to the Independent Podcaster report that AliToo put out this week. That sounds awful.

James Cridland: 42:41

Well, if you remember Todd Cochran, when he was talking about this, he would say it's 95% plus of indie podcasters are not making appreciable amounts of cash. So you might make 10 bucks, but your podcast hosting might be 15 bucks, and so in which case you are still not making money out of it. So 85% of indie podcasters aren't making money, according to the Independent Podcaster Report 2025. Is this bad? Well, no, not really, because actually only 9% of indie podcasters actually want to make money anyway. You know, they're in it for other things, they're not just in it for the money. So I don't think it's a concern. I think it's a concern if the only reason that people get into podcasting is the money. That that's certainly a concern, but it turns out that really, for 91% of people, that's not why they're in podcasting anyway. If they make some money, then great. But actually they're in podcasting for other reasons. So I'm not too concerned about it, to be honest.

Sam Sethi: 43:40

Yeah, I look, I I had a thought, which was the reason True Fans was called True Fans was after Kevin Kelly's 1,000 True Fans blog post. And it was the idea in the day, he wrote, stop chasing a million followers and focus on getting a thousand people who might pay you ten dollars. And that was the seminal moment for me when he wrote that years and years and years ago. Now, I looked at this and I went, is it because most people don't qualify for advertising or sponsorship because the number of listeners is so low or downloads? And it's probably true, but how or when or when will we get people to understand there are other ways of monetising? I think we're gonna talk a lot more about it when we talk about overcast, but how are we gonna get to the point, James? Or will we ever get to the point where wallets work, where micropayments work, where people can get paid directly by their fans, they can get comments, they can get donations, they can get Patreon-like premium RSS feeds. Will we ever get there, or is this just uh, you know, something that we keep pushing the rock up the hill hoping it will go down the other side, but maybe we'll never get there?

James Cridland: 44:53

Well, yeah, I mean, I I mean I think that there are a couple of things there. I think one of the things is that realistically these days, there is no limit to how small your podcast can be before you make money from it. There are a bunch of people out there who uh will actually share some money with you, even if you've only got, you know, a tiny amount of of people consuming your show. You won't make an awful lot of money, let's be fair, but in terms of the amount of, you know, in terms of the amount of uh of uh money that you'll make, you'll you'll you'll make a small amount of money, and that might be enough to cover your podcast hosting costs. Or it might be enough to, you know, take the wife out for a nice a nice meal. It's probably likely to be the wife, given some of the other numbers that we've seen this this uh week. So, I mean, you know, as an example, I've got a podcast on rss.com where I'm an advisor, and I have seen over the last 90 days, Sam, this podcast has seen 1,125 downloads. Woo! Look at me, 1,125 downloads. And I've made, in terms of advertising, $2.39, which is nice. No, in fact, $3.47. Oh, you can stretch response to now, can you?

Sam Sethi: 46:14

Wow.

James Cridland: 46:15

If I can do my if I can do my maths correctly, because because I've actually taken some money out. So it's not it's not an awful lot of money, but on the other hand, it's not an awful lot of downloads either. So you can actually see pretty clearly the amount of money that I'm making cost per thousand. Yeah, and and it's early days for that service as well. Right. Uh it's a it's a product called paid. So so I think that that's one side. The other side is the is the micropayments. And you know, I don't want to be Debbie Downer. We're never going to get there if the only thing that we focus on is Bitcoin. But right now, that is the only thing we can focus on, and there will be a percentage, it might be five percent, of all podcast consumers that might get into the whole Bitcoin thing and be able to share that. It might it may be considerably more with services like uh true fans that hide all of that for for the audience. But but I think I think you know the big change will happen when we start talking about Apple Pay, when we start start talking about you know Google Wallet and all of that kind of thing. Obviously, you know, TrueFans w whisks all of that away so that you don't have to worry about any of that. But sadly, TrueFans isn't quite yet the size of Apple or Spotify, although I know that you're working on it.

Sam Sethi: 47:32

Yeah, don't don't hold your breath, but we are doing our best. Yes. No, I I I I wrote a piece related to this report that you put out, which was highlighting the five different ways. I I just don't think people are aware. I I I went to the City University Podcast Gold event, which had a lot of the British podcast winners there, and you know, talking to them about anything, I mean their level of knowledge was so disappointing, I think that's the word I'd say. You know, disappointing as to they're still talking about downloads, they're still talking about advertising based on a download number, nothing has changed. And I go, I I sort of shrug my shoulders, go, shall I explain it? And then I go, No, I'm not going to, because it it's just going to go over their heads and they're not going to do anything with it anyway. Yeah, yeah.

James Cridland: 48:23

No, it's um I think it's I think it's hard right now, and yeah, it would. I mean, I think that there are other ways, but let's talk about that when we get to the thing about overcast, assuming that I don't edit it out.

Sam Sethi: 48:37

Now, stand by for action. Tune in has been acquired by Canadian podcaster Stingray, and I just had to say F-A-B Scotts.

Tik Tok Lady: 48:45

We are about to launch Stingray!

Sam Sethi: 48:47

It's a ridiculous name, isn't it? Yeah.

Music: 48:52

Stingray!

Sam Sethi: 48:53

Who is this Canadian broadcaster Stingray? More importantly, why have they bought it?

James Cridland: 48:58

It started in 2007. It operates a hundred radio stations in uh Canada. It bought Newcap in 2018, and Newcap was the big, you know, the big radio company that it ended up buying. But it also owns um TV channels as well, called uh Stingray as well. Anyway, the the they have jumped in, and I think this is actually really good news for TuneIn, because Stingray have jumped in, they've realized that they are beholden to uh TuneIn in many cases because TuneIn operates the radio databases in Apple Music, the radio databases for your Google Smart Speaker or for your Amazon Echo or whatever it is that you have, the radio databases for streaming in most of the cars that you end up driving. It's a really big and really important gateway. It's also got podcasts in there, although it hasn't really done very much with podcasts over the last couple of years. And so I think this is really good news for radio as a whole, but also for podcasting. For TuneIn to have been bought by somebody who clearly has plans for that product. I'm slightly surprised that the CEO, Richard Stern, is still going to be working for TuneIn. My my suspicion is that he will leave relatively quickly once he's being told what uh what to do, but you know, but we'll see how that works. But yeah, I I think that that's a pretty good pretty good news for audio, really.

Sam Sethi: 50:27

Related to that though, Bower Media has also done a deal with TuneIn as well. What have they done?

James Cridland: 50:32

Yeah, they sell the advertising in TuneIn uh in some parts of uh Europe, including Poland, Slovakia, and Portugal, they have a product which I'm reliably informed is pronounced Audio XI. So there's the thing. I asked somebody at Bower because Audio XI, how on earth are you supposed to? Audio 11? I don't know. But anyway. Ask Elon Musk, he names everything. But the company that uh sells the advertising, at least right now in the Americas, is iHeart. Now that is interesting because Stingray is a competitor to iHeart in Canada, because Bell owned the iHeart brand in Canada. So not quite sure what's going to happen there, but uh that'll be interesting to uh take a look at. But I think good news in terms of uh tune in being owned by somebody. Now we've also heard big news from ACAST, who have excitedly said that they will now be trading on NASDAQ, NASDAQ stock home, that is, from November the 20th. Sam Sethi, why should I care?

Sam Sethi: 51:35

Why should you care? You shouldn't care at all. But the the employees and the employees and the investors are gonna be very happy. Um we when we interviewed you interviewed Greg Glenday, we we had heard rumors that they were gonna list, we thought they were gonna list on the US Nasdaq, uh, didn't realise it was gonna be the Stockholm Nasdaq. So what they've done is they've gone from their early IPO on what was First North, which again is an early listing. So a bit like AIM in the UK, the alternative investment market, where the rules of what you do and the governance around what you do are not as strict. Going onto the NASDAQ in will mean that they'll get access to much more investment. They'll be traded differently. The regulatory rules will be much more stringent on them, but it means that they could probably raise more money. It also means their shares will be traded, but also might mean that the investors, the original investors, will be able to exit out. That often happens when you do a listing, they'll get preferential exit on the first day of trading because the trading will have a secured valuation. It'll be underwritten by several banks. So I'm assured that they probably are going to be able to take money out. If they're not going to take money out, I'm certain that the employees will see an uplift in the amount of their equity, so their stock options possibly. So there's lots and lots of good stuff that will come out of it, and I think it just makes it a grown-up company.

James Cridland: 53:06

Yeah, and I and I mean certainly their their their uh press release suggests that it will strengthen the company's credibility, increasing opportunities to retain and attract creators, advertisers, listeners, key employees, and other partners, as well as broadening the investor base. And certainly, if you're traded on Nasdaq, on whatever Nasdaq, then I suspect that you are taken rather more seriously than if you're trading on something that nobody has really heard of. So Greg Glenday said in in the statement, it positions ACAST for the next chapter, where we'll continue to focus on profitable growth, expanding our unique global position, and boosting our appeal to strategic partners, international investors, and the top talent and the creator economy. He does a good quote. So uh yes, many congratulations to ACAST. How exciting.

Sam Sethi: 53:53

Yeah, it does put them under a lot of pressure, though. Of course, we've seen this with Libsyn, where they didn't hit their numbers on a regular basis. So by not doing that, they had to delist. So again, you're gonna be looking at those quarterly reports very closely now. Profitability is gonna have to be hit quite significantly, and they're gonna have to make future assessments to the market about their profitability, otherwise, the share price will drop.

Announcer: 54:20

People news on the Pod News Weekly Review.

James Cridland: 54:26

Lots of people leaving all over the place. So Stephen Robles has left Riverside. He is the uh face that you see whenever you go to the Riverside platform on that video that Otto plays as soon as you go there. He is becoming a full-time YouTuber. Many congratulations to him. He also co-hosts Primary Technology, which is a top 10 tech show in the US. He also runs the shortcuts community. He is the man about Apple iOS shortcuts and indeed on macOS these days as well. So many congratulations to Stephen for that. Lots of um people leaving leaving companies. Uh Christiana Kromer leaving D Scripts. She'd been with them for nearly four years. Uh Grant Tottill has left SEA's listener. He joined a company in 2002, and he has been the big cheese in terms of podcasting there. My suspicion is with that one that that is just a cost saving because they're merging with a big TV company here as well. Chloe Straw leaving Audio UK, friend of the show. She's been on a couple of times. She is she is a force for good in the audio business, and I'm sure that she will appear somewhere else relatively shortly. There's it says something in that press release about where she's going, but it's basically, you know, she's going somewhere really nice. And when we can talk about it, then we will. So we'll see what happens there. And then finally, we mentioned feed closing last week. Rob Walsh is doing his own podcast now, which I would heartily recommend. It's called Podcasting. No, it's not. It's called Podcast 411. And uh he's already published another episode this week interviewing somebody important, and I can't quite remember uh who that important person was. But doubtless I will find out and stick it in the uh show notes. So that's definitely worth a peek. And uh it's emerged that one of the reasons why, probably, is that Elsie Escobar, the co-host, and indeed officially the host of the feed, has announced that she has left Libsyn. Uh, she'd worked for Libsin for almost 19 years, and she says that uh she feels immense gratitude and pride for the people, the lessons, and the legacy that we co-cre that we co-created. So, congratulations to Elsie for your next uh step, whatever that next step is going to be.

Sam Sethi: 56:51

Yeah, she was interviewed by Martin Quibel this week. And yeah, she said that she's looking for a new opportunity. So uh yeah, she's not retiring, that's for certain.

James Cridland: 57:01

Yeah, no, indeed. Colin Campbell has been hired by Apple, which is exciting. He was the senior vice president of NPR's podcast strategy and franchise development, although he didn't necessarily be at NPR for particularly long, but he has now gone to Apple. Not very clear what exactly he's going to be doing at Apple. I don't see a uh job title in any of the uh coverage of it, but yeah, it's uh it'll be interesting to see quite what Colin is doing at um at uh Apple. I'm presuming.

Announcer: 57:37

Hey, idiot. You covered it on Thursday night. He's going to work at Apple News as director of audio. Pay attention so I don't have to edit this stupid podcast further. The tech stuff on the Pod News Weekly Review.

James Cridland: 57:50

It's the stuff you'll find every Monday in the Pod News newsletter. Here's where Sam talks technology. Exciting news for fans of Overcast, Sam. Indeed.

Sam Sethi: 57:59

Hat tip to Dave Jones. I saw it last night. Probably you did as well, James. Overcast finally has adopted some of the podcast namespace. They've adopted the season and epitope episode tags, which are going to be supported in the current beta. And they're going to look at supporting the person, chapters, and transcripts. So wow, hell has frozen over or through thawed over. Don't know what's the right expression. Hell has thawed over. I don't know. But he has done the first step in it supporting the podcast namespace. But, but, but, but he is not very positive about the rest of the podcast namespace either.

James Cridland: 58:38

No, he's not. I mean, he says, uh, you know, I'd like to set expectations here. There are some tags that add useful metadata in many contexts, but I don't see enough benefit or a viable path to publisher adoption to justify supporting many of the tags or the mechanisms. He says I have no plans to support their cryptocurrency features. More broadly, I do have a bit of a philosophical pushback on any pressure to adopt Podcasting 2.0's proposals. This was not a standards body, collaborating with podcasters, podcast app makers, and podcast listeners to get widespread agreement on a set of proposals. It's some people who had some ideas and published them. And what I would say to that is, yes, that's exactly how it worked. Nobody wanted lots of meetings. If you want lots of meetings, Marco, you you have lots of meetings. That's absolutely fine. But yes, it was. It was some people who had some ideas and published them. He then moved on. They gave it a name, Podcasting 2.0, that suggests a level of authority and inevitability that I do not agree with. I would probably agree. I would I'll adopt the parts that make sense for Overcast to adopt, and there are some good ones there. But podcasting two point zero is not a standard that anyone is obligated to adopt. It's a list of proposals. And I totally agree. Totally agree. It is. It's a list of proposals, and you can pick and choose from whichever of these tags you want to implement in your own thing. And I'm very excited to see Marco going for the person tag, which I think is brilliant. Going for the chapters tag because Apple has, and so why not? And going for the chapter for the and going for the transcript tag because Apple has, and so therefore why not? I think that that is absolutely the right thing to be doing. So many congratulations, Marco. The one thing I would like to see, to be fair, is the funding tag. It was based on Marco's idea anyway. So we might as well use it. So I think from that point of view, that's fine. And I would totally agree with him. There's lots of ideas, there's lots of proposals for tags. Many of them aren't supported by very many people. We were talking about the soundbite tag earlier on, and it's absolutely up to him as to which he goes for. He doesn't like the name, uh, you know, whatever. But I think, you know, if he doesn't want to do the funding tag or the soundbite tag or the trailer tag, you know, I don't really kind of understand why, but that's absolutely fine. If he doesn't want to do those, then that's absolutely cool with me.

Sam Sethi: 1:01:15

So when's a standard not a standard? How do you become how do you get a standard, James?

James Cridland: 1:01:20

Well, so Justin Jackson, Justin Jackson has um commented to Marco and said the podcast standards project takes these, I mean, essentially what Justin has said is the podcast standards project takes these proposals and considers which we want to actually put into a standard. And I think, you know, that that's always been my understanding of how that organization works. And I think that that's absolutely fine. I would love to see Marco involved in that because I think he would be really useful, you know, in terms of that. He doesn't, again, he doesn't need to support everything, but you know, it'd be great if he was if he was involved. If he wants to be involved in, you know, a whole set of meetings and you know, collaboration with podcasters and podcast app makers and podcast listeners, if he wants to be involved in that, then great. And the podcast anders project is the place to go, I think from my point of view. But yeah, the podcasting, you know, the podcasting 2.0 is a, you know, as I've said before, it's a whole set of tags. Some of them are brilliant, some of them work absolutely great, and some of them frankly don't work at all. But that's great. That's exactly what it should be. And then we have the podcast standards project to move some of those things on. So hurrah for Marco for moving some of those things on. I suspect it's because of Apple, but hurrah for Marco anyway. And yeah, and I think it's a great, it's a great step forward. What say you, Mr. Sethy?

Sam Sethi: 1:02:48

Well, I I I I'm happy that he's done it. Okay, it brings another player to the party. We've talked about TikTok, Netflix, we've talked about Apple doing things. It's all great news, right? For the podcasting community. Hurrah. And and it's justification for the hard work that a lot of people have put in for the last three years. Like Dave Winery doesn't like podcasting titto, couldn't give a damn what he thinks. Couldn't give a damn. But personally, I've been around this when we saw HTML 345 and iterations in between. There was no standard, and then it eventually went to die with a standard called the W3C and never saw the light of day again. We saw that with activity streams, we saw that with CSS. You go to those big bodies like the IETF and the W3C, and it becomes a committee of nobodies who run it to death. And I think hurrah to the people who have worked really hard, Adam Curry, Dave Jones, uh, Stephen B, Alex, Nathan, many, many others, right? They've they've taken time out to to push podcasting, and they got the proof of their hard work because Apple adopted it. Now, Marco is a follower, not a leader, and this is sheep-like mentality, and I think the criticism is unjustified. I think, you know, what what what does he want to call it? Podcasting 1.0, Adam Curry didn't do it, Dave Winer made everything. I don't know. I just I find it really frustrating. I'm glad he's adopting stuff because it makes sense, and he'll adopt other stuff when it makes sense. Great. I I just don't see why he has to dig his heels in, and and as you said, I think it's only because Apple's done it. He would never have done it otherwise. And he's it's the same with Rob Walsh.

James Cridland: 1:04:30

You know, I would say though, I would say he has Marco is saying that he's going to support the person tag. Apple do not support the person tag, yet Marco is going to support it. I think that's a good thing. Okay. And I think we should give Marco the credit for realizing that actually the person tag is a really useful tool here. And it will be great to see because Marco is easily the largest podcast app who would be supporting that particular tag and that particular uh feature because Pocket Cast doesn't support it. I don't think Antennapod supports it. So it would be great to get the feedback from Marco of okay, this is what works in the person tag, this is what doesn't work in the person tag, and and fantastic. So I'm I'm I'm quite I'm quite, you know, I I think that the wrong thing to do is to turn around and say, you know, and and after giving him a slap for so long for not involving him himself at all in podcasting 2.0, now to give him a slap because he's only he's only putting three in, two of two of which are, or five in, two of which are supported by Apple. I think we should probably give him the benefit of the doubt.

Sam Sethi: 1:05:46

I'm popping a cork, right? I'm very happy that he's joined the party. Very good for you. Absolutely. What I'm what I'm saying is, why did he have to do it through gritted teeth? Why couldn't he have just said, yeah, that's great. I'm really excited about this, and I might consider some in the future. Why did he have to slam it on the way in? You know, I'm adopting it, but I'm doing it through gritted teeth, and I don't really want to do this, and I don't think most of it works, and I don't think this is a standard, and I don't think this, and I don't think that. It's like bugger off. Don't do it then. Right? Just don't do it. I'd rather you didn't do it than do it through gritted teeth.

James Cridland: 1:06:19

No, I would probably I'll probably agree with some of that at least.

Sam Sethi: 1:06:22

Yeah.

James Cridland: 1:06:23

So yes.

Sam Sethi: 1:06:24

But anyway, look, it's good. And we're gonna talk about some of the other apps and what they're up to in a minute as well. But going back to one of the big sticking points that Marco did say, and I and I I again I do agree with him on this one, is micropayments and adoption of wallets and all of that stuff is super, super hard. Yeah. Don't know if we're pushing the rock up the hill. I often say that when I used to have to talk about HTTP, it's a URL, starts www. Most people looked at me and went, You're talking Swahili, Sam, it'll never catch on. And that was the web, and we know that it caught on. And I think when I say to people it's a wallet, they're just micropayments and they're peer-to-peer transferred. Oh, okay, got it. And now with Alan address, yeah, what's my wallet address? Oh, it's just sam atgetallby.com or James at strike.me.

James Cridland: 1:07:14

Yeah.

Sam Sethi: 1:07:14

I think the technical complexity is beginning to get hidden. And so maybe in a year or two years you might see Marco adopt it. But I think we have to see more mass adoption from the other apps who are leading the charge before you get to the likes of the level.

James Cridland: 1:07:32

It just needs to be easier, it needs to be, you know, as as we keep on saying, but also it will be nice if when we build something, people don't pull the rug from underneath us and change all of the technology, which is what has basically happened and why streaming payments have you know have become much less of a thing than they were. It would be nice if that doesn't happen. So hopefully we can get we can get it right with ln address as a good start. Talking about that, we we seem to be moving over to LN Address now, which is good. Sovereign Feeds now has something basically built into it that says you shouldn't be using node addresses anymore, you should be using ln addresses. I was banging my head against the steering wheel when I was listening to the podcasting 2.0 show because they've because they've idiotically chosen podcast index at getalbi.com as their LN address. They're idiots. What they should have done.

Sam Sethi: 1:08:30

Friday night's gonna be fun.

James Cridland: 1:08:32

What they should have done is to set up an alias of podcast index at podcastindex.org, which by the way works, so that they don't have to change everybody once they stop using Albi in uh in a couple of years' time because Albi pulls the rug and you know from us all over again. We we we've had whining and moaning for the last four or five years about everything needs to be sovereign. We we shouldn't be having any any uh you know centralized thing. And then all of a sudden we get them turning around and saying, okay, you need to change your node address to r to reference getalbi.com. What utter idiots, what fools. Their idea is that that's gonna be in 20,000 different shows because they all want their 1% splits from those 20,000 different shows. We're all gonna change to a getalbi.com address, get real. Why do we bother talking about making sure that nobody owns this space and then we hand all of the payments to get Albi? What new what fools, idiots.

Sam Sethi: 1:09:42

This bit's not getting cut. Please do not cut this bit.

James Cridland: 1:09:48

What fools. Having said that, yes, uh, you Oscar is doing a very good job uh of doing a little bit of work in terms of uh how we get the metadata back. One of the things that we have had to do is uh as we move quite fast to get rid of node addresses and move over to LN addresses for streaming payments. That has essentially ruined some of the metadata that we get of people sending messages. And so what Oscar has done is he's done a very good and very nicely transparent standard, which is the RSS payments.

Sam Sethi: 1:10:23

Don't call it a standard.

James Cridland: 1:10:25

Proposal. Proposal. Uh which is which is which is this metadata idea, and all it is essentially, there are bits of it that I don't understand, I'll be I'll be frank with you, but all of it essentially is a nice JSON URL which is sent so that you can actually see all of the information and it works quite nicely as well.

Sam Sethi: 1:10:45

So they've adopted uh or they've hijacked the description field so to put the metadata within it, which is very clever. Sadly, Oscar and I were due to meet this week, but Oscar hasn't returned any of my calls. Oscar, call me. You didn't want to catch a cold. I'm ghosted of you. I know, I know what it feels like. But yeah, we we were talking before the show about you weren't getting any true fans metadata, i.e., boosts within the results. You were getting the payment results, but you weren't. So we've adopted Alan address the the model so we understand that you are James Gridland at strike.me and the amount we need to send you and the splits, but we don't understand how to send you the metadata. So this is what Oscar's put forward. I'm gonna look at it. I'm a little bit busy on something else right now, Oscar. Just a little. But yes, as soon as we can, we will. And it seems like a very sensible solution. I think this will be then the stake in the ground that we can then start to build forward from rather than have to change again and again.

James Cridland: 1:11:50

Yeah, indeed. Podcast Guru working on something similar. I hope that they are working on the same spec. It would be foolish if they weren't. Also, things going on. Castomatic has a brand new, beautiful looking beta, which is available on test flight right now and apparently looks uh rather excellent. So that's worth a peek. Metacast has made some additional changes. They are a fascinating company, don't do very much with podcasting 2.0, but they're a really fascinating sort of you know, super podcast app if you want to learn more about what you're listening to. So worth a peek there. And yeah, lots of other things going on. The only other thing that I would mention in the in the tech stuff is XSLT is going away. That is the rather complicated way that you can currently make a RSS feed look halfway decent if you click on it by mistake. But uh Google has basically said we're taking that out of Chrome, and Firefox has said, whatever you say, Mr. Google, and so it's going to be pulled out of both Chrome and Firefox. Safari is never supported viewing uh RSS feeds anyway. So that's going in the next 12 months. The good news is that RSS feeds also can use CSS, and you can just do a very nice, simple, you're looking at the wrong thing, you need to go here in CSS, and that works absolutely fine. So if you want to work out how that works, you'll find it in Monday's Pod News newsletter. You can copy my code if you like, that's absolutely fine. And that is the way of doing that stuff in the future. So at some point, everybody will need to add that XSLT stuff and take that out of the RSS feed.

Announcer: 1:13:31

Boostigram. Booster, Boostigram, Super 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.

James Cridland: 1:13:45

Yes, so many different ways of getting in touch with us. Fan mail by using the link in our show notes, super comments on TrueFans Boosts everywhere else, or email. Thank you uh so much to the many people uh this week who have been boosting and uh streaming sats and all of that kind of stuff. Here is where I slightly embarrassingly say that my umbral fell over at the end of last week, and I have it's still in the process of coming back to life. It should be back to life when you are hearing this. So apologies for that. That means that I can't read anything. So so the only information that I can currently see is um a little bit of information about who may have been streaming the uh show. So thank you for that. It will come back to normal next week. You can, of course, use the fan mail link, which you'll find in our uh show notes to get a message to us. That's lovely. And also thank you for the for the power supporters as well. Many people who are supporting us every single month with their credit card, people like John Spurlock, he of uh OP3 fame, people like John McDermott, he of Calaroga Shark Media fame, and people like uh Rachel Corbett, she of rachelcorbett.com.au fame. She runs uh Nova's podcasting and uh does all kinds of other things as well. Uh thank you uh to all of you. Weekly.podnews.net is the place to go for that. Oh, and by the way, we are putting together a special show at the end of this year, which is ideas for next year. Well what's the what's the phrase we use? Predictions. Predictions, yes, yes. That's the phrase I'm looking for. Yes, yes, and you don't get on if you're not a power supporter. So if you want to get on and give us your predictions, then then uh certainly in the power supporter section, then weekly.podnews.net is where you can become a power supporter and share your predictions with the world.

Sam Sethi: 1:15:40

Like it. Okay, limited. Good. Yes, now I'll be reaching out to a number of people to get the audio from them very shortly.

James Cridland: 1:15:48

Yes, no, that should be good. So, what's been happening for you this week, Sam?

Sam Sethi: 1:15:51

Well, I thought I had a uh a giggle on LinkedIn when a friend of the show, Liam Hefner, put out, Have I got pod news for you? as a new show idea for me and you, James. I don't know if you saw that.

James Cridland: 1:16:02

Yes, yes, I saw that. And I was curious as to work out who the posh one was that was slightly out of touch with the world. Uh and and uh who the who the man of the people was. Uh and I couldn't work out, I couldn't work out because I think we're both the posh ones.

Sam Sethi: 1:16:21

I think I think public schools united here, yes.

James Cridland: 1:16:24

You were also at the City University Podcast Gold Night during the week.

Sam Sethi: 1:16:29

Uh Brett and Sandy over there did a great job. A lot of podcast winners talking about how they produced their podcast and what uh the uh potential was. The winner kill list was there. They were talking about how it took them four years to get that podcast out. Four Jesus years. I mean, like wow.

James Cridland: 1:16:49

Uh and yeah, and and of course, you know, it's a limited series show. Yes, it's won awards, but it's a limited series show, so it's limited monetization, sadly. So yeah, it's uh interesting. Interesting.

Sam Sethi: 1:17:03

But so that was good, and then there's lots of students there from the podcast MA that's done at City University asking questions, so that was quite nice. And there's uh the guys from Adoliticius were there and Novell and a few other big companies had turned up as well. So it was well supported.

James Cridland: 1:17:18

Very nice. You are currently, you've said that you are currently working on something. That something is TrueFans hosting, uh, which is very exciting. Yes. So uh yes, one step closer, and I can now see a exciting looking. Oh, you've got a new visual language there. Fancy, lots of exciting graphs and things for uh how the thing works.

Sam Sethi: 1:17:39

Yeah, I mean we're taking it step by step, but the the critical part for us was could we move a podcast from another host? Yes, we've done that now several times, and that's worked seamlessly. Could we then get that to play on multiple apps and get the data back? And we can, so we can we don't download, we stream, and we do that in six-second packets, and so we know exactly when you stop streaming is your listen time. So then we can aggregate that back to you, the creator, as a total listen time across all apps for your episode, but we can also break that down by the number of plays and the listen time on each app now. So that's pretty cool, and of course, obviously, we can then roll that up into showing you a listen time for your podcast, and if you've got multiple podcasts, then we can show you a listen time for those as well, aggregated. So it's all working. I'm very pleased. We've done that in partnership with Russell Harrower. I don't know if hosting as a service, has is a new word or not. So we we are basically a virtual network on top of Russell's network. We weren't going to make the investment into CDNs and into servers and all that. That's a massive cost. So thank you to Russell. I'm sure that he's gonna reach out to you, James. Actually, I was thinking it might be nicer given that you're both in Australia that you interview him, because obviously it would be fresh to you rather than me knowing everything about.

James Cridland: 1:19:09

Yes, because I will know nothing about it. I will know nothing about it, and he's in Perth, so that's um a couple of uh hours into the past. No, it's not hours into the future, isn't it? Or is it how into the past? That's how that's how it works. So um, yes, so we should talk to Russell over the next couple of weeks. That would that would be fun.

Sam Sethi: 1:19:28

But if you want to get on the wait list, it's just truefans.fm slash pricing. And yeah, I think by the end of the month we'll have our first customers on, and then we'll just grow from there when and how we do it, and hopefully it'll be a success. Yeah, very cool. So, what's happened for you, James, this week?

James Cridland: 1:19:47

I have been mostly trying to rebuild the umbral. I'm not quite sure why I'm rebuilding the umbral, to be fair, but nevertheless, you know, I felt that I ought to. I've got no idea uh quite how much money I've lost, uh, given that the umbral fell over. I've got what I thought was a seed phrase for Bitcoin, which turns out to be a seed phrase for my lightning node.

Music: 1:20:11

Right.

James Cridland: 1:20:12

So I'm not quite sure what I'm not quite sure how I use that. I'm waiting for the entire Bitcoin um change to to download. So once that's finished, we'll see if I've lost all of the money that I had in in channels and things like that. Don't really understand how any of that bit works. And also, I uh you know I had a very small amount of Bitcoin on that thing as well. Not quite sure how to get that back because I thought that I had a seed phrase for the Bitcoin node. Turns out that I may not have done. So I may have uh said goodbye to probably $30. It wasn't a massive thing, but yeah, good job. I moved it all over to uh to uh strike really. So so yes, never never let me in charge of in charge of tech, uh, because that would be a that would be a fatal mistake. So that's one thing, and the other thing that I have done this week, I I do feel that this section is now what James has done on his on his home assistant box.

Sam Sethi: 1:21:12

But new show title required, yes.

James Cridland: 1:21:14

Yeah, but in case, in case, Gene, you're interested in what I've done with my home assistant box this week, so I've got some NFC tags, some just some little stickers, NFC stickers, and I've worked out now how to program that uh to program those so that I just brush my phone up against this NFC sticker and it turns the lights off in the office, rather than walking all the way back up the stairs to press some buttons on a screen in the office.

Sam Sethi: 1:21:43

I can now just uh do that by uh standing next to the front door and um so has it passed the wife test because when I did home automation and we had switches, which my wife knew how to work, and she is technical, she would like get really annoyed at me when I'd say, No, it's automated, you just walk into the room and they turn on. So don't turn the switch off.

James Cridland: 1:22:03

I am uh no, I've been I've been very careful with that. So we've got and this is going to sound very large, but so we've got a swimming pool in the garden.

Sam Sethi: 1:22:12

Now you know who the posh one is of the two of us. Yeah, go.

James Cridland: 1:22:15

I know, I know. So we've got so we've got a swimming pool in the garden, which is so fearsably expensive. I wish that we didn't have it. But one of the things that that pool has in it is it's got some very fancy blue lights. So in the in the evening, if we want it to, uh, we can turn on those lights and you know, there's a sort of blue thing, and it looks very, very fancy, right? And we've not turned those on for the last eight years because why would why would you ever see if you can find the remote control for the blue lights and then hope that they'll actually work and blah blah blah. It's just a it's just a nightmare. What we now have, and the wife has has just found this out, is if you go out onto the deck or onto the or into the swimming pool when it's dark outside, the lights automatically turn on.

Sam Sethi: 1:23:06

Okay.

James Cridland: 1:23:08

That's all it's it's actually interfaced to the security camera on the deck. Right. And the security camera goes, Oh, I I can see a human being, and it won't be burglars. So so it'll be clearly so it'll be us. So uh yeah, so that's what we've done. But um, yes, it's all uh all very, very complicated. But anyway, it's been it's been fun. And and one one last piece of tediousness. I now have so I'm I'm I'm wearing an Apple Watch, and I now have a complication on the Apple Watch, which tells me how much battery I've got in the car. Uh oh God, you've just increased your blood pressure by no, it's fine, it's fine, but it's just it's just useful to know whether it's charging or not. So I've got that now on there, so I'm feeling very clever in terms of um how I've done all of this stuff. But yes, lots of complicated tail scale VPNs and everything else. So there we are, gosh.

Sam Sethi: 1:24:04

Anyway, I should I should get a life. And a more interesting note, how is your application to be the BBC's new DG?

James Cridland: 1:24:11

Yes, gosh, yes, the BBC, eh? Who would work there? I mean, in all seriousness, who would be the Director General, who is essentially the CEO of the BBC? Who would want to do that job? I mean, Tim Davy has done it for the last five years. I've I've known Tim for quite a long time, and he has visibly aged in the last five years. You know, it's a job that must be an incredible job. It doesn't pay very much. You get about half a million pounds in terms of salary, which is not very much in terms of you know looking after 23,000 people. But and they just the stress and the hassle of doing that job, you know, wow. Who would want to do that? That that's the real crisis. That's the real crisis, is that no one wants to work in the public service anymore because you don't get paid anything, and it's just criticism against criticism against criticism.

Sam Sethi: 1:25:08

So yeah, it's gonna be fascinating. It's become a hot potato, right? Because it's a political potato now, because everybody and their dog says you're not impartial. Yeah. We are sadly going down the American route of bilateral media. So we've got the equivalent of Fox News, which is GB News, which is the worst show ever, similar to Fox. Ronald Reagan, I found out, was the person who destroyed America's media when he removed the build for impartiality. And so then they went off on their own little routes of left and right wing media, and never the twain shall meet. And America's a split country as we know now. And I worry that that's gonna happen in the UK if the BBC doesn't exist and doesn't offer some form of impartiality because one person's impartiality is not another person's, then I suspect we will end up with split media as well, you know, people watching left-wing media or right wing media.

James Cridland: 1:26:06

Yeah, no, indeed. Indeed. It's gonna be uh, yeah, it's it's absolutely fascinating seeing what's going to happen there. Public media has already been in real trouble without all of this stuff happening. So, yeah, there's a thing. Anywho, that's it for this week. All of our podcast stories, of course, taken from the Pod News Daily newsletter. You'll find the Pod News Daily wherever you get your podcasts, or you can subscribe to the newsletter, which is better at podnews.net.

Sam Sethi: 1:26:33

Oh, I don't know. Hearing your voice is quite nice, doesn't it? You can support this show by streaming Sats. You can give us feedback using the BuzzSprout fan mail link in our show notes, and you can send us a super comment or boost. Or better still, become a power supporter like the 23andme, Power Supporters at weekly.podnews.net.

James Cridland: 1:26:53

Yes, and we're hosted and sponsored by Buzz Sprout, Star Podcasting, keep podcasting.

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