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 Cridlin and Sam Sethy.

Sam Sethi 0:11

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

Kendall Brietman 0:16

We're the only platform now that you can record, edit, and host your podcast on.

James Cridland 0:22

Kendall Brightman unveiling Riverside's new hosting product. We've got our costs pretty low and we can help media developers. Russell Harrower on Pod2's new cloud hosting. Plus, RSS.com launches a new free podcast hosting plan and how to use your own dot com with lightning payments. This podcast is sponsored by BuzzSprout with the tools supporting community to ensure you keep podcasting. Start podcasting, keep podcasting with BuzzSprout.com.

Announcer 0:51

From your daily newsletter, the Pard News Weekly Review.

Sam Sethi 0:55

Now,

Riverside does hosting now

Sam Sethi 0:56

James, what's that famous expression? You know, like a London bus, you wait for ages and then three come along at once. Feels like hosting's doing something similar. You wait for ages, no new hosts, and suddenly a ton of them come along at once. Now, the first one we're going to talk about, unsurprisingly, or maybe not so, is Riverside. They've just announced they're going to be hosting James as well. What are they doing?

James Cridland 1:20

They have just announced that they're going to be hosting. I thought, well, in the absence of any press release, because they've not bothered to send a press release out, I thought, well, let's find out from the folks themselves. So I spoke to Kendall

Interview: Kendall Brietman

James Cridland 1:34

Brightman.

Kendall Brietman 1:34

Well, I am Kendall Brightman. I am the community lead at Riverside, which basically just means that I am kind of the bridge between our product and the community that uses it. So communicating about new features, but also being the voice within Riverside that speaks for the people that are using it. So what they care about, what's important to them, what they struggle with, what they love, all of that. Just kind of being the person to represent that voice.

James Cridland 2:00

So let's start with the basics. What is Riverside? At least what has it been until now?

Kendall Brietman 2:06

We are a recording, editing, and now hosting platform. So really all in one end-to-end content creation platform. So you can record your podcast, you can edit it right on there, make your clips, get your transcript, and now be able to also publish it all through Riverside. So that's kind of a very general, broad overview of what Riverside is. But there's just a lot packed into it. AI show notes, your AI clips. There's there's a there's a lot of different things that you can be doing on Riverside, but our whole goal is to make podcasting and content creation easier, faster, but keep it professional. So what I mean by that is that all of the recordings you can record in up to 4K. So you just have and uncompressed audio. So you have the highest quality audio and video possible to really make your content just shine and stand out.

James Cridland 3:02

So there will be quite a lot of people who have used your product a long, long time ago. I mean, I remember writing about Hillary Clinton. Remember her? Who was a big fan of the product, what, in 2021, maybe? Maybe 2021, maybe, maybe earlier. You've you've launched a lot of stuff since since uh then. I don't remember being able to edit or any of that kind of uh thing.

Kendall Brietman 3:28

Yeah, I mean I'm old enough to remember when I joined, it was I think that we had just started the editor. Like it was we've come a crazy long way. I've only been here for two and a half years, and when I started, it was just starting to become more of a robust editor. But we're putting out new features every week. It's we were just joking, me and a few of my colleagues, that it gets hard to keep up ourselves. So if you've checked out Riverside before, I recommend checking it out again just because there's been so much change happening. And by change, I just mean continuing to iterate. So when we started, it was very much focused on that recording quality, that it was the highest quality that you can get for remote recordings. And so that's still true. But on top of that, now we've just built a really incredible editor. We've now built hosting into it. So yeah, there's definitely it's if you haven't checked it out in a while, I highly recommend it. I know I'm biased, but that's what I think.

James Cridland 4:23

So this week you launched podcast hosting. There are tons of podcast hosting companies. So what makes you different?

Kendall Brietman 4:31

Yes. So that is a big announcement that we just had that Riverside now supports podcast hosting. And what makes us different is that I believe we're the only platform now that you can record, edit, and host your podcast on. So for anyone who already has a paid Riverside plan, it's already included in your account. And if you sign up for Riverside with any of our paid plans, hosting is now included at no extra cost. So I would say what makes us different is one being that all-in-one solution, being able to do everything in one place. I mean, I hear from podcasters all the time the amount of just kind of file shifting that you have to do. You're recording, downloading it, getting it into an editor, go doing that, and then taking that, downloading it, and then uploading it to your podcast host. And it's just such a tedious part of the process. So to have everything all in one place is just really great for the workflow. But then number two, as I was saying, is that it's recorded, it's included in your paid plan. So what that also means is that it's one less subscription that you now have to pay for. Because so many of these podcasters that we speak to are doing it because it's something that they're passionate about. And maybe they're monetizing a bit, but surely not in the way that just it's you're able to always cover all of the different tools that people are using. And so to be able to cut out one of those subscriptions and have everything done in all in one place is, I think, what really sets it apart for creators who are using Riverside to do it.

James Cridland 6:03

Well, you quietly introduced this a while ago. I remember trying to get Steven to talk about it at podcast movement, and he he just blank walled me. He wasn't going to answer any questions at all. But this has been, you've you've been rolling this out to some of your customers already, haven't you?

Kendall Brietman 6:18

Yes. So what we started with is we started with new podcasts, so non-existing RSS feeds. We'd create that RSS feed for you. That was kind of the first step of it. But then the obvious next step would be to be able to import your podcast that's already being hosted somewhere else. So that's what the big launch is now is that we've already been supporting hosting for a new podcast. But if you have been podcasting and want to bring your podcast into Riverside to make that all in one workflow, you can now do that. We now support that.

James Cridland 6:50

Now, obviously, Sam would be wanting me to ask about podcasting 2.0. What sort of features from that are you supporting? I'm guessing you must be supporting transcripts, but what else?

Kendall Brietman 7:01

As far as like included in the hosting? Yeah. Okay. So we are when you're uploading your podcast, when you're hosting it, we have you are putting up your podcast art, able to schedule it, put in the description, set if it's episodic or if it's part of a series, which is how we communicate to Apple Podcasts and Spotify, really how to show your podcast. Also connected to YouTube. So you're able to publish straight to YouTube. There is also analytics included. And one thing that I'll say is earlier I was talking about like if you haven't checked out Riverside for a while, check it out again, is that we're always adding to Riverside. So right now we have analytics that's able to tell you how many listeners that you had for your for your show, where they're coming in from. But as we continue to build this out, we're going to be adding more analytics. For example, being able to look episode by episode at some of those, at some of those numbers. And so this is really a first step into what you're going to be able to do with Riverside Hosting.

James Cridland 8:02

Okay. So for now, you support transcripts on the platform, but not necessarily in terms of the podcast hosting to get those transcripts out to PocketCasts and Apple Podcasts and all of that. How about support for chapters?

Kendall Brietman 8:16

So basically, if you also record on Riverside, what a great part of it is is that you already get your chapters created for you by your recordings. And you can also update those chapters when you edit, of course, because when you take out those edits, your chapter time codes are going to change. So what happens is when you're recording on Riverside and then you go to host that episode through Riverside, you still have all of that information. So you can take those show notes, you can take those chapter timecodes, and it's automatically you're able to put that into your episode description. So there's no need to reinvent the wheel, no need to do that twice. It's we already have all that information, so you could easily just put that right in your episode description. So yes, chapters are included.

James Cridland 8:58

Okay. Riverside's famous for video, of course. Will you be hosting video as well for people who want it? Or are you just exporting to YouTube, I guess, by the sounds of it?

Kendall Brietman 9:11

It's audio only to Spotify and Apple. But users, after they claim the podcast on Spotify, can manually add the video to their podcast through Spotify.

James Cridland 9:21

Yeah, it's interesting that, you know, Flightcast, for example, has access to a Spotify upload API for video. And I'm told by Spotify that that API is available for everyone, but nobody else is using it yet. Even companies like Riverside that have such a good long association with Spotify directly, which is really interesting. Who gets access to podcast hosting?

Kendall Brietman 9:43

So anyone who's on a paid plan through Riverside gets access to podcast hosting. And again, it's at no additional cost. So if you are already recording and editing on Riverside, you'll see already in Riverside account added that you now have hosting. And if you sign up for Riverside, it's not like we are going to ask you about hosting as part of your package. It's just the same price. You sign up, you also get hosting.

James Cridland 10:07

Very cool. And are there limits on how popular you can be? Is there a download cap or anything like that?

Kendall Brietman 10:13

Nope, there is not. There is, you can only have one, you can only host one podcast per account. So hosting will only support one podcast for now. Yeah, as far as the amount of downloads, there is definitely no cap. And we are excited to see how many downloads and everything that you're able to get through hosting on hosting on Riverside.

James Cridland 10:35

Very cool. And is the monetization in there as well? Ads and that sort of thing?

Kendall Brietman 10:40

Not right now. So again, as we continue to push hosting, maybe those opportunities will be coming in the future. For now, monetization is not really included. But that is, I again would say that as we continue to roll this out, you're gonna see that we're going to continue to iterate and improve and expand on hosting. Because like at Riverside, what I've found is that we want to get the most stable, most impressive feature to you out as soon as we can. And so from there, we iterate, we add. And so that's how, for example, with the editor that I was talking about, like we could have waited years and rolled out an editor with all of these features that were already packed in. But what we like to do is we like to deliver you something that you're able to use and love. And then as we continue, we can continue to add features to that that you're also going to be able to use in love. So podcast hosting is another example of that that you're going to see that as we continue, it's only going to get better and better and have more features.

James Cridland 11:44

So, where can people go to find out more about hosting?

Kendall Brietman 11:48

So we have a webinar that we're going to be launching very soon after the launch. Actually, by the time this comes out, we'll be able to sign up for that. So that's riverside.com/slash webinars. And you'll see on there, we'll have a full walkthrough of hosting. You'll also see it on our YouTube channel, and I'll be posting it in our community on Facebook. It's Conversation Creators by Riverside. So we'll have information there. Also, when you log into your account, you'll be able to get a step-by-step walkthrough of how to use hosting. And our just our YouTube channel always has a ton of different videos that are not just walkthroughs, but best practices. So that's where you can find a lot of information.

James Cridland 12:25

And of course, uh, riverside.com is the place to go. One other question, if I may. Uh, you've recently lost Stephen Robles, the the bearded shortcuts guru himself. Who is the new Steven? Is that gonna be you?

Kendall Brietman 12:42

It's not me, but I we are actually we have the position open on our website. So I believe it's careers.com or riverside.com slash careers. And we are looking for, I wouldn't say we're looking for the next Steven because there is no other Steven. Steven's the best, but we're looking for somebody that's uh wants to come and represent Riverside, help us grow our YouTube channel. So if that sounds like you, we have the job posting up online right now. So yeah, we're definitely accepting applications, but I will just say that I loved working with Steven. He is going off to go at it alone to do his own thing and start kind of making his own types of videos. So already I'm I'm seeing a huge increase in in Apple shortcut videos from him. So um I am really excited to see what he does. It's a lot of fun working with him.

James Cridland 13:34

Yeah, I know absolutely. Well while you're on, I mean it's it's just us, right? And nobody else is having a listen. I don't know whether you've got anything that's coming around the corner, perhaps, that you could tell us about.

Kendall Brietman 13:45

Yeah, so so we just announced hosting, but I will say that what we're finding is that a lot of people are really seeing the value in editing on Riverside and all of the things you could do beyond remote recording. So that's what we were originally known for that remote recording, adding the editor. And so with all of the features that we've added, there's a lot of value in Riverside, and people are seeing that more. But maybe you're not recording remotely. So there are a lot of people that are recording in person, and we definitely hear you. So we've added the ability to have two mics and record two different mics onto your account so that you can edit that audio separately. But stay tuned in that space because we are definitely going to be adding more in regards to in-person recording. So stay tuned on that.

James Cridland 14:29

All sounds very exciting. Very excited. Yeah, Kendall, thank you so much. Yeah, of course. Kendall Brightman from Riverside. So, Sam, what do you think of all of that then?

Sam Sethi 14:39

Let's start with the positive, shall we, James? Good on them to get into the game. I think what Kendall was trying to say was you know, we're a one-stop shop now. You can you can come to Riverside, you can get it for free, we'll host your stuff. I think they were focusing correctly on new podcasters more than existing podcasters. I know that that's what they said they've just announced, but you know. That's the positives. And again, as Kendall said, you can, you know, record, edit, clip, all the good things. I I think I've called them the five P's, you know, that you can do the pre-production, production, post-production, clip promotion. There's no monetization within there, so there's no profit element. But I think it's very, very basic, don't you?

James Cridland 15:26

Yeah, very, very bare bones. I think MVP is the phrase, isn't it? Minimum viable product. Well, I think the M's are included. Or the V for that matter.

Sam Sethi 15:36

Yes, exactly. More like the V.

James Cridland 15:38

No, I mean it's it's um yeah, I mean, uh so analytics, you heard Kendall say there that that'll give you, you know, a number of listeners, and you know, and that's about it. They won't even give you quite as yet details per episode. So it's a very first product, you know, very V uh V0.1. I am really surprised that and you possibly heard it uh slightly in my uh in my interview. I'm really surprised about transcripts. You know, Riverside has transcripts, they have chapters, they're not supporting either of those within the RSS feed. There was a bit of talk from Kendall about, well, you know, we've got the information so you can paste it into the into the episode notes. I mean, uh how you can launch a brand new podcast hosting uh platform in 2025 and ignore podcasting 2.0 completely, ignore what Apple have been doing for the last three years completely. I find that really weird. But, you know, it's a first thing. And you know, and I think from that point of view, I suppose uh i it can only get better, and it's good that there is another podcast hosting company here. I doubt that we'll get very many serious people using it because uh one podcast per account is a big thing. That that's gonna really bite them, I think, if they weren't capable of producing more than one podcast per account. There may be a good reason in terms of uh in terms of not wanting to spam things, you know. That that may be a good reason not wanting to sp to have lots of spam on their platform. But that's going to stop quite a lot of people who are spending you know relative money uh on that product being able to use them for a podcast host. Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.

Sam Sethi 17:26

I I think you you know they would do well to get somebody like you as an advisor in. The podcasting two oh features are all there. They're just hanging there waiting for them, as you said, transcripts, chapters, person tags. They've done nothing.

James Cridland 17:40

Yeah, the difficult job of of putting the podcasting 2.0 features into a podcast host is that all of a sudden you need to get all of this information. But they've got all of this information. That's what Riverside will have.

Sam Sethi 17:52

That's the weird thing. Yeah, it's just hanging there. You know, the alternative enclosure, audio and video sound bites for their clip.

James Cridland 17:58

I mean, they've got they've even got pictures of the people that were the guests. I mean you couldn't ask for anything more. So early days, but it's great to see a new hosting company uh in. If you want to find out more information, I may have said riverside.fm or potentially riverside.com, I can't remember. But anyway, the full address is riverside.com slash podcast-hosting.

Sam Sethi 18:23

Now DScript tried this a couple of years ago. They started off by allowing you to edit everything within D script and then upload it to the host directly from within DScript. But the upload process was so long-winded, it was quicker for me to download and upload by the time it uploaded into BuzzSpratt as an example. They do host your edited version, but it's a D script URL. I've told them for years and years and years this is no use because you know people want to have a branded URL. I wonder whether Riverside now getting into hosting in this way will trip DScript into doing something more in the coming months.

James Cridland 19:03

Yes, who knows? But I mean, you know, th th there's a a good thing to add that sort of feature in there. The I think the other thing, and I said it really as an aside, not that Kendall would be able to comment anyway, is I have heard Spotify tell me that they have an open API to post video. Surely, given the close relationship that Riverside has with Spotify and the fact that Riverside are making 4K video, not to be able to actually upload that into the Spotify platform is really weird. Really weird. So yeah, so early doors, but I'm sure it'll get better as we move forward.

Sam Sethi 19:47

Now, bus number two coming along

RSS.com launches free hosting

Sam Sethi 19:49

rss.com launches free hosting. What what's going on?

James Cridland 19:54

What what what is going on? So, firstly, I am an advisor for rss.com, so I can't be an advisor for Riverside. So let's just get that out. But yes, they have launched a new product which is called Free Local and Niche, or indeed Free Local and Niche. Uh, it's the free podcast hosting plans for specialized creators. I mean, to be honest, you could probably use it for everybody. But the idea is that it it's basically proper free hosting. Our sponsor, Buzzbrat, will give you free hosting to a point, but it's only a couple of episodes, and then you have to start taking it seriously. With this, you can publish unlimited episodes, for example. You can get on every podcast app, you can access all kinds of things from RSS.com. The interesting thing with this is, as I understand it, that rss.com does support some podcasting 2.0 uh features. And the one which is mandatory if you're going to take advantage of this free podcast hosting from rss.com is you have to put in a location. How exciting is that? So we'll actually get a bunch of shows with locations and very specifically talking about specific locations and places. So I think that that's quite that's quite exciting, really.

Sam Sethi 21:16

Is that why it's called local and show?

James Cridland 21:18

Indeed. Right. You guessed it. You guessed it. Yeah, so it's uh it's good. You can see the uh the uh the differences between that and the paid model at rss.com slash pricing. You don't get any access, for example, to paid ads, so you won't money from this, although you do get value for value up to a point. But uh yeah, so you get you get a fair amount of things. But transcripts or ads or that sort of thing is left to the paid users as it probably should be.

Sam Sethi 21:47

So there has to be a limit on what's available. I mean you said it BuzzSprout gives you a couple of episodes. That's your intro into Buzzsprout, but you know, if you get beyond semi-serious, you you you have to go and upgrade. Captivate doesn't allow free, for example. So RSS.com must be doing this as a you know bait and switch, right? Get you in and switch you over. So what that is is it six hours, two hours, one episode? I mean, there has to be some limit, otherwise no one's gonna switch over.

James Cridland 22:19

No, I mean there's no limit in terms of podcast hosting. So the pricing page is pretty clear. Unlimited episodes, unlimited audio, you get a proper full RSS feed. Uh you get analytics up to 90 days. So you know, you won't get analytics forever because those are expensive, but you basically get much of what you get with all of the paid plans. But if you want to earn money, if you want to stick your podcast onto YouTube properly, if you want to, you know, have an embeddable podcast player, if you want to do various things, uh that's an embed a version of the embeddable podcast player without any branding on it, if you want to do all of those sorts of things, and of course transcripts as well, then you do have to start paying. And the analytics is, you know, for longer than 90 days, up to 180 days if you're on the all-in-one podcasting and for podcast networks, you get it, I think forever, I'm gonna say. No, for a year. So yeah, so it's it's uh there are differences there, of course. I think the probably the uh the big one there is the programmatic ads, because uh you you just tick a box and you get ads in your podcast, you earn money from that. I've got my first payment of the very small show that I do called Radioland. So yeah, so that that bit works. But I think that's really uh one of the reasons why people will will you know sign up for that.

Sam Sethi 23:40

We've seen with Spotify that free drove market share. Do we expect or does RSS.com expect then their a major uplift given that they've gone free free?

James Cridland 23:52

I mean you would expect that that is one of the reasons why they're doing it, I'm sure. Yes.

Sam Sethi 23:57

Well, uh I I only ask is uh uh are we now having a race to the bottom? Is this is this where hosting is now? Is it a race to the bottom? Is it is it purely the Stephen Fry model? I don't know wine, but I know price. And so the cheapest price is the one I want. And is this what we're seeing? Are we really going after people who can't even want to pay a minimal price?

James Cridland 24:19

Well, at the end of the day, you get a better product than you do with Spotify, which is free. So the there's a there's a thing there. But I think, you know, at the end of the day, what we're seeing in lots of podcast hosting companies is that there are plenty of upsells there. There are upsells with Baspera, our sponsor, if you want to gain access to some of the magic AI stuff that they have, their co-host AI. There's upsells if you want the magic mastering, which we use to get rid of quite a lot of the ums and the errors. That is a pretty standard way of most podcast hosts working these these days. So I don't necessarily see the being a particular issue, given that we've got the biggest podcast hosting company, uh Spotify, which is you know still giving all of their stuff away for free, and there are plenty of others available out there. I think this is one of the better free hosting services, but I guess to an extent I would say that, wouldn't I? But I think certainly it's not necessarily a race to the bottom. I think that there've been free podcast hosting services for quite some time.

Interview: Russell Harrower, PodToo Cloud

Sam Sethi 25:27

Now the third bus coming along is in Australia, and this one is Pod 2. They've launched what I called last week Haas, which I still think is a better name, hosting as a service, but they want to call it infrastructure as a service. You caught up with Russell Harrower. What's Pod 2 up to?

James Cridland 25:45

Well, they've launched the Pod 2 Cloud, and it's a cloud platform built specifically for media, offering global storage and distribution. I chatted with him during a normal Australian working day to find out more.

Russell Harrower 26:01

My name's Russell Harrowwer, and I'm the CEO and founder of Pod 2. We do podcast hosting, and just this week we've launched Pod 2 Cloud, which is our infrastructure as a service product.

James Cridland 26:12

So infrastructure as a service, I think Sam last week called it hosting as a service, which was kind of nearly right. What is it in a nutshell? What would your elevator pitch be? Or since we're both in Australia, what would your lift pitch be?

Russell Harrower 26:25

Sure. So we know the struggles that hosting providers and media developers have with CDN costs, storage costs, and we believe that Pod 2 is in a unique position where we've got our costs pretty low, and we can help media developers access the storage CDNs with an easy one-click solution, which as someone who's used Google, you have to go and search for all these add-ons. Simple.

James Cridland 27:00

Yeah, and you try setting something up on Amazon AWS, and my goodness, it hurts your head. So you've you've you've fixed a lot of that. So you are ki kind of, I guess, sort of an equivalent of of Amazon S3, you know, the storage stuff plus a cloud network plus a CDN on top. Is that about right?

Russell Harrower 27:20

Or yeah, so uh at the core, as I've always said to my mentors, I said Pod2 is just a fancy storage bucket and CDM provider. You can s shove whatever you want on top of it and it will work. So we have developed our own S3 compatible storage engine to actually allow creators to just use the AWS S3 SDK out of the box. And one of the unique things about us, which I don't know if it's on the market anywhere else, but we also offer analytics. So if they use metadata that they can send when they upload a file, like episode ID, creator ID, etc., then they can actually use them in queries with our pod 2 SDK and actually get analytic data back, as in consumption data, which apps downloaded it, how many bots downloaded it, um, and and all that kind of stuff.

James Cridland 28:15

Very nice. Are you using some of the open data in terms of in terms of the OPORG stuff for that?

Russell Harrower 28:21

Yeah, we definitely use as much open source technology as possible, but then there's also data that we collect. We've been doing podcasting now since 2023 as pod two, and it allows us to collect a lot of user agents that a bit spammy. We have a database of of bad IP addresses, just like any company would. And we we always check and wash as much data as as we can. Of course, it's the difference between pod two and pod two cloud is we don't wash out the pod 2 cloud's data unless our clients ask us to. So that's an opt-in feature. Where if you're just a indie creator using pod two, then clearly we look after that side of it.

James Cridland 29:04

Cool. And so pod two cloud, I'm guessing that the advantage for people is that is the pricing uh I'm guessing it's much cheaper or something, or what what why why would you use pod two apart from it being simpler? Why would you use it for yeah?

Russell Harrower 29:23

Yeah, so for for us, we try to keep it not cheap, like we're not trying to be be like your two dollar store. We are trying to be a little bit cheaper than Google, at least 10%. And for people who are developers who are doing 500 terabytes of CDN data, then clearly we'll do a custom price for them because we want to look after them, they're doing a huge amount of data, and if we can support them on their journey, then of course we will. So if you are a media developer or a wanna be podcast hosting provider, then reach out because

James Cridland 30:02

And you say we, how many people are at uh pod two? I know very little about the company actually, and I'm just sort of wondering how many how many people you have working there.

Russell Harrower 30:11

Sure. So I have me, um, which is we, and we have four cats, so and a lovely partner. So we are looking at hiring in the in the New Year, but where we I I speak in we terms because it's just what you get trained immediately, you just gotta use it.

James Cridland 30:31

No, well, exactly, exactly. So but but what happens? I'm I'm assuming you have uh such things as buses in Perth, although they're nowhere near as cheap as they are in Brisbane. But what but but what happens if you if you walk under a bus tomorrow?

Russell Harrower 30:45

Okay, well we have safety measures in place for that. We have people in my network that I that had that can easily get access to all the all the servers and data and all that kind of stuff. Nothing's gonna happen to me. But you know, this this is the joys of being self-funded as well, because we we don't have VC capital money, and if I did have VC capital money, then clearly there would be a team of people.

James Cridland 31:11

It's one of the But you've got but you've got this pl the the plans there in case in case anything happens, which is always useful.

Russell Harrower 31:18

We've got everything written down, documented, very well documented, and and there's a a what to do just in case something does happen to me. And and I think every company needs it. Like we've just had in the industry Todd sadly passing away. And that was a wake-up call, I think, for everyone in this industry. If you own a hosting provider, or if you own anything that hosts other people's data, you need to be able to make sure that it continues when you're not here. And and I think that's that's the beautiful thing about PolyToCloud is at the moment when you have let's say you're an indie creator and you host on one of the let's just say pod two, and let's say pod two disappears and your RSS feed is broken, there hasn't really been a way to get your data back. By using Politia Cloud, if there's a hosting provider that uses our API, we can just automatically just redirect it to their account. So we don't actually have to rely on an active RSS feed to get your content back. Which I don't think AWS does. So do you have any customers as yet? We've got our foundation partner, which is Sam from TwoFans. He's a great guy. Um go that far. He's been talking about hosting him and I was I was like, look, if if I'm happy to help you if you want to. And and I didn't fight the first time he he asked me, but I was like, okay, well, I just finished an accelerator program here in Perth called the Plus Any Accelerator Program. And during that, it was like, okay, well, what outside of your business can you actually do? And I was like, well, we do storage and CDMs really well. And I was like, okay, we'll offer that as a service to other people. So that's that's kind of a micro pivot. To me, it's just doing what we do really well. I'm glad that Sam is entering hosting. We've got Fountain FM who's entering who's who has started their hosting journey. So I think a lot of the whole casting 2.0 players I see in the future that will have a lot more hosting providers.

James Cridland 33:25

Yeah, no, I think so. I think so as well. And Sam has been talking about dropping an awful lot of hints about the fact that he will have better statistics than pretty well anybody else in terms of in terms of audio downloads and audio plays. Is he leveraging your technology for that, or has he built something clever on top of your tools?

Russell Harrower 33:47

So he's definitely leveraging our technology, but the technology is something that that is Pod2's done since mid-2024. We tested it and made sure it will work. And that's the the joys of of basically being a developer and and understanding how the internet works and the other packets get sent everywhere. And if you know, it's it's just a bit of fun. And when I found out, oh look, I can do this, I thought, well, this is basically what Spotify offers, but now we can do it for every single player.

James Cridland 34:22

Really interesting to uh see. I think I have lost count of the amount of times that people have recently been saying Amazon AWS is just way too overcomplicated for you know simple things that people want to end up doing, host media, host a website, all of that kind of uh stuff. So yeah, so there's definitely a market need here. So I wish you all the best. Russell, it's been it's been great to have a chat.

Russell Harrower 34:48

Thank you very much, James.

Sam Sethi 34:49

Okay, there's Russell Harrowett. Yes, pod two cloud. Now, Russell and I probably speak every day, actually, James, is it's quite weird, really. We started speaking about two years ago, and every day on my dog walk, because it works out about eight o'clock in the morning, nine o'clock in the morning, I have a good old chat with him. And we we have collaborated in the past on things like the pod fund, which sadly didn't go anywhere, premium RSS, which we hope will go somewhere, and we've now started collaborating on this service. I had a need, an itch, a scratch. I was frustrated with the speed or lack of speed of adoption of podcasting 2.0 features and functions that I needed for true fans. And Russell and I spoke, and the result I think is much of what we're seeing today from Russell. Again, like Dan Meisner, I've banged the drum about something called listen time percent completed rather than downloads, which I think, as Dan Meisner nicely says, a download is not a play. So, yes, in TrueFans, we implemented those in the app about two, three years ago using activity streams. So, yes, Russell's worked really hard on all of this, and you know, what I do think is really cool about what Russell's done is he's created all the APIs, the the CDN, the data storage, the hosting infrastructure, and created a set of APIs that apps like TrueFans can then extract the data, and then that data can be manipulated by us into a UI and a UX experience, which is what we've done. No, it's a great little feature and function. But the key part is it's all about streaming data, it's not about downloading the file and then playing it back, and I think that's going to be the USP. So the data is streamed in six-second packets, it's not using HLS, but it's using a form of HLS, it's using the same methodology that HLS uses. And for video it will be HLS, but for audio it's not. But what that allows us to do is to know exactly across all the apps how long you've listened to the episode, and then we can display back in the creator's dashboard the amount of storage streamed, we can show you the cost of that, so you can work out how much that episode actually costs you based on the number of plays, based on the number of apps that have actually used it. And yeah, so we can give you a total listen time, and later this week we'll break that into a listen time metric per app and a number of plays per app as well.

James Cridland 37:33

So you say number of plays, I mean it's number of downloads, isn't it, really?

Sam Sethi 37:36

Well, we've had yeah, okay, you you you are going to stay pedantic on that one. I I would say it's the minute you press play. So it's not a passive download, though, so it's not like the other hosts who we can go and look at the download numbers, and I can tell you that half those downloads might not be played by those hosts who delivered that that episode. But we know every one of those users has actually physically actively clicked play.

James Cridland 38:04

Apple Podcasts or and Spotify and all of those services?

Sam Sethi 38:08

Exactly, yeah, exactly, with those as well.

James Cridland 38:10

So how how do you how do you do that? Because I mean it's it's a it's a download of a of a file.

Sam Sethi 38:17

It's a six-second packet that's been initiated. Yes, it's a download.

James Cridland 38:22

No, not not if it's not not if it's downloading to my phone overnight, it's not.

Sam Sethi 38:26

But we don't download it to your phone overnight.

James Cridland 38:28

But Apple Podcasts downloads shows to my phone overnight. So so how are you gonna know when I press play for a downloaded show like that?

Sam Sethi 38:38

Because w wh why is Apple downloading it to your phone overnight? Because I've asked it to.

James Cridland 38:49

Okay. You you you um when you follow a show, it downloads the latest three episodes for you and downloads every new episode when it when it sees that coming out and when it knows that it is in a good state to download that. So if it's connected onto power, if it's connected onto Wi-Fi, that's when it w will download the audio files for you.

Sam Sethi 39:11

Yes, so it's gonna request of us the latest three episodes, is what you're saying.

James Cridland 39:16

Yeah, so it'll request the full the full audio, won't it?

Sam Sethi 39:21

I'm not sure. I I need to come back to you on that one. I I genuinely don't know. The way that we've designed it is that we basically do not want to download. That's not what we want to do. I'll come back to you on that genuinely. I don't know.

James Cridland 39:34

Yeah, cuz the because the thing is, you you so there's nothing new necessarily in what you're talking about here. Omni Studio launched something back in 2018, which they did two things. They used they used partial content, so I think it's the 206 code. Yeah. They used that, but they also managed to make their podcast audio servers capped at 128 kilobits a second, which I thought was a really clever idea. So uh so if you were to press the play button on a podcast show, then regardless of how fast that person's internet was, it would never go faster than the actual audio was. So you could you you could see every second.

Sam Sethi 40:20

Which is what we're doing.

James Cridland 40:22

Now now obviously, obviously, you don't know uh if if somebody is downloading a show, well it'll it'll just take a long time. Um but you don't know if somebody is downloading a show on Apple Podcasts or on or on Spotify where you can do that, or on Pocket Casts, or on Overcast, you don't you you you don't get play information from that, or rather you do, but it'll just look as if it as if it was played in the middle of the night and it'll go all the way through. Um but what you will but what you will see is you will see the play information of shows which are being in averted commas streams, which is the phrase that people use, even though it's not it's not actually streaming. And actually from that you should be able to, you know, I mean it's relatively easy to go, okay, that was a download or that was a streamed play if you're making sure that you can't download faster than you know X, you know, X percent or whatever, because then you can actually see people sticking with it and and and you know, and and and actually playing that and you can see where people dropped off. So you you know, I'm I'm I'm always I'm sort of slightly nervous about anything that that says we've come up with this great idea, but we're not going to document it. We we've got no documentation here.

Sam Sethi 41:40

Well, we we are. I mean, I mean, look, let's let's be clear. I mean, we we we're basically trying to change the way that the industry works, and it I'm not saying what we've done is yeah you uniquely new, but I think what we've found is a method, and as you said, Omni Studio did it before, and you told me about that in the past. I mean, I think when you look at HLS, the way HLS works basically takes a streaming packet from what's the server, and then when the person says, Okay, I've stopped streaming, you get that message back to the server, which is what we're fundamentally doing as well. So I need to talk. Russell and I will probably have a long chat about this straight after this show.

James Cridland 42:26

But sorry.

Sam Sethi 42:27

No, but but but at the moment, the data that we are seeing as an example is we are we are seeing the number of plays that we believe, and we're seeing the number of apps that have requested it. We know the amount of data that we've sent to those apps. Apple may be the the outlier that we have to work out how we can do it. I don't know.

James Cridland 42:48

Well, uh yeah, I mean, any any automated download will will be something that you need to work on. But I think uh being able to, if you can spot the automated download versus the user-initiated play or the user-initiated download, which I think is the phrase, if you can spot the differences in between those two on any platform, because you know, AntennaPod will do that, Pocket Cast will do that, Podcast Addict will do that, so on and so forth. But but you should be able to spot which differences are. So you could actually give your user this is how this is the percentage of your of your listeners who are automatically downloading your show. This is the percentage of your listeners who are not. That's actually a really useful thing because you can get from that the subscription numbers, which you normal normally can't get a full uh a full number from you know, people like Overcast, which is a bad example because you can, or people like you know, Pocket Cast, you can't, for example. So that would be actually quite a quite a handy thing. But more data is always a good thing, of course. Dan Meisner has a lot of data in terms of actual playstats from the individual apps from Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and uh others. And I believe that we have Dan on this very show at some point uh in the next oh there you go. Next one.

Sam Sethi 44:11

He is a very busy man, and then very funnily he said to me, I'll I'll come on and we'll do the interview on the Twitter for the week. Great, okay, no problem. And then he was waiting on a call this Tuesday. I said, Dan, you're a week early, mate. He said, Oh, yes, yes, I am. Yes, sorry.

James Cridland 44:27

Yes, well, he will be he'll be doing that with his radio voice. Yes.

Sam Sethi 44:32

Uh from sunny Canada. Is that where he is? Sunny Canada?

James Cridland 44:35

No, uh he's in uh oh yes, Sunny Canada in Vancouver. Yes, I was just thinking, Sunny Canada, there's no such thing.

Sam Sethi 44:43

An expression that's never been used before.

James Cridland 44:45

Of course it has because it gets blisteringly hot in the summer. My goodness, Montreal in the summer is quite a thing, and Montreal in the winter is quite a thing, and there's about uh there's about two weeks where it's actually nice to live there. Anyway, let's move on.

Sam Sethi 45:01

Now, James, okay, apart from apart from thanks for giving me a load of problems. Sorry. No, it's fine. And look, you know, this is this is the learning curve.

Two podcast hosts to avoid

Sam Sethi 45:12

But one podcast host that you've talked about in Pod News Daily is called Soundwise. And um, there's a slight recommendation of do not use them. Go on, what have they done?

James Cridland 45:24

Yes, don't use Soundwise. If you're thinking about hosting your podcast with Soundwise, that would be a foolish thing. Also, by the way, Podcast AI. Don't host your podcast with Podcast AI. That's an official recommendation from me. I should point out that's just my own opinion. And I was very careful in saying uh that it was an opinion. Uh, but yes, the reason why you shouldn't host with those two podcast hosts is that they are Hotel California in disguise. You can check in anytime you like, but you can never leave. There's no redirects out of there. So if you get yourself a podcast on there and then you decide that actually Soundwise is rubbish or podcast AI is rubbish and you wish to move to a good podcast host, could I recommend Buzzsprout? Then that's uh absolutely fine, but you won't be able to take any of your audience with you. So that is a bad thing. So both Soundwise and Podcast AI get the finger wiggle of don't do that. Can we have the British Tut? Yes. Yes, that's what you get. Uh yes, very bad. Whereas if you sign up with our sponsor, BuzzSprout, for example, then there is a beautiful help page, as there is for everything that Buzzprout does. A beautiful help page all about how to do redirects and stuff. And it couldn't it couldn't be easier and simpler to do that. Just go to the go to the help, type in redirect, and it gets you all kinds of information about uh how you can do that. And I can confirm that it works beautifully.

Sam Sethi 46:55

Excellent. There we go. Uh-oh. Well, no, I had to move one show, one of our shows, and and obviously test with it every hosting platform out there to see the redirect does or doesn't work. It worked beautifully.

Apple's new rankers

Sam Sethi 47:10

Now, Apple, it's the end of the year, clearly. They've been releasing a set of rankings for the most popular shows in each country. Anything that we should be aware of.

James Cridland 47:20

Yes, you know what's going to happen soon. Spotify wrapped, that's what's going to happen soon, and everybody will be very excited by that. But this is Apple uh not releasing any of that nonsense, but instead releasing their global rankings for shows in each country. Now, I worked out, I compared Triton's ranker data with Apple's top shows rankers, and I think that Apple's top shows are total plays, which would kind of make sense, wouldn't they? Rather than total audience or time spent or anything like that. Now, you will have seen all of the coverage has been Joe Rogan is number one, and Joe Rogan has beaten the daily, and that is all that anybody has printed. It turns out that there are 70 different countries, and I worked out a way of scraping them from the Apple Podcast's website and publishing them. So I've got a full list that you can go and see on the Pod News website. Joe Rogan also appears in the top tens for Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa, by the way. So there's a thing. And Goal Hanger, though, I think is this story really. They have done tremendously well. So in the UK, the rest is politics, is number one. There are four goal hanger shows in the top ten, two more in the new show ranker, including the rest is classified at number one. And if you look in total across all 70 countries, then goal hanger shows appear 19 times in the full lists. So they have done tremendously well. Good hang with Amy Polar is the most cited show. Although I would point out that some of the charts are shared between countries, so you won't necessarily get all of that. But uh, yeah, some really fascinating data in there. It's well worth a dig into understanding really popular shows in each country and what those shows are all about and everything else.

Sam Sethi 49:13

Now, one thing that stood out to me is they are comparing basically those top shows by measuring total plays. Yeah. So this is clearly Apple's first party data that they have locally, rather than by listeners or time spent. But what is a play on Apple, James? Is it click stop, and that's a play?

James Cridland 49:31

I have a feeling that yes, a play is somebody pressing the button to play a show. I think it's one play per episode, is the way that they do it, because otherwise it's really easy to game. So it's one play per person per episode. So I believe that that's how they end up doing it. But I think plays make sense in terms of I mean, you know, the daily is only 15 minutes long, Joe Rogan is two and a half hours long. I if this is a list of top shows, it's not the longest show, it's not the show that can go on for the longest amount of time. So I think from that point of view, probably plays is the right move. You could do audience instead, which would be easy enough for Apple to work out, but I think plays is probably a little bit uh a little bit better. But you know, what w what do you think they should be measuring there?

Sam Sethi 50:24

Well, no, I mean look, I I think in the way that you just described, if they were going to measure it by the time spent, you're right. That's it's not about the best show that's listened to longest, it's the show that's played the most. I think the play should have some sort of metric, so because Apple, like Spotify, have an auto-trip over into the next show, and so some of those plays will be spurious numbers. And yeah, uh again, with listeners, again, you don't have to log in, do you? I I'm not 100% sure with Apple these days.

James Cridland 50:56

Well, I I you don't have to log in, but they aren't counted. Right. So, yeah, so the way that we, you know, certainly digging into the Apple stats as I did, you know, quite some time ago. Apple, I mean, for a start, they're responsible for about 40% of all podcast downloads on average. So they're they're big, right? They are pretty large in terms of that. A play is literally a tap of the play button. Now, there was a time when it was any tap of the play button, including pausing and unpausing an episode. Um stop slows and if you were yeah, but particularly if you were driving, then it pauses every time it tells you to turn left in 200 yards or 200 meters, depending on where you live. And so, of course, that would have counted as well. I I I would I would hope stroke imagined that they have fixed it. Um but but yeah, but you will see. I mean, so for example, the Pod News Daily podcast, for example, we actually see quite a lot of plays in comparison to audience. So there's a big uh there's a big article on the Pod News website all about how podcast stats work, and there's a screenshot of one of our of one of our shows with 32 listeners but 232 plays. How does that work? And that was something to do with plays being, you know, any tap of the play button. I think they're a little bit cleverer than that now. But even so, uh I was able to pretty well crosstab uh the uh the chart information that you could see in Apple with the rankers in the Triton, you know, ranker where you could sort by total downloads. So you could see that they were in the same order. Of course, Triton doesn't include everybody, and so it's not gonna be perfect, but i you could see that they were in the right kind of order if you just looked at at you know a download stroke play.

Sam Sethi 52:55

Indicatively, the the type of rankings will be correct. I mean, yeah, you might have one that should have been at number five, but that was number seven, but you're not gonna get some strange anomaly. You know, Pod News Weekly Review isn't suddenly gonna appear number one in America by by chance.

James Cridland 53:11

What are you saying?

Sam Sethi 53:13

Well, massive in India, but not not quite yet there in America. Yes, indeed. Got a lot of cousins in India. Yes, indeed.

James Cridland 53:22

Now, let's take

Podnews

James Cridland 53:23

a break.

Announcer 53:25

Hey, you with the ears. If you are enjoying this show, you should also be enjoying the Pod News Daily Podcast. It's five minutes long every day with your daily update for podcasting and on demand. It's like the email newsletter, but ideal for you if you can't be bothered reading that or you can't read at all. No judgment. I'm just an AI voice and I'm thick as a plank. Artificial intelligence, don't make me laugh. Anyway, you can find the Pod News Daily Podcast at podnews.net slash listen. Now back to

Podcasting's woeful diversity

Announcer 53:55

these two guys. The Pod News Weekly Review with BuzzSt. With BuzzSprout. Start podcasting, keep podcasting.

Sam Sethi 54:04

There is a report out that says there's a lack of diversity in podcasting. Now, I think that's the most bleeding, obvious thing that's been said. But this report has gone a little bit deeper. What's it said?

James Cridland 54:16

Yeah. I mean, they used the word woeful in here at one point. Oh, nice use of the word, yes. And I mean, it is a it's quite an emotional report, and potentially it shouldn't necessarily be, but you can have a look at the numbers, and the numbers don't lie. It's really, it is not a good story in terms of diversity, all forms of diversity. So if you're looking at male versus female, for example, if you look at they looked at the not just the top 100 podcasts, but they also looked at uh nearly 600 different shows, and they found that basically a third of all podcast hosts were female, 33.2%. So men outnumbering women two to one. That means that podcasting is worse in terms of gender diversity than movies, than TV shows, than music artists. So podcasts does particularly bad there. It gets even worse when you start looking into individual genres. So if you're a business and tech show like this is, then males 92% are boys, 7.7% are girls. It's not a great story all the way down. In fact, the only category where women outnumber the men, they only do just 53 to 47%, and that is true crime, which is 90% white, and also uh obviously true crime, uh, most of those stories are about men doing dreadful things to women. So it's it's not great, and it goes on and on and on. Now, what I would like to see out of all of this is I would like to see a bit of understanding of what the industry is like as well. So in the UK, for example, Ofcom, which is the media regulator, Ofcom does a very good job, but you know, they have the regulatory stick behind them saying every year, Mr. Broadcaster, you have to fill in this form, which tells us how diverse your employees are, and where they are on your, you know, on your list, you know, how many people of colour do you have in your boardroom, you know, how many LGBTQ people do you have, etc. etc. Just so that Ofcom know in terms of the industry how diverse the industry is. And we don't have any data, zero data in terms of how diverse the podcast industry is. And that is important for events, it's important for news coverage, it's important for all kinds of things. But at the moment, I can't turn around and say the pod news skews more male than female in terms of the industry because I don't know what the industry is. And so right now it's a it's a really difficult thing, but it is an eye-opening report. And you go through all of this, it gets even worse, by the way, if you're on video. You're more likely to be male if you do a video a video podcast for pretty obvious reasons. And so all the way through this, it's it's not a great story. Sam, what do you think of it all? Well, thank God you've got me, eh, James. You know. Balances it up, you know. Yes, there we are. There we are. Yes. I've got I've got a mid-brown posh man. Brilliant. That's what we mean.

Sam Sethi 57:48

I think I think there is a lack of diversity, but look, I I have mixed feelings on this one. One is is there a real barrier to entry? As in monetary barrier, maybe for some people, but is there a real barrier to entry to get a microphone and to get online? We talked about rss.com and Spotify doing free hosting. I do think there is an element, you know, I my wife used to run MSN UK and we used to joke about how men would go for jobs when they're underqualified and women would wait till they're overqualified. Why that is, I have no idea. You know, is it testosterone? Does that lead us to danger? Do we think we know more than we we actually know, but we're not worried about, you know, getting behind a mic and saying it? I don't know. I can't see that there's any real barrier other than you know, people feel they don't want to get on mic and be publicly judged by others.

James Cridland 58:47

I I think that's definitely some of it. I I I would point to radio, and radio is also a very male, a very male industry, and I think quite a lot of it is playing around with tech, playing around with techie things, which podcasting still is, is something that does lead to men doing it more than women, and I think that there is that, and I think easy, straightforward uh tools like Buzzsprout, our sponsor, but also like Riverside and others, that make it easier for everyone to be involved is important. So I think that that's sort of one side of it, and I do think it it interesting that this report compares podcasting to movies, TV, or music, but doesn't compare it to radio. My my suspicion is that radio is actually even worse in inverted commas than podcasting is in terms of this. There are so many middle aged white men on radio that, you know, ten years ago there had to be a real big push in the UK, fifteen years ago, there's a real big push in the UK to actually get more women on the air. So, given that 50% of radio listeners are women, and by the way, about 50% of podcast listeners are women as well. So, you know, so I do think that there's something there in terms of that. But and I also think you're absolutely right, events have the same issue that you get women who don't put their hand up and men who say, Oh, yeah, I'll go on stage and I'll talk. And and I think that, you know, that's something that event organizers have realized and are very careful to uh push. Every event that I have organized that has gone ahead as I organized it has had a good amount of women, although not 50%, because the industry isn't 50% yet. But when when the industry, you know, when if you can at least mirror where the industry is, I think that's a that's a better start. But right now, gosh, it's it's it really doesn't look good.

Sam Sethi 1:00:58

So two things you've said there, I just want to come back on. First one you talked about a report that Ofcom might produce. Here's a stat that you might not know. On the London Stock Exchange, there is not one single person of colour that is a CEO. Not one. Wow, there you go. And yet America has a plethora of them, you know, from Microsoft to IBM to Adobe. I mean, the list YouTube, right? So strangely, all the smart people of colour go to America and not one smart person of colour is in the UK. Or is there something else that's causing that issue? Um, I won't go there, right? Yeah, yeah. And I think reporting it might be useful, but you know, my wife's on numerous boards, and often it's it's a token, it is tokenization of it, you know. Um and the boys with the toys still talk about their cars and going golfing, and they talk about, you know, whatever what toy they've got. So I think you know, it might be a useful thing to identify the problem, but I don't know if it'll fix the problem because it hasn't in other areas. Uh, the other thing I'd I wanted to say was I sent both my girls to all girls' schools for the very reason that you described about putting your hand up. I realize that in a mixed classroom, boys will put their hand up and girls will retreat back in. Not all, clearly, but but in an all-girl classroom, that doesn't happen. Equally, things like makeup and worrying about what you look like. You know, we were talking about video. Again, the girls, my daughters were less worried about what they look like each day because after the initial going to school and the after initial 13, 14, 15 of messing about with makeup, they just got bored of it all and then they got back to schooling. And I think, again, with podcasting, I think you know, we we spotlight a lot of women into this, you know, they they get nasty comments in the video streams that you know. I mean, Jessica Tarloff, who's an amazing reporter from Fox, she's a Democrat who's doing one show with Scott Galloway. And she says, you know, the comments that she gets, you know, from sexualization to what do you look like today, nothing to do with what she said. It's all so I don't know if women want to put themselves in the firing line, whereas men I think maybe have a little bit more whatever, don't get that sort of commentary and also a little bit more thick skinned. I don't know the answers to these questions, by the way, but it is worth reading that report, I think.

James Cridland 1:03:32

Yeah, I think it's definitely worth reading that report and also worth reading the Ofcom report, if only because my dog is furious about it, um, but only only because they do a really good job in podcasting. They do a really good job in benchmarking the UK as a whole, and then actually showing you, you know, where where individuals in the media industry land, and they've very brightly separated senior managers with the whole UK employees. So you can see, for example, that uh 16% of the UK is uh what they call minority ethnic, but only 11% of senior managers in the media. Having said that, 26% have joiners. So you can see that there is something going on there, although 23% have leavers. So maybe they don't feel particularly uh welcome. And so on it goes. There's some really useful information in terms of how it how it all works, and from a point of view of just sort of, you know, seeing where the benchmark is and is the media industry hitting the benchmark, I I would love to see that in podcasting as well. And I was on this week, I was on the media roundtable podcast with uh Oxford Road, and they too are very much talking about that as well. And you know, I I think it's it's just something that it would be great, wouldn't it, if the maybe the IAB could do, maybe Sounds Profitable could do, to actually get some kind of information here about how good the industry is itself going before we then turn around and have a look at the shows that are there. The other sort of side on this, I would say, is this was looking at the top 100 shows and the top 500 shows with data from uh Spotify. It could be that some of the shows that that, if I can use the phrase minority ethnic people are listening to are uh minority shows and that wouldn't appear on that top 600. That could be part of the reason for some of this data as well. But at the end of the day, I I don't think anybody really knows why. And it would be lovely to at least get more data uh as to why. This is a fantastic start, and it would be great to see maybe if they did this data again next year, whether or not we actually saw any change. Now my dog's decided to get in on the act.

Sam Sethi 1:06:04

The issue I think is with a certain president, is that DEI took a backseat, and again, going back to corporate UK, because I know from my partner wife's conversations, has become a back seat conversation that used to be a you know a requirement on the forefront in every boardroom, is now become and the last item is have we got enough people of colour? And I suspect that as much as you and I, James, might be you know concerned about this, I'm not sure that a lot of people are gonna be concerned.

James Cridland 1:06:39

Yeah, and I don't think necessarily that it's entirely right to point at just a politician in terms of this. I think I think that you know everybody that runs a business has this to have a look at. And yeah, I think it's an important thing that we should all take a peek at.

Audio is still king

Sam Sethi 1:06:57

Now, James, I'm gonna give you your favorite line, the one video kill the podcasting style. No, that's not true. There's a report out that audio is still king, James. Why is audio still king?

James Cridland 1:07:09

Well, audio is still the number one way to consume podcasts. If you look at um time, if you look at total consumption, then in spite of all of the chatter about video, that's one of the findings from a Cumulus Media and Signal Hill Insights podcast download report that was published earlier on in the week. But some really interesting data in there. I would say, firstly, this is put together not by a company that makes video podcasts, it's put together by a research company and a radio broadcaster. So just bear that in mind. But some really helpful data in terms of, for example, over half of podcast consumers on YouTube also listen to the same podcasts on another platform. So I and I found myself doing this just this this uh morning. I was watching a little bit of the rest is entertainment, which is a podcast that I enjoy from the UK from Goalhanger, and I was watching that on YouTube and then continued to listen to the rest of it in the car on Apple Podcasts. So I think, you know, that that will have ticked a box in terms of YouTube for numbers, but actually the majority of my consumption was in audio form. The other thing that they came up with, only 8% just watch podcasts, and that number hasn't changed since 2022, which is fascinating. I mean it's bounced around a little bit, but it's not actually increased, is probably the phrase that I should be using there. So that I think tells a lie to the fact that podcasting is all going video, because it really isn't. Video is adding a new way for people to find podcasts, but at the end of the day, it seems that at least audio is the beneficiary, and that's probably a good thing. Good. So can we put video to bed now? Can we? I'm sure that that will not be happening.

Sam Sethi 1:09:00

Okay. Now, zooming over to your part of the world, James, let's have a look around

Australia's Audio ID

Sam Sethi 1:09:05

the world. What's going on with Australia? Something called an audio ID. Do not understand this, so over to you, James.

James Cridland 1:09:12

Yes, well, I will explain it to you and you'll be horrified. So there are four big radio companies over here. There's Nova, there's SCA, there's ARN, and there's Nine Radio. So those four big radio companies all have their own apps. They all have live streaming radio stations, and they all have obviously podcasts on those apps as well. And all four of those apps are all you you register, you you sign up to use them. Now, one of the problems is that I might listen to Triple M, but I might also listen to Gold. Triple M is owned by SCA, Gold is owned by ARN. And wouldn't it be useful if I, as the broadcaster, knew, oh, this is somebody that has already heard this ad once on Triple M, but now they're listening to Gold and we don't want to play them the ad again. So some way of identifying me to all of the radio broadcasters. That's what they've launched. It's called CRA Audio ID. I think it's a hash of the email address. I don't think it's anything more complicated than that. But what it essentially means is that if you book ads with Google's DSP and you ask, please, could I have this ad to go out four times for every listener, please, and no more, then now it'll work because those listeners are given the same ID uh no matter who they're listening to, whether it's uh a a show on SCA or a show on uh ARN. So Big Big Brother is truly well and truly here and making sure uh making sure in a privacy in a privacy way, I suspect that they would say, but at least making sure that uh that that uh they can cross-tab my listening in between all of the different uh r radio output.

Sam Sethi 1:10:59

I guess you'll get two IDs if you go in your car and you're in your house, because that's two devices.

James Cridland 1:11:03

That won't be No, you won't. That that's the whole point. You'll get one ID because you've had to you've had to sign in. Oh so it's it's all to do with the sign in and all to do with the email. Now, I I don't know enough about the standard to know whether or not I, as Nine Radio, for example, could work out from your ID who you are. I'm presuming that you they must be able to because they've produced the ID in the first place. They've produced the hash in the first place. But I don't know whether the hash allows you to go back again, if you see what I mean, if if it's a two-way hash or a one-way hash. And that may be the maybe the thing. I don't know.

Sam Sethi 1:11:43

Didn't Dave Jones uh try and promote something very similar to this called UUID, universal unique IDs for podcasting?

James Cridland 1:11:52

He did, but it was almost the opposite in that it was for any specific episode. So the UUID was different for every podcast and every episode. So it would essentially just uh make sure that it was the same, you know, if you pressed the play button three times or you downloaded a show twice, it would only ever count as one person because you could see that UUID. So I think my understanding of that was that yeah, you couldn't use that to track users. In this particular case, I I think you probably can, but I'm not quite sure. I mean, presumably there's all kinds of things when you log into one of these services and it tells you what's uh what's uh going on, but I don't use any of them, so I wouldn't I wouldn't know, but I'm I mean, uh as you can possibly tell, I'm um not the biggest fan of this as a plan.

Le Monde goes with Acast

Sam Sethi 1:12:46

Now, zipping over to uh France, uh Le Monde has done something. What have they done?

James Cridland 1:12:51

Yes, they've chosen ACAST for podcast monetization. They have uh one big show and two very small ones. The big show is Le du Monde, the hour of Le Monde, which is 12.5 million listens since the start of the year. Le Monde, of course, being the big newspaper, kind of the equivalent of the Times, I guess, in France, certainly in terms of Gravitas. So, yes, there's a thing. Many congratulations, ACAST, who, as we speak, are trading on the Nasdaq for the first time in Stockholm. So, congratulations to them for doing that.

Sam Sethi 1:13:25

Well, before you move on, I was gonna say I'm I'm going to the ACAST party soon, and everyone's gonna be very, very, very happy there because we're all very rich now.

James Cridland 1:13:34

Yes, oh yes, the ACAST Party will be the place to be. You're coming over? No. I'm not coming over. I may, I mean, I'll come over if they pay. No, I won't. I I may have emailed somebody at uh at ACAST and said, many congratulations on on this. P.S. Here is our here is our advertising rate card if you wish to support us. I'm not sure that's gonna go anywhere, but still talking about companies uh growing larger. Shall I move on or not? Yes. Talking about companies moving, talking about companies getting larger. Uh platform media has made three strategic senior hires. Of course, they are part of the mighty Pod X Empire. They now have a new head of production, head of legal, and head of people. So congratulations to them. And Sabrina Tavernisi is leaving the daily after a three-year stint as co-host. She's going to move to the national desk at the newspaper for a while. My wife used to fall asleep to the daily, and the last words that I would hear from her every single night was either it's Michael Barbaro, or it's it's Sabrina Tavernese. So I won't be having any of that anymore now. She fall asleep to another podcaster instead. Right. Uh, but

Awards and Events

James Cridland 1:14:50

there we are.

Announcer 1:14:51

Podcast events on the Pod News Weekly Review.

James Cridland 1:14:55

Let's move on to awards and events. And uh, congratulations in Ireland. The All Ireland Podcast Awards were announced. Nikki Byrne won the Spotlight Awards, the Irish Independent running away with two awards. There weren't that many awards to be given away in that particular one, but it's great to see an awards uh ceremony going on in Ireland, down to Outer Roa or New Zealand, and the big New Zealand Podcast Awards has just happened there as well. Podcast of the Year, sponsored by ACAST, was Kelly Talton's Final Treasure Hunt, which is a show from RNZ. We heard from RNZ a couple of weeks ago, and it's a show all about the untimely death of Kelly Talton and a team made up of friends, family, and marine enthusiasts to complete one of his final expeditions. You can go and listen to that, and all of the other winners for both the New Zealand Podcast Awards and the All Ireland Podcast Awards on the Pod News newsletter. Ivooks announced its finalists for the 2025 awards. VAT event is on December the 3rd, and SF Sketchfest, which is a comedy festival in January and is easy for me to say, has announced some of the live podcasts that will be taking part in that event, including Stuff You Should Know. And On Airfest in Brooklyn has announced the first wave of their headline talent and programming for that big flagship festival, which is apparently incredibly crowded but well worth going to. So that's in Brooklyn in late February, and uh much of podcasting will be taking place in January at Podfest in Orlando. If you're a fan of uh Orlando, then firstly, why? And secondly, uh, you should be going to Podfest. That's where the the Podcasting Hall of Fame is going to be announced and various other things as well. So, which is uh always worth going

The Tech Stuff

James Cridland 1:16:51

to.

Announcer 1:16:51

The tech stuff on the Pod News Weekly Review.

James Cridland 1:16:55

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

Sam Sethi 1:17:01

Well, this week is going to be James Talks Technology, actually, when you find out what's happening. Here we go. Yeah, oh yeah, oh yes. But let's start off with uh D Script. They've announced that you can now create and save your own templates in DScript, and the service also supports more language materials for translation and dubbing. So, you know, the platform is still growing. One thing I did note, you know, we we announced a couple of weeks back that Vimeo had been bought by Bending Spoons. Their new CEO, Phil Moyer, did an event on stage. And there's an interesting demo you can look up from that. They've come up with a tool called Agenic Video. And when I first looked at that, I thought, oh, is this just a gimmick? But allegedly you can now interrogate the video using AI to find elements within the video very quickly. So again, it's uh searching through video but using AI. Again, it you know, given the amount of video that's been produced, it might be an interesting way to find the tidbits of information you want without having to go through a transcript or having to do it through a manual method of just watching. Well, very nice. Very nice. Now, uh Nathan Gathright has come up with an idea, James, that I think you've also chimed in on uh as an alternative to the timed link that Apple came up with. So the idea that Apple had was that in the transcript, if it found a book reference or an event reference, it would highlight that and link to an Apple-related site. And Nathan has come up with a suggestion of how we might do that with podcasting2.0. Tell me more, because you got involved in the thread.

James Cridland 1:18:43

And I think it's actually the other way around. So when you're uh listening to a podcast, then you can link out to various places using using Apple's timed links, assuming, of course, that uh Apple allow you to link out to that particular place. In this particular case, what Nathan Gathright was wondering is for any web page in the world, can we say, oh, and if you're interested in listening to a podcast about this, then here's where to get the podcast. So can we actually automatically show using some hidden data in that web page where the podcast version of this web page is? So for example, if you were to link to the Pod News Weekly Reviews page for last week, is there anything programmatically on that webpage from Buzzbrow which actually tells a podcast app, ah, this is a podcast episode, you can get it here so that it can then automatically grab that and uh show you a player. I think that's what he is looking for. He was looking for some complicated bit of JSON and everything else, and I've put him into in touch with schema, which is a pretty standard way of adding additional information that uh Google uses and that various other people are using. Spotify used to use this in their podcast pages, they don't anymore. I think iHeart still do. Pod News certainly does, it's all over the Pod News website, and it's called JSON LD, which is very tedious and dull. But potentially that gives the information that a podcast app would need to basically go, oh, I understand that this is a podcast, a podcast episode, I will go and get that. In this particular case, the information that I'm putting in is significantly more. But uh yeah, so I'm not quite sure where that's gonna go, but I think you know, hopefully that will give the alternative for you to basically understand, okay, this webpage has a podcast attached to it, and now I know how to get how to get hold of that. Good.

Sam Sethi 1:20:48

Okay, we'll see if that goes anywhere. Now, as I said, this is James Cridlin's tech corner. Clearly, you're not flying anywhere. So let's start off with you put out a little bit of code called basically a way to add captions to audio players using the VTT format. What did you do?

James Cridland 1:21:05

Yeah, so there is if you have a VTT transcript on for your uh podcast episode, it'd be quite nice, wouldn't it, if that actually showed up as you press the play button. I'm surprised how few podcast hosting companies have done that yet. But on my own personal blog, I have done that, and I've published the code in terms of how I've done that. Of course, Safari does it slightly differently to everybody else. But this is the reason why I've been talking about using VCT for transcripts, because they're much more helpful in terms of that than any of the alternatives, because VCT is understood by every browser, Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. So if you want to see that, that's on my blog, james.critton.net slash blog. And it's an HTML audio player code with captions and everything else. And the change that I made to it this week is to allow more than one player per page, because I suddenly realized that that would be useful too. So that's that done.

Sam Sethi 1:22:01

Now, you had a little discussion about what Adam and Dave were doing on the podcasting 2.0.

James Cridland 1:22:07

I mean, I think I may have used the phrase idiots a lot, but uh yes, because they uh because they they decided that they would publish a getAlbi address for everybody to use instead of their own. And if there's one thing that Todd Cochran taught us, it's get your own.com. So you can if you want to be paid through Lightning, then yes, absolutely, a getAlbi.com address will work perfectly, but you're probably best using your own.com so that at some point you can change it. I'm calling it an LN address proxy, it's not really that at all, but it's a really simple, straightforward way of uh of of essentially setting that. And again, that is posted on my blog as well. It's a simple piece of PHP code, but you can actually do it statically as well if you don't care too much. So that's hidden away in in there as well. It just means that you know, if you if you want to pay me using Lightning, then you can pay me at james at podnews.net. That will always work. I don't know whether James at getalby.com, which by the way isn't my Alby address, will work now. I don't know whether it'll work in the future, even if it does work now. I've got no control over that, but I do have control over my james at podnews.net address. And so therefore, that's the one that is in this feed now, and that's the one that is in the podnews daily feed, because that's how I want people to end up paying me. So there's a good thing. Nice.

Sam Sethi 1:23:30

And finally, for some reason, but I'll ask why, uh, you've switched over from using the podcast index to the Apple Podcast Directory.

James Cridland 1:23:40

Why? What? How? For one thing. For one thing. For one thing, okay. Um and that is to so pod news has a whole section which is uh podcast pages. And the reason why I did that originally is that I wanted some data about podcasts, and I also wanted somewhere to link to, because actually linking to a podcast is really hard for some shows. So I thought that would be the easy and straightforward way to link to a podcast would be to just to have a simple podcast page. Now, the way that it used to work is it would look at the podcast index, use that as the source of truth in terms of where the RSS feed was and what its name was and everything else. Now it is still using the podcast index as the source of truth, but it's also using Apple Podcasts just to find out the most up-to-date RSS feed. And I think there'll be a talk on the podcasting 2.0 show this week on the board meeting in terms of that. I kind of think that the Apple Podcasts directory for all of the good and the bad that it is, is probably the right place to go for the very latest RSS feed for a podcast. And I've seen a lot of shows where the podcast index is out of date and the Apple Podcasts directory is the one that's in date, the one that has the latest RSS feed. And that's because we're all admins of our own show on Apple Podcasts, right? So we we can change that. We know that that's gonna change about 40% of our downloads. If we change it there, it'll probably trickle through to everywhere else. The one place where it's not trickling through right now is into the podcast index. And I thought that that was only going to be a problem for a couple of shows. It turns out that that's a problem for quite a lot of shows. And so I think there's probably a conversation that needs to be had around whether or not you treat Apple Podcasts as the source of truth in terms of where the where the RSS feed is, or whether or not you still treat podcast index as the source of truth. So what I'm not saying is if it goes away from Apple Podcasts, get rid of it from podcast index. Absolutely not. What I am saying is if it's different in in Apple Podcasts than it is in podcast index, we should probably overwrite the podcast index, RSS URL, with the Apple URL, if you see what I mean.

Sam Sethi 1:26:08

That sounds like a lot of work for somebody. AKA Dave Jones.

James Cridland 1:26:13

Yeah, I don't think it is actually. I think it's a I think it could be done relatively easily. I mean, it could be done in an automated fashion just by having something that chunks through one Apple Podcast show every 60 seconds and just goes chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk all the way through. And once it gets to the end, starts all the way from the beginning again. I think that that's one you know simple piece of code. I think that the harder bit is writing some form of programmatic way for me to basically say change this RSS feed to this. So that I think is just an API that needs writing and that the you know and and it needs the the auth around it to make sure that only a few trusted people can end up doing that. But I think if if you've basically got something that just sits there and whirls around and takes a look at the next Apple Podcast feed and just checks that it's up to date, not not necessarily auto auto-insert it, but just checks that it's up to date. I think that that would be a useful thing, and I don't think that should be too much work. I know that Dave has been thinking about other ways of doing that, and I think that that's a useful, a useful thing. But I was quite taken aback by how many things are different. Now, some things are different just because feedburner, for example, now accepts HTTPS as one thing, and so of course that's going to be different. There are weird things like Buzzsprout changed what its RSS feeds, you know, where they were from rss.buzzsprout.com to feeds.buzzsprout.com, or perhaps it's the other way around. I don't know yet. You know, so you've got all of those little sort of changes, and it would just be good, just a little bit of hygiene, just to get everything working as it kind of should.

Sam Sethi 1:27:56

Nice. Well, nice catch anyway. Let's see what changes come about. Now, moving on from James's tech corner to Spotify. Nothing major. They're just they're redesigning the podcast sharing UI to provide a more fine-tuned control over the starting point for clips, basically. It's very much like Headliner, I think. But yeah, if you are using Spotify and you want to create a clip, you've now got more control over it.

James Cridland 1:28:22

That's very nice. So these are clips within Spotify itself, not clips which you share on the internet, because obviously that's not a thing. But uh,

The Inbox

James Cridland 1:28:31

yeah, very nice.

Announcer 1:28:32

Booster, Booster, Booster Grand, 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 1:28:45

Yeah, so many different ways to get in touch with us at a fan mail by using the link in your show notes, in our show notes indeed, or in your show notes, so who cares? Or super comments on TrueFans Booths everywhere else, or email, and we share every money and we share any money that we make as well.

Sam Sethi 1:29:03

Okay, well, we have got some here I can read out for you. Seth Goldstein sent us one. Your show's amazing, keep up the good work. Martin Lindescog segur stove is a great brand. I recommend you check out Gustav Dalen's museum and get his pin with the motto, be an optimist. Okay, I don't know that one.

James Cridland 1:29:23

What's that about?

Sam Sethi 1:29:24

Uh I don't know. I think I mentioned I have an Auger at home here in the UK.

James Cridland 1:29:28

Oh, oh, oh, well, there you go. There you go. Yes.

Sam Sethi 1:29:31

And then Martin again said, I will check out the podcast magic service created by Sublime. I think it will work out with all the lightning addresses in due time, but I'm a bit worried about some stuff as I'm reading Dr. Brian of London's post on podcast index social. I think the Starship will be able to navigate in cyberspace. I'm I'm reading verbatim here, by the way. 1701 Satoshis with a digital telegram, i.e., boostergram, supercomment, freedom. Of expression is still available with or without public service companies like the BBC. And I stop and breathe. Oof. Yes. Well, there you go. David John Clark said, I keep saying on pod news, uh and to true fan CEO Sam Seth, VivaWii won't become mainstream until it's a system with a fiat currency, no wallets, no SATS. So somebody who doesn't like that. And again, from Neil Vellio, aha, did nobody give Bob a higher quality recording tool? I can't remember what that's in relation to. But there you go. There are a few more, but we should move on.

James Cridland 1:30:41

Yes, and uh and I should say I can't see those, but I can see them from Pod News Daily. For some reason, I can't see the Pod Newsweekly review at all in my True Fans dashboard. But also thank you to Martin Lindiscog or Lyceum, as we would normally call him. I will let the late Bloomer actor be the number one super fan of Pod News Daily for now. I can't catch up on his listening time. LOL. Time to chill out and relax. I'm planning to do an all-nighter binge listening to podcasts and value for value music during the upcoming Thanksgiving weekend. Oh, that's very exciting. When is Thanks Thanksgiving? Is it now? It's probably now, isn't it?

Sam Sethi 1:31:18

Sometime soon.

James Cridland 1:31:19

Who cares? Who cares? Anyway. I'd just like to say, I'm glad the Indians gave him a turkey and not a donkey. It's next week, by the way. It's the 27th of uh November. Um so yes, all good. But thank you so much for those messages. I will work out how to read more of those for next week. And uh much appreciated. Also much appreciated to the 22 superfans, power fans, power supporters. What are we calling them? Yes, that, who include people like John Spurlock, like Mzileen Smith, like Dave Jackson, or like Neil Vellio, all of these excellent people who are supporters of us every single month. If you would like to do that, weekly.podnews.net is where you can go with your with your credit card, and uh that uh money gets shared directly with uh Sam and uh myself. Uh much appreciated, and thank you to Jim James as well for your uh kind support.

Sam and James's week

James Cridland 1:32:12

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

Sam Sethi 1:32:15

Well, I I fell off my chair laughing, first of all. $230, James, if you'd like an apple sock.

James Cridland 1:32:21

I know the apple sock. The iPhone pocket is, I believe, the phrase.

Sam Sethi 1:32:26

Oh, sorry. I thought somebody just cut the top of a sock off and then sold it for $230. I mean, geez Louise, is that the best they can do now? Izzy Mayaki, the designer made it, so clearly that's the $228 worth of value there. And I believe Tim Cook gave a gold one to Donald Trump, so there you go. But I'm sorry, that is anyone walking around with a sock is someone to avoid. An Apple sock, that is. But the other thing is we talked about a few weeks back that Apple are intensifying their succession planning for Tim Cook. It's time for Tim to leave. And if the sock is the uh latest product, it's time for Tim to leave.

James Cridland 1:33:07

I don't know. I think if you can if you can launch something that costs £230 and is a sock with a hole in it and will sell out, I I think I think I all power to you. I mean, that that's the sort of business that I would like to be in. But still, but yes, um Tim Cook on the way out at some point next year. I'm looking forward to Elon Musk as our new leader.

Sam Sethi 1:33:31

Actually, genuinely, about five years ago when he was head of Tesla and doing SpaceX, I thought he's a sort of Steve Jobs mad type entrepreneur that Apple would need to sort of kickstart them. Like I, you know, an Apple car didn't exist and it still doesn't. Um, I thought, ooh, I can imagine Apple could buy Tesla because the stock price was low enough for them to acquire it, and that would be the Apple car. I'm fundamentally this week, actually, Tesla included CarPlay for the first time within the Tesla upgrade. So, I mean, I did think he could have been until he lost his uh mind and became a Nazi. But other than that, I think um I was following Elon for a while.

James Cridland 1:34:11

I was following a Tesla on the way to school today because I was uh picking up my daughter, and the there was a sticker on the back that says, I love EV, not Elon. Uh which I thought was quite good. So uh I think you have to put anything on, yes, you're Tesla. Anyway, I'm I'm looking forward to the Apple jock strap. That's that's what I'm looking forward to. It's got a space in there for my Apple Watch.

Sam Sethi 1:34:38

Oh I make no comment moving on.

James Cridland 1:34:42

Careful how you sit down. Exactly, yes.

Sam Sethi 1:34:46

It's either text, or you're just pleased to see me.

James Cridland 1:34:48

Is there any is there any wonder that there are no women in podcasting?

Sam Sethi 1:34:51

Yes. Dear, and then again, with TrueFans, where are we? Um so to your point earlier, we aren't launched, so all these lovely problems that you're presenting me are problems. Um thank you. I was gonna say you threw me under the bus, but that wouldn't be true. Not yet. No, not yet. No, he will do soon. Um, no, we we we'll we'll come up with it, and it may well be that we can't fix that problem. We just have to say, all right, this is 100% a download to Apple and everyone else that can be streamed to, can be streamed to. I mean, I don't know. We we'll we'll try and look at it. But we are connecting it now to the TrueFans wallet and we're connecting it to Stripe. So, in terms of being able to buy the plan, and as I said, one of the things that we're doing is based on the data that you don't use, we will then refund you the amount.

James Cridland 1:35:41

So yeah, which I think is very is very cool and very smart.

Sam Sethi 1:35:44

Yeah, thank you. So that's where we are. So hopefully we will open the wait list in probably hopefully midweek next week, or if we don't achieve that the week after for certain. So, yeah, that's our timeline currently.

James Cridland 1:35:57

Yeah, no, that all makes sense. Very nice. What's happened for you, James? Uh, I've had a nice quiet week, which is uh always nice. I was due to be in Sri Lanka this time next week for various reasons. That is not going to happen. So here as normal, which is nice, and yeah, I've I've just had a nice, a nice, quiet week doing not very much, which has been very good. I read a fascinating piece on the Carji uh blog. Carji is a search engine that I use, it's a good Google alternative for search, and they have AI on there if you want it, but you have to basically ask for it in terms of uh search results and things. And their head of AI has written a really good blog post which I will add. If you're using anything other than Apple Podcasts, then you can click through on this chapter and you can read it. And if you are using Apple Podcasts, then tough, because they won't let me to link through to it, then I'll find another way. But anyway, it's a really good article, it's all about LLMs, and it it basically says that LLMs don't lie, but they're really good at bullshitting, which I thought was a really good way of pushing it. And it explains exactly how an LLM works, it explains exactly what LLMs are good for and what they're not good for. Uh, it's a really good piece and is well worth a read. So that's uh hidden away in the Carji blog. It's a good uh search engine and worth a play. And by the way, if you are using Carji, that's another thing that I did over the last couple of weeks, is that I worked out on some new special RSS feeds for Carji. So if you use the Carji News service, which I think is available to everybody, news.karji.com, it's a really nice news aggregation tool that only updates once a day. So if you if you find yourself doom scrolling through the news, then try this because it literally updates every day at uh 10 pm my time. So whatever that is, your time. But it does a really good job, and there is a whole piece, there's a whole section on podcasting news, and it's mostly pod news, to be fair. Um, I've put a bunch of other RSS feeds in there, but yeah, it's a good it's a good tool. So if you want to have a play around with that, then do. I heartily recommend it. Uh and that's it for this week. All of our podcast stories taken from the pod news daily newsletter, of course, at podnews.net.

Sam Sethi 1:38:26

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James Cridland 1:38:42

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