AI Announcer 0:00

The Pod News Weekly Review uses chapters, so you can skip from story to story.

Human Announcer 0:04

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

Sam Sethi 0:13

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

Steve Ackerman 0:18

I'm a little bit sniffy about the folks who get agitated about video and argue about whether it is a podcast or not. Video does not cannibalize audio, it's additive.

AI Announcer 0:27

Steve Ackerman has big news to share with us. Plus.

Jay LeBoeuf 0:31

Right now, creators want fewer apps and a cleaner workflow.

AI Announcer 0:35

Jay LaBeouf from Adobe Podcast on the new features for podcasters, and the latest from the Edison Research Infinite Dial. And maybe we find out why James is too lazy to voice this bit. This podcast is sponsored by BuzzSprout for the tools, support, and community to ensure you keep podcasting. Start podcasting, keep podcasting with BuzzSprout.com from your daily newsletter, the Pond News Weekly Review.

Sam Sethi 1:01

Yesterday you co-hosted the Edison Research. Is it Edison Research or Edison SSRS?

James Cridland 1:09

It's Edison Research at SSRS because they were bought by SSRS late last year, and that's helped them do an awful lot more stuff. But yes, so Edison Research at SSRS launched the Infinite Dial uh yesterday and at 2 o'clock Eastern Time. Uh there I was with um VP of Research there, uh Megan Lazovic, uh, talking about all of the new data, which was absolutely fascinating. Some really interesting data about radio and uh important numbers in terms of podcasting as well.

Sam Sethi 1:42

Yeah, I mean, I'm looking at some of the data that you've presented. One of the first things that jumps out is in-car use. Yeah. But the thing it says right at the bottom is podcasts not asked. That doesn't make sense to me.

James Cridland 1:56

No, well, back in 2016, they didn't bother asking about whether you listened to podcasts in cars because kind of nobody really was at that point. At least that was the that was the theory, at least. So, yeah, I mean that was one of the big things. So podcasts are the number three thing after AMFM radio, which is number one, and online audio, that's things like uh music um from uh Spotify and that sort of thing at number two. Podcasts are there at number three in terms of people. Edison's uh infinite dial measures people, not necessarily consumption time spent listening, um, so it just measures people. But 37% of people say that they currently listen to podcasts in their car, um, as do I. So that is a uh is a big change you would have assumed from um 10 years ago. Um, but I mean, you know, it it gets even more interesting when you start having a look at in at individual age groups. Over half of all Americans uh who have um driven in a car uh or ridden in a car last month have listened to a podcast in them. Uh if you're looking at young Americans again, uh people under the age of 34, uh, then 73% listening to online audio, 65% listening to AMFM radio. So AMFM radio isn't actually number one for them, for that particular age group. Um so some fascinating information there, and you know, and you and you could see from some of the other data that they had about AI and some of the other data that there's very clear changes to the over 55s there. And that's the thing that I think um i is most interesting, given that um I I get into that age bracket next week. Welcome. So that's probably welcome. Yes. I mean you're nearly out of it now.

Sam Sethi 3:46

Um so moving away from Carl, they started to also talk about share of ear. What was going on there?

James Cridland 3:54

So Edison also do two other pieces of data. Um, Edison Share of Ear, which is um time spent listening to audio. So infinite dial measures the people, Edison Share of Ear measures the time. And there was a fascinating graph which I've never seen Edison produce before, and it was showing daily podcast consumption time as a percentage by the app that they're using. And I have always been saying, if you remember, I've always been saying YouTube is number one in terms of people, but it isn't necessarily number one in terms of consumption. I've normally been saying, because I've been looking at other data, that Apple is number one and that um YouTube and Spotify are both kind of number two. That's not what this data shows you. And what this data shows you very clearly is that 32% of all time with podcasts in the US is spent with YouTube, 25% with Spotify, 20% with Apple Podcasts. That's a big, big change to where we were. And it does seem to show that YouTube is number one for podcasts, whether you're thinking about people or whether you're thinking about time spent listened as well.

Sam Sethi 5:12

Now, why why is that changing? I mean, are we seeing the algorithm that YouTube provides, giving us more content quicker? Um what what what's giving the YouTube the edge?

James Cridland 5:25

That's a great question. I'm not sure that I know the answer to that. I mean, it's certainly not how people listen to this show, and um one would assume it's not necessarily how people listen to a bunch of other shows out there. Um I I guess some of it comes back to what is the definition of a podcast? And I know I'm a uh I'm a boring, um, you know, worn record on that, but that's kind of important in things like this um to actually understand. So, what is a podcast? What are people calling a podcast? Um, and of course, you know, where will Netflix, um, Hulu, all of these sorts of things be on this list this time next year? Um, you know, who knows there as well.

Sam Sethi 6:08

Moving on then, um, monthly podcast consumption was another statistic that they put out. What was the uh overall arching view of this?

James Cridland 6:18

Yeah, so um this is basically the number that anyone cares about. Um, it's the amount of Americans who've listened to or watched a podcast over the last month. And they asked, listened to or watched um both last year and this year. And uh the figure is up again, it's another record. 58% of all Americans age 12 plus are listening to podcasts. Um, that's 167 million people. And what I thought was interesting, and I highlighted it at the time, is that um the weekly podcast consumption number is 45%, but that has grown faster than the monthly one. So to me, that kind of makes me assume that people are listening to more podcasts, they're listening, they're listening more often, which is why the weekly number has gone up faster than the monthly number has. Um, so all good news for podcasting. Um, there's a ton of detail uh in here. And um, thanks to Sirius XM Media, which is the sponsor, um they've given um uh a ton of top line information away for free. Um so you can go and take a peek at that, and of course, um go and watch me um uh with uh Megan doing the whole um doing the whole reveal, uh, which was uh quite quite good fun. You can go and do that um at the Edison Research website, which is which is at EdisonResearch.com.

Podbean Cancels DAI

Sam Sethi 7:46

Nice. Uh again, I think I need to delve back into the uh full uh set of information because I think there's a lot there to to pack out. Now, um moving on, James, Podbean and Gone. This was something that you um noted on the WhatsApp group. Podcast hosting company Podbean has abruptly pulled its dynamic ad insertion tool across the whole of Europe. Now, why have they done this, James?

James Cridland 8:15

Well, why have they done it indeed? Um, the company has told us um that uh the decision was based on a combination of evolving global privacy regulations and a shift in our internal product focus. Now, that doesn't necessarily explain why they just yanked it without any warning whatsoever, uh, which has really put some people in the lurch. So this pod ads thing that they had was a dynamic ad insertion tool that you could use to insert your own ads that you had sold. And so all of all of a sudden you're gonna get all of these podbean customers who are no longer able to actually insert those ads that they have sold into their podcast. I mean, that's a massive big deal. So to pull that without any warning whatsoever is a bit strange. Now, if you look at where they have pulled the insertion tool, you can probably guess that there is something to do with GDPR in there because it's basically every single GDPR country it's been pulled from. Um, but it was a it was an instant thing, and that that uh, you know, I I just find that really a a really weird way of talking to your customers, of taking care of your customers and everything else. I've had a load of people saying, you know, this this has had a huge impact. Who would you recommend? Um, you know, and uh if you're not doing uh anything particularly complicated, then Buzzsprout, our sponsor, is great. It's got its own DAI uh uh service which is completely free, so you can use that. If you're doing something which is a bit more complicated and you need, you know, uh scheduling and all of that kind of stuff, um, then Captivate is probably a good choice uh for you. They've got a tool called Amy. Uh I used to be an advisor for them a long, long, long time ago. Um, so uh, but yeah, it's a really, really fascinating thing. It's not the only thing that they've got rid of as well.

Sam Sethi 10:07

Yeah, this one surprised me. I mean, they're getting rid of their livestream product out of June. Now, give me uh a minute. Didn't we just predict that live is probably gonna be the next big thing we've been waiting for in podcasting? And they've got what, sixty-five thousand shows, it says here. Um they're gonna get rid of it. Why?

James Cridland 10:31

Yes. Uh 16 million live stream minutes. 5.8 million people have watched one of these shows. Uh and they and they're getting rid of it. And they're getting rid of it because oh yes, it's all AI, isn't it? Reallocating resources towards AI features. Um just very strange. I I I don't I don't really understand the whole Podbean um uh thing. There must be some kind of legal thing, uh, you would assume, mustn't there? I mean, you know, but um yeah, but who knows?

Sam Sethi 11:05

Moving on then, James. Another company I really don't understand, because I don't use their products, it's Adobe. Now, a friend of the show, Jay LeBeuf, who used to be at DScript, is now heading up their podcasting and AI initiatives. Um but they've announced a couple of new enhancements to their products. What have they said, James?

James Cridland 11:24

Yeah, so they've announced uh an a number of things. They've got um an enhanced speech service, which I've used in the past, that now has source separation, so you can remove music from the background, which is actually very useful. Uh, in case you want to take a clip but you don't want the the copyrighted music behind it, um, then you can do that too. Uh it's got a remote recording tool, which I'm sure that uh Riverside are delighted about, um, which uh does it in video and in audio as well. Uh, and there's a few other, you know, little tricks there in terms of um multi-track upload and and everything else. But uh yeah, they certainly seem to be moving fast.

Sam Sethi 12:02

Yeah, is this a threat, as you said, to Riverside, but also DScript? I mean, is it going to be, you know, have they woken up and said, right, we're going to be the all-in-one solution for creators, uh, you know, audio, video, recording, enhancement, editing, all in one place?

James Cridland 12:18

I mean, Adobe has always been uh someone which um uh which quite a lot of creators have used for you know many different things. Um and you know, and very clearly they are beginning to have a more complete workflow now in terms of audio and video. If I was uh Riverside, if I was D Script, I would be worried because Adobe clearly has a much bigger brand, um, and arguably a much more trusted brand, just because it's so big, it's been going for a long, long time, and everybody, you know, by and large, has at least used an Adobe product at some stage in their life, even if they're not using it now. So I think, you know, it it's certainly a big, um, you know, a big sort of elephant has just jumped into this particular room. Um, what they don't do, of course, is podcast hosting, um, which Riverside does. Um, what they are really leading on here is uh not necessarily video but audio, although they do do video as well. Um uh but maybe that's something to do with um uh making sure that they don't upset their video customers. Um but yeah, I I find all of it all of it absolutely fascinating. So you caught up with uh JaylaBeuf from uh Adobe. What did you start by asking him?

Sam Sethi 13:36

Well, I asked him to tell me about the products at Adobe because you've got Adobe Podcast, Adobe Premium, uh, and you've got Adobe Firefly. And I just didn't know how they all fit together. So I asked him, what are the ones that you're looking after and how do they fit with podcast creators?

Jay LeBoeuf 13:52

We have this expression within Adobe, uh, don't ship your org chart. It's a massive company that serves a lot of creators. So let me explain it through a creator lens. Let's imagine you're a podcaster. Today's the day you want to do something. You arrive at the Adobe website, you're trying to wrap your head around it. Honestly, this took me months to wrap my own head around. We have, I'd say, uh, three tools that you really should be considering: Adobe Podcast, Adobe Premiere, and Adobe Fireflag. So, what's the difference? Adobe Podcast is the tool for entry-level creators or creators who really just have some specific jobs to be done. They want to get in, get out, not spend nights and weekends meticulously laboring over their creations. And podcast has always been the tool we want to provide to just be the simplest, most reliable, friendly, and honestly fun tool. There's not a lot of fun tools out there, and I think podcast hits that goal. Premiere pro is already known as the industry standard for film, TV, YouTube creation. But as podcasts are increasingly becoming video first, most of the top shows, for example, on Spotify, and Spotify themselves, uses Premiere to edit it. You're editing shows as if it's like a multi-cam TV workflow. And Premiere has all that built in, but Premiere has a ton of audio capabilities that I don't think people have been paying attention to. And then last, Adobe Firefly. Adobe Firefly, relatively new product and surface for Adobe, and it's our AI first creation platform. So where we're seeing that being used, if you needed to do an ad read, if you wanted to experiment with having some synthetic guests, you could actually go in. We have text-to-speech, we have generative music, we have generative sound effects, everything uh commercially safe, uh there for you to use, to then bring into your other services. And we also have a video editor in Firefly 2.

Sam Sethi 15:55

So those products basically are available. They're all online products, you don't download anything anymore. They're all SAS, I assume. So you just log in and access them that way.

Jay LeBoeuf 16:05

Uh actually Premiere Pro is still downloadable Mac Windows.

Sam Sethi 16:10

So now let's say that I'm a podcaster. Do you envisage me going from Adobe Podcast to Premiere when I go into video from audio? Is that the transition that you're looking at?

Jay LeBoeuf 16:21

One of the trends that I'm seeing is creators want fewer apps. And you know, the industry bounces between bundling and unbundling and bundling again and unbundling. Right now, creators want fewer apps and a cleaner workflow. So what we want is for creators to kind of spend the time thinking through how much time and effort do they want to spend creating and also just what tool resonates most with their workflow. So with Adobe Podcast, for example, Podcast is a simple, straightforward tool that provides you everything from recording to editing to production to then clipping and publishing out your content as audio and video clips. You can do everything there. Whereas Premiere, Premier is more focused on editorial, like the editorial process. So similar to Podcast, where you can do text-based audio editing, the approach that Premiere takes is you can also do all the rich audio and video edits that you would expect to do in a modern DAW, in a modern nonlinear editor, augmented by AI. So Premiere is a deeper tool, professional grade tool, and it is worth learning. But some people really just prefer the ease of use of podcasts.

Sam Sethi 17:37

Just in my brain, I'm just thinking Adobe Podcast, Adobe Podcast Pro. No, maybe. Anyway, I'll ignore that. Now, you've got some new announcements coming out. What are they?

Jay LeBoeuf 17:47

So earlier this year, I provided Pod News, some of my predictions for 2026. And we also debuted a whole bunch of stuff at Adobe Max, which is our creativity conference last October. Part of the predictions, part of what we were showcasing is the ability to split audio into layers. You know, for the longest time, Sam, I mean you you've been working in audio and radio for a long time. Usually the recording is what it is. And maybe you can notch out certain frequencies, maybe you can do some noise removal, but we've never really had the ability to do source separation. On the image side, we're used to being able to click and hold and remove background and click and hold and click on one person, just remove them. That's been possible on the image side. We're adding that on audio. So shipping today, probably when everybody hears this, Adobe Podcast's enhance speech module, which is what people use to make their audio and videos just sound better, now includes a new music control. So now it automatically splits the audio into speech, music, and background. So you get three separate layers to work with. The interface makes it super easy to work with. You have dedicated sliders and mute controls for all of them. So uh real example workflow. I end up filming a video and I'm right outside the stadium. You can hear music playing in the background. That is copyrighted music owned by Universal Music Group playing in the background. Now it might not bother me as I'm recording, but as soon as I publish it to YouTube, you do not have the rights for that. Now you get a message saying that UMG is gonna monetize your content. Or if you're actually trying to like put ads in there, it's gonna get taken down. And I work with tons of creators and also a lot of companies that just need the copyrighted music removed, either so they can replace it with something else or or just repurpose episodes, you know, just get rid of it. So the music removal, not only the slider, but also the dedicated mute control, just solves a huge problem that people have. Uh and we're really excited to have that. So that's in the Adobe Podcast surface. Layerization of audio, I think you can also do that people have been asking for for a while, is to be able to download the audio as individual stems. So now we split it into speech, music, and background. This is a great example where if that's all you're gonna do and you want to take those stems and you want to bring it into your favorite digital audio workstation that you've been using for years, go for it. That's great. It should be part of your workflow.

Sam Sethi 20:21

And what's the the other announcement that you're making?

Jay LeBoeuf 20:23

So as we see more and more tools head towards video workflows, you and I are recording this right now. We're primarily recording audio through remote recording, but we're also recording video too. Just in case. Adobe Podcast is now shipping remote video recording. We've had remote recording for audio only since it launched, you know, two and a half years ago. And it's become incredibly reliable. It's the the best service that Adobe offers for recording. Now we add video in there. So you can add, I believe, up to five guests, do very fluid video recording, everything is synced to the cloud. You can download the individual stems. And again, if you want to complete your workflow in Adobe Premiere and edit it like a multicam TV show, go for it. If you want to finish your remote video recording, have it all instantly transcribed with active speaker view on with one click, you can do that in Adobe Podcast. Brings together a lot of a lot of hard work. Uh it turns out shipping video recording, very, very hard, very challenging. But the team has a great approach. It's incredibly reliable, and uh, we're gonna start seeing it rolled out when people are listening to this.

Sam Sethi 21:36

So the third leg of the Adobe products is Firefly. You've talked about the use of AI in both podcast and Premiere Pro. So what does this product do then that the other two which have AI already built in? Don't why have a third product?

Jay LeBoeuf 21:53

Why have a third product? We needed an AI first situation, like a or State it another way. We need an AI first surface. In the same way that I mentioned earlier that creators favor like end-to-end surfaces, they also favor things that are purpose-built for what they're trying to accomplish. So you rarely get a chance to start from scratch. Firefly has been that opportunity for Adobe. And what we're doing is starting out by building some of the basic building blocks for good AI audio. So what we shipped in October that we haven't covered here, but I think people need to know about, we shipped three modules: generate sound effects, generate soundtrack, and generate speech. So generate sound effects is our own foundation model. So all these models are things that Adobe has built. I feel very lucky to work at a company that has the resources to build our own foundation models with our own licensed training data where creators have been properly compensated. It is all commercially safe, so creators have no worries about where the content came from and what they could use it for. And in the case of the sound effects model, you can type in a prompt to create your own sound effects, your own ambient sounds. You can use your voice to actually control how that sound comes out. So the example we always give is let's imagine you need a droning sound in your show. You can type in the type of ambient drone that you're looking for, and then use your voice to do the wow, wow, wow type modulation. We'll combine those two inputs and then you get a rich output.

Sam Sethi 23:33

Don't tell Ed Sheeran that he does all his music like this. Don't tell Ed Sheeran.

Jay LeBoeuf 23:39

Well, let's imagine you need music for your show. Let's imagine you need a theme song. Let's imagine you need some interstitial music, you know, during your ad reads or something. You might be plagued by getting copyright strikes, or you're bored because you're using the same royalty-free music that you downloaded ten years ago. Like, it's time to move on. Time to have some additional choices. So we have the generate soundtrack module in Firefly, which allows you to just simply describe what you want, but the way in which we do it, it's not here's a text prompt. Good luck. But rather we give you some mood tags, we give you some vibe tags, we give you some energy tags. Kind of a take us back to you remember the the descriptors in Last FM? You would listen to a track and you would get all these like cool descriptors back and just type in what you want. Well, that's kind of what we have now, where you can just tell the system through selecting through a few tags roughly what you want, or you can upload a piece of video content, and we will automatically detect what's going on in that video and try to help you create a soundtrack for it. Now, it's clear for everybody listening in to know that these are not we're not trying to create meme soundtracks, we're not trying to create happy birthday to your niece with novelty lyrics type music. This is purpose-built content for soundtracks to underscore video or underscore narrative audio. So we know a lot about the use case and we we try to make sure we do the best job there.

Sam Sethi 25:22

Yeah, and now that you've got the Adobe layers, you can take the music out from another background, use Five Line guessing, create your own sound, and then whack that straight back in.

Jay LeBoeuf 25:31

Yes. Exactly, exactly. And you could create multiple, multiple variations, multiple versions. All that music that you're creating is commercially safe. You know that it's safe from any copyright strikes. So is adjustable to uh I don't want to say millisecond precision, but like tenth of a second precision. We will figure out how long the content that you need is and make sure that the fade ins, the fade outs, and musically it just it just works that content.

Sam Sethi 25:57

Okay. Jay, thank you so much. Congratulations on your what, two nearly three years now, is it? Where are you now in the Adobe career?

Jay LeBoeuf 26:07

About let's call it two and a half fun and wonderful and very dynamic times in this industry. But you know, when you look at how quickly AI is changing and also like as a creator, who do you want to which tool stack are you going to double down into? Um, there's a lot of incredible tools out there, but I I I just love being in Adobe. I think our our approach to ethical AI is one that I personally stand behind, but also the like breadth of tools of going from simple ease of use with podcast all the way to Oscar-winning editorial tools that you could get in Premiere and like everything in between is so fun. I learn so much every day.

Sam Sethi 26:48

Cool. If I want to know more and learn more myself, where would I go?

Jay LeBoeuf 26:54

I would recommend everybody go to podcast.adobe.com. Check out the latest stuff that is shipping today, including the remote video recording and also the remove music and enhancement features within enhanced speech. Use that as your starting point and then I'd the limit from there. Also, there's there's links to contact the team. There's a real team behind it. We read everything. Reach out anytime.

Sam Sethi 27:19

And when will we next see you in person? Will you be at Podcast Movement or the London Podcast Show? Where can we find Adobe?

Jay LeBoeuf 27:27

I am hoping we'll have a good presence at the London Podcast Show.

Sam Sethi 27:31

Excellent. I can't wait to have a drink with you then. Jay, so good to see you again, my friend. Congratulations on everything. And yeah, we'll see you in London then.

[Ad] Financial Matters with Richard Oring

(Cont.) Adobe: interview with Jay LeBeuf

Bumper - podcast completion

Jay LeBoeuf 27:39

Sounds good. See you soon.

Human Announcer 28:11

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

Sam Sethi 28:19

James Bumper, one of our friends, has always been talking about percent completed. They've done some research recently, James. What have they done?

James Cridland 28:28

Yeah, Bumper have um a ton of very interesting research um all about consumption and about completion. How long are people listening to individual shows? Um, and also, you know, um uh are they actually consuming um uh all of the show or just some of it or blah blah blah? And so uh yeah, so they've analyzed more than 100,000 episodes to discover that the average on Apple and Spotify, of course, on YouTube it's much, much, much lower. But the average on Apple and Spotify is 76% of an episode has been listened. Um now that uh number goes higher if you have a shorter show. So shows under half an hour, it goes up to 85 um percent. Uh so that's a significantly higher number. But yeah, I th I thought that was um I I thought that was a really interesting thing.

Sam Sethi 29:24

Uh and of course, shows under three minutes they get completely 100%, don't they, James?

What Apple Podcasts will download in iOS 26.4

James Cridland 29:30

Well, it's uh surprising that you say that because um uh I had someone, um uh Stephen Da Vincenzi, uh he produces a podcast sort called Simple English News Daily, and he sent me a screenshot of his Apple Podcasts Connect uh screen saying I'm doing about 110% on average. Bet nobody can beat that. Uh to which I replied, challenge accepted, uh, and showed uh a view of Apple Podcasts Connect. Um you can actually go in there, you you choose uh you choose all time, and then you sort by average consumption. And the top show um uh from the Pod News Daily, not the Pod News Weekly Review, because clearly, clearly this show, how long is this show? Um so from the daily um sort of three, four, five minute show, uh the number one was a new threat to podcasters, extortion. Wow, that sounds exciting, which was an episode from 2019, uh, which has an average consumption, average consumption of 299%. Wow, there you go. I'm sure that that's true. Uh and the next one, Apple's accessibility and Gimlet's not changing anything. Wow, that's dated, isn't it? Again from 2019, 216%. So uh yeah, so that was quite funny. Nice. But yeah, yeah, so the shorter you go, obviously, the the higher uh it gets. But um, yeah, it's still really interesting, I think.

Sam Sethi 31:03

Now, related to this, um Dan Meisner, who's from Bumper, um, posted on LinkedIn that he appreciated the coverage that you and I did for the Apple recent video announcement. But he left you a question, James, which I'm not sure he asked you directly, but he did say one aspect I'd love to better understand is how Apple support for HLS video will impact podcast downloads. Apple's support material says that for video episodes, the audio for followed shows will be downloaded automatically. So users always have something to play offline. Now, he went on to say, but I'm not entirely clear what's getting downloaded automatically. The audio enclosure from the RSS feed, the audio-only rendition from the HLS stream. He's heard conflicting reports and he wanted an authoritative source. And of course, the GOAT jumps in. So, James, what was your reply?

James Cridland 31:58

I have the authoritative source because that is a question that I asked Apple, and Apple have given me an authoritative answer. So if you are using iOS 26.4 and you're using something which is capable of video, then it always uses HLS. Even if you're just listening on uh audio and you've said I don't want to see the video, it still listens to the HLS because the audio is separate in the HLS multivariant playlist. Um, and if you download a show that has video attached to it, you can download audio, which is the default. You can also download video, which uh is also available. And all auto downloads from iOS 26.4 will always come from that HLS uh multivariant playlist. Um, what that means technically is it's probably going to be an AEC stream or an AEC file. Um most people are using between 128 and 160k right now. Um, but that's basically it. And so uh no, you won't get anything different. Um, and so it's just the same deal as uh Spotify. It's the same audio, uh, it's the audio from the video file if you like. Um, but the way that HLS does it is much, much cleverer. So um, yeah, that's basically what's going on there.

Sam Sethi 33:22

Nice. So why are we still talking about downloads? I'm sorry, I'm just confused.

James Cridland 33:28

Well, we're still talking about downloads because there are still a lot of people who like to be able to listen to um shows um without having to use their uh data. Um, there is this thing in London, Sam called the London Underground. And uh and you won't believe this, but it's trains and they go underground.

Sam Sethi 33:49

No, I'm not sure.

James Cridland 33:50

You won't fill me on this one, James.

Sam Sethi 33:52

I I know you've not got this in deepest darkness. My showfish never told me about this.

James Cridland 33:59

But yes, and so from that point of view, that is obviously uh an obvious thing. Um, I will be on a plane this time next week. Um, and so uh my phone will be full of podcasting. Fine, you'll be fine.

Sam Sethi 34:12

You'll be 700 meg down and up, you'll be fine.

James Cridland 34:15

Not on not on Qantas, I won't be. So um, but yeah, so um so all of that stuff, it's still important to to people. Um and um my assumption is that Apple Podcasts is still going to automatically download. That certainly seems to be the case um because I'm on uh 26.4 already. Um so yeah, so it's still an important thing. But of course, the important sort of part of all of this is that Apple Podcasts has all of the playback stats anyway. Uh, and so as long as there's an easy way to get those playback stats out of Apple Podcasts, and I don't know whether that's the case yet, but as long as there's an easy way to get those playback stats out of Apple Podcasts, then brilliant. Um, that will um, you know, you'll get all of the play information there. You can ignore the downloads for the HLS because you'll be able to actually be able to see the individual playback um uh going on in the uh in the app.

Sam Sethi 35:12

I mean, I I think I think what I would rather Apple did is not set the default to automatically download, right? Let people choose, but but it's not Apple's way.

Time to stop using downloads?

James Cridland 35:23

No, I mean it's not it's not necessarily Apple's way at the moment, although the default is going to be audio only and not video. Um, so that's important. What does happen in the Apple Podcast app is that it stops downloading if you stop listening. Um, and so what I'm finding, I use Apple Podcasts as my main podcast app, sorry. Uh and one of the things one day we'll get you to change one of Help May freeze over. And one of the things that I've noticed is uh the rest is politics is now releasing such a ridiculous amount of episodes that I'm not listening to enough of them for Apple Podcasts to automatically download them. Um because I'm you know it's it's it's just simply not not a thing anymore. Um so I think that that's I think that that's certainly interesting. But um, yeah, I I I think if they were to get just or just get rid of automatic downloads or stop that from happening instantly, I think that would cause the industry so much of a concern um that it really isn't worth you know having a conversation about. I think it would I think it would terrify um uh people because there's still an awful lot of this industry that relies on downloads as being a relatively standard number. Uh, and all of a sudden, you know, you probably cut those downloads by about 20% again if you were to do that. So um yeah, so you probably don't want to do that.

Sam Sethi 36:48

Well, interestingly, uh Steve Razors, who was the former EVP for podcasting and audio at Paramount, wrote a post which was entitled, What if we've been doing podcasting wrong this whole time? Have we been measuring podcasting success wrong? He says. Um, he talks about reach versus engagement. He talks about reach being downloads, chart positions, network scale, and engagement being what? Again, Edison Research were talking about watch time, listen time, completion rates, retentions, which is what Bumper talk about as well. So he says for most of its history, podcasting has optimised for one number. Downloads. He says downloads drive the charts, downloads drive ad pricing. Um, you know, if a show hits a million downloads, then the headline is that it's a success. Um he says the dirty secret is that downloads are an imperfect metric. We know that, because a download doesn't equal a listen. Um he says roughly 70% of listeners finish most or all of an episode, I think, again, which has been backed up by Edison research. So, James, this article that Steve has written seems to say that, you know, well at least it backs up what Edison's being observing, you know, how much people are listening. We've talked about how the download metric or at least I have, the download metric isn't the key metric. Is it time? I mean, I know you just said what Apple are doing, but is it time to move away? He he wants us to move away towards shares, watch time, retention, completion rates.

James Cridland 38:27

Yeah, of course he does. And uh here is the choice that we have as an industry. We can either put all of our podcasts into Apple Podcasts, YouTube and Spotify and cut everything else off. True fans, no, absolutely not. Cut the whole lot off so that we've just got three places to put our podcasts. Then we can have exactly the numbers that he wants. Can't necessarily get engagement, but we can certainly get completion rate and retention rate, and well, I mean, we can't even get return behavior, but you know what I mean. We're sort of we're sort of far closer to it. But then you've got open RSS, and open RSS is the reason why podcasting has been so successful, and you can't get the type of consumption metrics that you want to out of Open RSS. So you end up with a choice. Do you want to kill OpenRSS because of the 10% of shows that take advertising? Or do you want to keep Open RSS because of the 90% of shows that don't? And Steve Razes would be perfectly happy for you to get rid of the 90% because he doesn't care about the podcasts that don't earn money from downloads. He only cares about the podcasts that earn money from downloads. He's a he's a great, he's a great guy. I like him a lot. But that's that's the choice that we're making. Um, and it's a choice that you know some people very loudly have been turning around and and saying that they want to make. Um, and we we we should just be mindful and aware that if our choice is to denigrate the work the the download number uh totally um and only look at um completion, retention, and all of that kind of stuff, um, then we are handing the keys to the open podcast ecosystem, to Apple, to Spotify, and to YouTube. And you know, and that may be where we're going, but um I'm not sure that I'm entirely comfortable with that.

Sam Sethi 40:31

I'm not sure I agree with that in its entirety, James. I think what you're seeing is the existing legacy hosts only use downloads because they haven't moved to a metric that they can measure. So they're gonna promote the download because it's the only thing they can do. Um, I think you'll see, I mean, you know, we have achieved it. Okay, we're we're nothing of nothing as true fans. I'll I'll I'll say that, right? We're nothing, we're not gonna cause the needle to move right now. But we technically have achieved the ability to measure across all apps the plays, listen times, retention rates, consumption. So it's technically possible.

James Cridland 41:10

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You you say you have. Yeah. Um and I think the difficulty, the difficulty with that claim is no one's seen how you're doing it. You've not published any information on the case. Not yet, and I said that. And we don't and we don't know what then we don't know how accurate those numbers are. They've certainly not gone through any IB certification. So it won't be going through it either, probably. But if what you have done is is, you know, is correct and what you have done is measuring things properly, then yes, we've got we've got a fantastic move forward. I've no idea how it works out, what what a download is and what a play is. But we have at least with that understood that we've got uh a little bit more data there.

Sam Sethi 41:56

Yeah, look, I I'm I'm the first to say we we're at you know step one, step two, right? But we are at the point. The reason why we haven't published anything yet is because I'm not comfortable that we've got it exactly right. I won't go gong ho until I've got everything completely right. But we're pretty close to it. And what I'm not trying to say that, you know, oh wow, look at truth. No, I'm saying the industry, if we can do it, then bigger players than us, like Buzz Sprout, Captivate, certainly should be able to do it, right?

James Cridland 42:28

So it almost almost asks uh almost leads to the question, well, why haven't they then? I mean Omni Studio did for a while. Yeah. Um and so it's kind of well, what what's going on there then?

Sam Sethi 42:40

Well, somebody said it, somebody said it, people like big numbers, right? Just bottom line, people like big numbers. Download numbers are always going to be bigger than your play numbers. And that's of course that's it, really. It's nice to say I've got you know 10,000 downloads, I've got 600 players. Doesn't the number just you know it doesn't sound as impressive. And if the industry is sold still on advertisers asking for that download number, then nothing changes. And I think it is a case of when you look at Bumper's dashboard, they're trying to aggregate those numbers, but it's a difficult thing. We've talked about the APIs aren't open from Spotify and Apple. So it's uh it's a it's not a clutch, that's unfair. That there's a method that they're having to go in as the client to bring stuff back out and then aggregate. Um, and that's one way of doing it. There's other people trying to do it. So I think maybe, maybe, you know, at the moment, the only people who have that first party data are the big players, the apples, the Spotify's, the YouTubes. But what I'm trying to say is if Steve is right and Dan Meisner's right, and I think they both are, then those are the metrics we should be focusing on in the next generation of podcasting. And it's just technically how we're going to get to that point. And there are there is a model, there is a mechanism. I will publish more about it. But I do think that you know, this is an interesting um inflection point where we're at. Yeah, I do.

Interview: Steve Ackerman

James Cridland 44:11

No, I think I I think I mean if we could get that that data, then I think that would be really interesting. One shouldn't forget that, of course, um uh the the thing that really drives podcast uh numbers isn't necessarily the downloads of the whole show, it's the downloads of individual ads and And how successful those are. And so, of course, you've got a whole sort of set of stuff going on there. And again, that's where the HLS Interstitial, the way that they're doing the ads in Apple Podcasts going forward, is going to be really interesting because again, we will actually get much more accurate data from the ads as well. May even be able to get things like skip data through the ads. So all of that I think is fascinating.

Sam Sethi 45:00

Now, from one former EVP to another, Steve Ackerman, he was the EVP and head of global podcast for Tony Music. James, you know him, don't you?

James Cridland 45:10

I do, yes. Yes. He's um he's a radio person for a long, long time. Um used to head up a company called Something Else that made uh a ton of radio shows and a ton of podcasts. And uh yes, following that uh acquisition um of Something Else by Sony Music, uh he ended up living in the U in the US for a while, I think.

Sam Sethi 45:31

So I thought what would be nice to do is to catch up with Steven. And I started off by asking Steve what he's doing now and and why he left Sony as the industry appears to be just taking off.

Steve Ackerman 45:42

It was a really personal decision, and and actually a lot of it really was personal because I was living in the States. I've got three adult kids, they're in London, so that was obviously a big driver, really. And look, I had an amazing time at Sony Music, it's full of amazing people. I've not got a bad word to say about them, but equally I I spent 20 years being my own boss, and I felt it was time to get back probably to just being a bit more in charge of myself.

Sam Sethi 46:04

No, and look, I understand that for personal reasons. Now, what are you doing with yourself at the moment?

Steve Ackerman 46:08

I think you've already encapsulated it. I'm really acting as a board advisor to a bunch of businesses and a consultant. So I'm working with lots of different folks, both in the US and the UK, but really helping different businesses grow or taking on different business challenges.

Sam Sethi 46:22

You've got a bit of an exclusive for us.

Steve Ackerman 46:24

Yeah, well, just through serendipity of when we're recording this, it is now being announced that I'm joining the board, as in the company board of the podcast show, that much-loved event, and I'm going to be helping them grow as a business, both within the UK and around the world.

Sam Sethi 46:39

It's that last bit you said, around the world. I will lay my cards down and say I'm a London boy. The London Podcast Show is a great show. I know Jason and Furker have done an amazing job pulling that all together. My big worry, it matters not what I think, is that it will water it down if we do. The Americans won't come, then we'll suddenly have just the Brits in London, the Americans in America, and wherever else you are. I worry that you're going to take the magic of the London Podcast Show away.

Steve Ackerman 47:06

Well, I think that's a really fair thing to raise. And of course, I think I can speak on behalf of everyone at the podcast show when I say that's the last thing we want to happen to London. It's the jewel in the crown, it's the flagship. But the world's a really big place. And what's so exciting is our industry is becoming a bigger and bigger industry and is absolutely a global industry. And so I think having events around the world that can continue the conversation throughout the year and allow different folks to attend, where maybe London is a long way to go or too expensive to go, does throw open the opportunity to look at what else we can do.

Sam Sethi 47:38

Jason, I've spoken to on numerous occasions who runs the London Podcast Show. Two areas that I've always wanted him to evolve into. Given Jason's background with the BBC, and given your background as a radio DJ and as somebody who loves music, there isn't a whole area of independent musicians who are using podcasting RSS fundamentally to distribute their music. I would love there to be a way to get the musicians into that London podcast show in some format, even if it's a panel, even if it's a discussion. Because one of the things I find is the conversation will be video, AI, monetisation, rinse and repeat. And there'll be everyone having their different spin on it, but that's where we are. There's a whole area around music, and given Jason's background at the BBC as well, I wonder whether that could come into it. Now I'm throwing my wish list at you just simply because you've announced it. So I'm allowed to do that. You don't have to answer any of this, by the way, but that's just me asking.

Steve Ackerman 48:31

Well, no, I will answer because I think I'll say that I think one thing that Jason Carter and the team have just done so brilliantly over five years is the podcast show has continually evolved. I think anybody who was there for the first event and has been in subsequent years would hopefully agree with that. And of course it will continue to evolve, and that means hopefully you bring in more and more different constituencies. I think, for instance, one constituency who I would expect to attend more in numbers this year than in previous years, are those related to the TV industry, of course, because of everything that's happening in video. We wouldn't have expected to necessarily see them at the podcast show a few years ago. So I'm sure it will continue to evolve with other constituencies getting involved, and of course, if we can find a valid reason why the music industry should be there, then I think that would make sense.

Sam Sethi 49:11

So let's move on then, given your background and the way that the podcast industry is moving towards video. We've seen YouTube adopt the podcasting world, we've seen Spotify, we saw the exclusives within Spotify come and go. Um, where do you see video at the moment as a podcaster? Is that something that you have to is it analysis to do where are we?

Steve Ackerman 49:33

Well, first of all, I think we need to come at video with just great optimism. I'm a little bit sniffy about the folks who get agitated about video and argue about whether is it a podcast or not? Frankly, who really cares? The point is it's allowing podcasters to reach new audiences on other platforms, and certainly all the research I've seen shows that video does not cannibalise audio, it's additive. It finds new folk, and that can only be great for the industry. Do you have to have video? Not for every show, but I think certainly if I was starting a regular show now, a weekly show and always on show, I think you'd be pretty crazy not to be thinking about video. We've obviously got Spotify and YouTube in play, we know Apple's coming. In fact, the BBC, for those in the UK, have just announced today that they're extending what they do on the video side, and of course it's going to keep on rolling out amongst other folks as well. So video has to be part of the ecosystem now, and it's a good thing it is. It's opening up new revenue streams, it's opening up new creative opportunities.

Sam Sethi 50:29

Do you think Spotify's video entry has been successful? It's now been going for 12 months. What's your take on it?

Steve Ackerman 50:37

I think it's been I think it's been successful for those shows that are big enough to see a good return on revenue. I think the challenge with Spotify has been the mid-range, the lower range shows. For some of those shows, it just doesn't make sense to put your show on video on Spotify. And I think the other potential challenge for Spotify is every 12 or 18 months there's a different strategy. And of course that reflects the way the world's changing very quickly as well. And I wouldn't be surprised if on the video front they have to make some adjustments again. And that's partly because they were one of the first movers, and so credit to them for that. But also because obviously, as we just mentioned, other platforms are now evolving or doing other things, and that's going to throw up questions for Spotify. So has it been a success? Well, I think credit to them for getting in there early and sort of forcing the hand of other folks. But I think it depends who you speak to. Some folks will say it's been really good for them, and other folks will say it hasn't been so useful.

Sam Sethi 51:34

Apple. They've just got into the video game, they've done it in a roundabout way. I think it's controlling the flow of video because they've gone to four partners, they're using an API, they're not using OpenRSS. What do you think Apple will do with this? Will it be a success or do you think this is going to be something that they dip their toes in and like Spotify sort of drift along?

Steve Ackerman 51:54

Well, I'm sure Apple are the same as most platforms. Of course, you want to look at what's the audience behaviour and how is it impacting on the platform. I'm less bothered about the fact that a few partners are involved, first of all. They're big partners, they come with a lot of shows. And of course, you have to start somewhere, and it's pretty difficult to roll something out immediately. But I think the Apple announcement's a really exciting one. First of all, the folks at Apple are really thoughtful. We shouldn't forget they've been supporters of the podcast industry for a long time, and they should get some credit for that. And on the video side, I think what they've announced is really exciting, especially because they're going to allow dynamic ad insertion. And I think that's a really important development. You know, YouTube announced that last year, they haven't announced when that's rolling out. But I think that's a really important development because ultimately I do think that can be a revenue game changer. At the moment, unless you really have huge amounts of views on YouTube, it's not a fantastic monetization channel. It's fantastic for getting views and marketing your show. It's not a fantastic way to make money if you're a medium or small size show, which of course the majority of the shows are. I think what Apple are offering, that chance for you to sell your own ads into video and to really maximise that inventory, because of course you can have different ads in different territories, or you can take an ad out and replace it with another one after a few months. I think that's a really big move. And I'm looking forward to hopefully when YouTube announced the date, when they'll start doing that as well.

Sam Sethi 53:10

Spotify have a totally different model. They pay a percentage of revenue from the subscription. It's really interesting when you look at it. So Apple have pushed the owners back on to the hosting companies, the ACAS, the AdWiz, to say, look, you serve the ads, you control that part of it. But then there's Apple taking a cut of that money, so they're making it a revenue generator. Whereas Spotify have done it the other way around, they're saying we're going to generate revenue from subscriptions and give you a percentage of that revenue. Do you think they will change that whole model now to mimic what Apple are doing and maybe bring other partners into the Spotify video market?

Steve Ackerman 53:45

I think it depends on the confidence Spotify feel around their model, and that's something that's going to be very private to them internally in the discussions they have. Without doubt, Apple doing what they're doing, and as I said, if YouTube do roll out what they've said they're going to do, which is basically the same thing as Apple, I think potentially that does put Spotify a little bit on the back foot. However, we all know by now, don't bet against Spotify because, all right, they're innovators and experimenters, and there's loads of things you can point to that sometimes they try and don't get right. But at the end of the day, there's plenty of things they have got right, and they've also been super important for the growth of podcasts and the podcast ecosystem. And I would love to be a fly on the wall inside Spotify and privy to the discussions they had because genuinely I'm not sure you or I can really call it. I think they're gonna know what they're trying to develop as an ecosystem and how much they feel threatened or not by what Apple and YouTube are doing.

Sam Sethi 54:36

I think one of the telling things is there's no data coming out of them on success metrics, and that often tells me that it's not going the way they want. But we'll see, you're right, we're not privy to it. Now, one of the other things that you did before, you had a company called Something Else that produced a lot of content for radio and then you went into multi-content production, so you were doing social media and podcasting. Given what the BBC have just announced, that companies who are independent podcast companies can now monetize that. Would that have been a really big milestone when when you're running something else? W where's your take on it, given your background?

Steve Ackerman 55:12

Yeah, it no, it would have been really important, and frankly, for many years we tried having discussions with the BBC around being able to monetize the the content we were making away from the BBC, admittedly a different time. This is almost pre-podcasting, really. And even once podcasting started, I do remember a conversation that someone at Something Else had with a BBC exec with a BBC exec say, What do you mean if there's a market for you to take your shows to in podcasting? Of course there isn't. It's just that. And they could not get their heads around the fact that we were already speaking with companies in America or obviously platforms like Spotify or Audible about shows. So that's changed now. The BBC are definitely both feet in in terms of podcasting. And I've always felt the BBC has a really special role in the UK creative ecosystem, which is to help the creative industries. They did a brilliant job of that with the TV independent production sector. They have done a good job of that with the audio production sector. But I felt as audio has become a space that can be more commercialised, where ad revenue becomes important, and of course where IP becomes important, I think maybe the BBC has been a little bit slow reacting here. I know the discussions have been taking place for a long time. The wheel has been there, I know, from folks inside the BBC, but of course it's a slow-moving beast. But I do think it's a real plus they're doing it now. It's only a positive and it's only to be encouraged.

Sam Sethi 56:30

So one of the other players that's come into the market is Netflix. Left field suddenly announced it. One of my takes is that Netflix is a nighttime platform. YouTube is a daytime platform for me. I know a lot of people now consume content on YouTube on their main screen, but Netflix have highlighted that YouTube is one of their biggest, if not their biggest, competitor. Why have they gone into podcasting and will it be a success in your opinion?

Steve Ackerman 56:54

Well, I don't think I'm the first person to really describe what Netflix are are doing as a chat show strategy. And when you look at what a traditional TV-style chat show might have cost, if you look at the late night shows on US network TV, these are shows crewed up by 150 people, expensive hosts, big sets, live audiences. They're expensive shows to make. And yet, really, when you break down the content, it's it's pretty similar to what podcasts are doing. In fact, you might argue inferior because you get five or ten minutes of conversation with a huge name, and then of course they move on to the next guest or the next feature, as opposed to exactly what we know with podcasts, that amazing ability to really have a very long conversation with someone in a way you may not have heard them before. So I think it's a fantastic move from Netflix. It's gonna be really interesting to see if it performs for them. But of course, all the metrics are saying that screen consumption of podcasts is going up continually. And I'm not sure I quite agree with you about YouTube being a daytime medium and Netflix being a nighttime medium. I think particularly if you're going for younger audiences, I I don't think that's necessarily true. I think YouTube is-being an old person, I wouldn't know that. Yeah, well, and listen, I'm alongside you, two old phages together, but when you look at lots of the research, it doesn't necessarily true. And so of course, YouTube, if you see it in that context, actually becomes even more of a competitor with Netflix than I think even your question may have suggested. So it's absolutely the right strategy, and again, what a fantastic thing for podcasting, right? If ever there was an example of podcasting eating TV's lunch or eating the lunch of TV production companies, this is it.

Sam Sethi 58:30

Somebody that always gets left out of this conversation is Amazon. I just never hear anyone on any podcast go, oh, and of course Amazon are gonna be able to do it. Never hear it. What's happening? Why this sleepy giant not doing anything?

Steve Ackerman 58:44

Well, I think Amazon is fascinating. In a way, we might have said the same about Apple until the announcement a few weeks ago. First move advantage isn't necessarily an advantage when you're in this space. Because of course Apple and Amazon and the like can throw huge amounts of resource at something as soon as they decide that's the direction they want to go in. So I would be amazed if Amazon don't do something in this space in the next, I don't know, 12 to 24 months. But let's see. The point is, if they want to move, they can move pretty fast, and therefore the fact they haven't done anything yet, I don't think is a lack of indication of ambition going forward.

Sam Sethi 59:19

So now you can take your Sony hat off, given your ability to look back, where does Sony fit in all this ecosystem?

Steve Ackerman 59:26

That's a great question. I think Sony Music's focus and certainly the brief I had and everything we tried to develop was always on trying to develop an IP-focused business. And the aim for Sony Music was never to be the biggest player in the market because they don't need to do that. They just need to prove the model. And I think we started to do that, and frankly, Sony Music is definitely one of the few businesses that is in both of the major markets of the US and UK. So there's lots of ways in which Sony Music's making the right impression. They're also one of the few places I think that has a full-service podcast business, by which I mean in-house creative, marketing, ad sales, subscription, and that allows that team to experiment in lots of different ways. So I would keep my eyes on what they're doing. They continue to be a really dynamic bunch of people with great leadership, and I certainly will be fascinated to see what comes next.

Sam Sethi 1:00:16

So, given that you've had one foot in the US and thankfully haven't got a transatlantic accent, you're back home. I've heard you say that America is dynamic, it's a bigger market. But when I look at the UK market, I look at Goalhanger, I look at Persophonica, I look at Crowd Network, I look at all the satellite production companies around that, I look at PodX, the London Podcast Show. It's a real buzz over here in the UK. There's a real energy. So why can't we compete with America? What's holding us back?

Steve Ackerman 1:00:45

Well, I don't think it is that we can't compete. I think you just can't underestimate the size of the market in the States. And this is obviously not just a podcasting thing, this is true for any industry, right? It is just huge and ginormous. And therefore, frankly, you can have a medium-sized show in the States and earn really phenomenal money out of that show in a way that is more difficult here. We all know that folks like Dolhanger want to break the States, they've got the rest of history that does well over there, but I think they haven't had many other shows that have really penetrated over there, and that's I'm sure be part of the churn in investment. And the challenge now is really canceling those companies start to create shows and content that can appeal to US audiences. So the skill is a big thing. I also feel that for a lot of our production sector, and this doesn't apply to goalhanger, but it does apply to some production companies, there's still that reliance on the commissioned model, as opposed to the willingness to back yourself or to go out and raise money so that you can release your own shows. Purst of Ponica, great example where they're doing that. But I think in the States you see that far more often. People willing to venture, to back themselves. There is a need to ability to raise money, so that's certainly true. But they go in with a mindset of I want to create a business that has value, that has IP, as opposed to here, where I think a number of production companies have gone in with a view of I want to earn money, and that's not quite the same as creating value in a business.

Sam Sethi 1:02:03

I come from an entrepreneur background. I've been in the UK entrepreneur space for about 30 years, and one of the biggest challenges is you talked about raising money. It's fascinating that Goldhanger went US to raise their money. They didn't raise it in the UK. I think that is one of the biggest things that holds back the UK is the VC scene in the UK. It's all focused on financials and fintech. If you're Revolute, you'll raise billions. But if you're a podcast company, I don't think you can raise the numbers. I saw this morning a company raised five million for a little badged device. And it's like, how can you raise five million dollars for that? And yet you try and raise that in the UK, they wouldn't give you 50p and a miles bar.

Steve Ackerman 1:02:43

Look, the stereotype is true. There is a greater risk-taking culture there. There is an easier access to money, there's much greater levels of wealth. You cannot believe what wealth looks like until you live in the States and see what the very wealthiest, the sort of lifestyle that the very wealthiest can sort of buy. And I'm not saying that as a positive or negative, it's just an observation. But there is an easier route to money, and it is true, VCs here, I think, are not so willing to take risks. But of course, part of that is also the ambition we have as an industry. And I'd really encourage folks to get away from the slightly, certainly in the UK, the slightly inward-looking mentality. And I do think one thing that folks in the States do really well, and I've mentioned this a few times, is they're great at puffing their chest out and looking upwards and being ambitious. And actually, when you look at the UK, I think you could apply this to some degree around Europe as well, but certainly the UK is a creative powerhouse across multiple industries, including the podcasting industry. We are home to the greatest filmmakers, musicians, TV producers, audio producers, script writers, authors. The list goes on and on. We're a fantastic created nation. And I would like folks in the UK to slightly look upwards and realize that with that comes the ability to achieve greater things. Look, in the something else days, we were able to just do the obvious, which was to say there's money in the state, let's see if we can pick up work there. And we opened up an office there. We had two or three people working there because we could see there was an opportunity there. And so it is also on the shoulders of folks who run businesses or would like to run businesses to have that ambition also and to look outward and to think how can I grow my business and where is the opportunity?

Sam Sethi 1:04:14

The last hot topic that everyone's talking about currently is AI. Not in the production sense. I don't think that's a problem. And you've got people who use it to create transcripts, to do things like Apple with timed links, to do things like creating show notes. That's all a great use of what I call assisted intelligence AI. But there's a lot now that's coming around with voice-related AI. And Inception Point AI is one of those companies that is churning 3,000 plus podcasts out a week. It's really is the definition of slot. But that isn't going to be the only place where AI voice is used. Where do you sit on the fence of AI?

Steve Ackerman 1:04:50

Well, I don't think when you work in a creative industry like ours, you can be a Luddite in the sense of putting your hands on your ears and just saying, I'm not going to join in the conversation. We all know within the way we're all working that AI is bringing lots of positive things just in the basic ways that we work, research or writing or whatever. I think when it comes to creativity, I do think AI is something to offer. I'm fascinated with what that can mean for translation and putting shows into different languages. I'm fascinated for what that can mean in terms of speed of movement around editing. Already a bunch of companies that I know are certainly using AI for the generation of their social media assets, which obviously, again, allows them to be properly multi-platform production companies without necessarily incurring crazy costs. So I think there's lots of positive ways in which creativity can be applied. Do we want AI slot with 3,000? I'm definitely on the side of the argument that says no, but that's because I'm a defender of creativity and I always will be. We're a creative industry, and creative always has to come first on everything that is done. Ultimately, we're about serving audiences, and I don't think serving audiences is giving them something to listen to or watch that frankly isn't very good.

Sam Sethi 1:05:57

Now, last question. Giving your time in Sony and you were looking outbound towards the industry, one of the areas that I spend a lot of my time in, and James and Adam Curry and Dave Jones and many other people is in what we've termed podcasting 20 oh. I'm always curious because we are slightly myopic in our view. We're talking about it all the time in this small little niche group. Does it actually resonate outside to people like you and Tony when you were there? You know, or is it oh, what's that? No, not bothered. Move on until it gets to Apple adding transcripts or apple adding chat. Which came out of the work from that group. Is it just an annoyance or a background noise, or do you actually take note of any of that stuff going on?

Steve Ackerman 1:06:37

No, I think it's a bit of both. Innovation comes in lots of different shapes and sizes. I'm a massive believer in innovation and just constantly looking for improvement. And again, I think as long as we keep our eyes on the prize, which is not about what makes us as producers or as an industry feel good. It's about the audience. It's always got to be about the audience. And so when you look at things like chapterisation or transcript, well, frankly, if that helps the audience to consume in a better way, then of course it's a good thing, and of course it should be part of the conversation. And therefore, anyone who's having those conversations should be encouraged. It's a positive thing.

Sam Sethi 1:07:09

Last but not least, then Steve, where are you going to be in the world? Where are you? Are you going to be at podcast movement? Are you going to be in the South by Southwest, the London Podcast Show? Where can we find you next?

Netflix and Podcasts

Steve Ackerman 1:07:18

Definitely going to be at the podcast show, seeing as a city now part of the team. I think for the next few months I'll be giving a few other events a skip, only because having lived outside the UK for a few years, I had a lot of time on aeroplanes and I'm quite a bit to have a few months less so. I'm going to see how things settle down with other events, but I think to my mind there were some podcast events that'll become less valuable than others. So we'll see how things settle down there. But I'll certainly be at the podcast show. I've certainly been at a few other sort of creative industry-related events like Ad Week. So yeah, come and say hi. If you're listening today and we haven't met before, come and say hi to me.

Sam Sethi 1:07:51

Lovely. Steve Ackerman, thank you so much. Congratulations on a wonderful career so far. Congratulations on the move into the London Podcast Show. I think that's going to be an exciting move for you.

James Cridland 1:08:01

Well done. Thanks, and appreciate it. PodcastShow London.com is where to get tickets. Both uh Sam and I will be there recording this very show, in fact. Uh, so uh you should definitely come along to that.

Sam Sethi 1:08:14

Now, in the no shit Sherlock, Netflix has announced something that we knew would happen, or at least it's come out. Bloomberg's reporting it. Moving over to Netflix seems to be bad news for creators, at least those who want to reach a large number of people. Could have told you that. Um, it's saying that with new subscribers dropping by 50% for many channels. James, why did anyone want to do this?

James Cridland 1:08:41

Yes, um, well, you know, I mean, uh you would kind of expect that new subscribers are going to drop significantly if you stop putting your main shows on those channels on YouTube. Um, but uh why would anybody want to get onto Netflix? Well, because Netflix sounds good, doesn't it? And also Netflix pays you a lot of money. So therefore, let's take the money and um and it matters a little bit less in terms of total uh numbers. Um, but I just think um yeah, it does it doesn't really come as a surprise, and it's interesting. I mean, this is the only data so far that Ashley Carmen seems to have been able to get hold of in terms of um consumption data there. One would assume that if Netflix had some pretty good consumption data in terms of the podcasts that were on the service, we would have heard about it by now. And the fact that they haven't, the fact that they haven't sent any to Ashley or to the Hollywood Reporter or to whoever um says that hmm, maybe there's something interesting going on there.

Sam Sethi 1:09:46

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results, said Einstein. And I think that's what we're gonna see with Netflix copying the Spotify exclusive strategy, but we'll find out. Now, their CFO, Spencer New Newman, uh said on Netflix, video podcasts are watch more on mobile, I'll watch more during the day. So is that achieving their goals or is he manifesting forward what he would like them to achieve?

James Cridland 1:10:13

Well, let me quote him uh entirely correctly. Our video podcasts are over-indexing on time of day, like morning and afternoon, relative to our core subscription TV film on-demand offering. Similarly, podcasts are over-indexing on the mobile device, so that's pretty cool. So they are being watched more on mobile, but not necessarily the majority of watching is on mobile, if you see what I mean.

Sam Sethi 1:10:39

Um Aaron Nissenblatt responded to this, I thought were brilliant. It's because you can put your phone in your pocket, unlike your TV, and take it on the go to listen. That's the answer.

James Cridland 1:10:48

Yes, and you know, I mean, you would kind of yes, exactly, you would kind of expect that. But yeah, you know, I think Netflix, um, clearly they need to tell a good story about um their podcast uh acquisition stuff so far, which is still only in the US. You can't watch any podcast anywhere else in the world, um, which is weird. Um, I think that Netflix you'll you'll be able to watch um the rest is football for a little bit over the World Cup, um, a bit more globally, but we'll see how all of that bit works. But uh yeah, clearly Netflix needs to release some numbers, but the fact that they are releasing numbers that are such so clouded in, you know, overindexing on the time of day says that it's not necessarily doing very well uh for them. And what happens to podcasting if Netflix turns around in a year and says, actually, podcasts are shit, aren't they? We'll get rid of them. Um, it won't look very good for us.

Sam Sethi 1:11:44

Well, yes, indeed. Um, now uh Netflix failed to purchase Warner Brothers, uh, no surprise. Um the company has been given a spare 2.8 billion by Paramount. Yes. What are they gonna do with it, James?

James Cridland 1:12:00

Well, what are they going to do with it? That's a great question. Uh, Max Cutler has written a long article, which uh I mean, kudos to him. Uh, he's written a long article for the Hollywood Reporter, basically uh uh saying, I'm your man, I've got lots and lots and lots of ideas for you if you want to buy Pave uh with your $2.8 billion. And why not? Absolutely. He suggests short form content. Ah um he says that Quibi was just too early, and uh I mean brave of him to pull up Quibi, but anyway, uh he said he says that um uh Quibi was just too early, but you know, short form content is a thing. Content from creators, so um stop having um uh big studios in the middle um and uh look at creator-led content, and also taking popular podcast exclusive because that worked so well on Spotify. Um so hang on a minute, it worked well for Max Cutler. He got bought by Spotify, didn't he? Well, yes, it did. It worked very well for him. So um, but you know, good on him for um thinking, oh, this is this is what I should do. And of course, he's big enough that if he contacts a Hollywood reporter and he says, Oh, I've got some ideas of what Netflix should do with their cash. Do you want this as an article? The Hollywood reporter turns around and says, Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. So I think from that point of view, it all worked. So congratulations to Max um uh for that. Talking about Spotify, where Max uh Cutler was, uh, because of course he used to head up Parcast. Um they have given a new set of creator milestone awards uh to uh podcasters, including a Spotify Creator Milestone award to Spotify's Bill Simmons. Well done, Bill Simmons. There you go. Yes, uh only one new podcast managed to reach gold, which you need 500 million streams for, uh, and that is the true crime show, Morbid. Um, but uh they have um some more um some more gaudy uh awards on their desk. So congratulations uh to them. They're also doing uh things to do with K-pop videos, which is all very exciting, um, which my uh daughter will be thrilled about. Um and then finally, did you hear what Louis Thoreau said about podcasts? This is brilliant. Go on, play it. This is absolutely brilliant. This is his introduction to a show that he did with Jimmy Carr, uh, as a matter of fact, and he started it by saying Hello there and welcome back to the Louis Thoreau podcast, or if you're watching it on Spotify, the Louis Thoreau Slightly Shit TV show. Slightly shit TV show.

People News

Sam Sethi 1:14:38

I could see the Spotify PR people spilling their lattes now.

James Cridland 1:14:42

Yes, and Louis Thoreau is paid to do that show by Spotify.

Sam Sethi 1:14:46

I know brilliant, but at least he's honest. At least he's honest is what you want.

Speaker 4 1:14:53

Yeah.

Sam Sethi 1:14:54

I mean, fundamentally, what was it? The the Netflix show that has no RSS feed, that has the SAGAFRA podcast agreement. That's that's another shit TV show as well.

James Cridland 1:15:05

Well, I mean it might be a good TV show, who knows, but uh it certainly isn't a podcast. Right as we can tell you.

Human Announcer 1:15:11

People news on the Pod News Weekly Review.

James Cridland 1:15:16

Yes, in terms of people and jobs, Cuminus Media has filed for bankruptcy. As you know in America, filing for bankruptcy is just uh it's is just um um uh a piece of time. Clean the decks. Well clean the decks. It's I mean it's not really, is it? It's just a piece of paper. And they go, oh look, uh we we're in bankruptcy now, we've got chapter 11 protection, we'll get rid of $600 million worth of debt, and that's basically it. So nobody will really lose any jobs or anything else. Um, and it it's no surprise that Cumulus Media has filed for bankruptcy. Um, all of their competitors have in the last decade. In fact, even Cumulus itself um uh last filed for bankruptcy less than 10 years ago. Uh, iHeartMedia also filed for bankruptcy in Odyssey, of course. Um, and so Cumulus Media is there again. Uh, I have foolishly signed up to the alert system in the US bankruptcy court. Uh there in the amount of emails, it's a big old company, and the amount of emails that I'm getting um is quite fascinating. But yes, uh, some of those emails will contain some really interesting stuff. So I'm looking forward to the really interesting ones. Um and Apple Podcasts has a job going. If you would like a job at Apple Podcasts, I think it's um I think it's at California, I think it's at Culver City, I don't think it's at Cupertino, uh, but I could be wrong there. Anyway, um uh they are looking for an audience-minded and innovative expert with genuine video expertise to work as their content strategy and programming manager. Um uh would you like to know how much you will get paid if you get it's anywhere between 121,000 and 230,000 American dollars. Right. Where where am I applying? Plus benefits. Uh, where are you applying? Podnews.net slash jobs. Uh exactly. But yeah, um, so that's going to be fascinating to help inform and editorialise our new video podcast offering. Now you might ask yourself, and I think that this would be a sensible question to ask, why are they only doing this now? Um, when they could have been hiring somebody, obviously not mentioning the word video, but they could have been hiring somebody um uh four or five months ago so that they would be able to start on day one with the brand new Apple Podcasts um fancy new video thing. Um so I'm a bit confused about that one, but uh yes, you're reporting.

Sam Sethi 1:17:51

Well no, it would have let the cat out of the bag, wouldn't it? I mean, if they'd said we want a Apple Podcast video expert.

James Cridland 1:17:56

Oh well yes, of course. But but they could have they could have been looking for a content strategy and programming manager and not used the video word. Uh I'm sure that that would work. Um they appear to be reporting to the head of content strategy and programming of Apple Podcasts. Um do you know who that is? No. No, me neither. Um, but I don't appear to be able to see anything that says um who that person is. So there we are. Oh, hang on a minute. There is someone here, and it's somebody that we've never heard of. Wow. Somebody who we've never heard of. Have you ever heard of Greg Herman?

Sam Sethi 1:18:35

Nope.

James Cridland 1:18:35

Nope. No, me neither. As head of content strategy and programming at Apple Podcasts, I help people discover podcasts they'll love. Our team recommends and curates shows and episodes across Apple Podcasts to help listeners find something new and help creators reach new audiences.

Sam Sethi 1:18:53

It doesn't really matter. He'll never do an interview. Why should I care?

Awards and Events

The Tech Stuff

James Cridland 1:18:57

Well, it's interesting you say that. I have put in uh again a request to Do I need to retract that now? Well, I've put in a request to Apple and I've said you've got so many good programming people across the world. Um, you've got people in uh Canada who I've met, you've got people in the UK who I've met, you've got people in Australia who I've met, you've got some really, really good people. This is a uh this is your secret source as a podcast app is the fact that you have all of these very talented uh content people in your uh in your company. Um I would really like to spotlight some of them and talk to them about what makes for a great podcast and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. And um and Apple has said, Oh, that's interesting. When are you thinking of doing that? And I said, Well, any any time that works for you, and they said, Okay, well, we'll think about it. I'm sure I'm sure that they will hopefully hold your breath, is what I'd say. Well, I'm sure that they'll hopefully come back to me at some point in the future. But uh yeah, so Greg Herman, that's his name. Right, let's have a look at awards and events then, shall we? Go, then South by Southwest, of course, happening uh next week. Um, and um podcast movement uh is there, podcast movement evolutions sounds profitable, is there. Uh if you want my advice, turn up early. Uh make sure you're on the list, first of all. Um go to podcastmovement.com uh uh and uh turn up early. If you've got a South by Southwest badge, then even better because you'll be able to skip a bit more of the queue there. Uh but my understanding is there's more people than there is space. Uh so go in as early as you possibly can. Um elsewhere going on, and by the way, Sam and I will not be there, sorry. Um so elsewhere going on, uh Empowered Podcasting Conference 3. Uh that's a good name, isn't it? Um uh that has a confirmed title sponsor. It's in uh Charlotte in North Carolina in the US uh in mid-August, and it's got a confirmed title sponsor of Ralph EStep Jr., um, the content creators accountant. And why do we know about Ralph Estep Jr.? Well, he's also a power supporter for this very show, and he's also a supporter for the Pod News Daily as well. Um, so uh Ralph, thank you uh so much for what you do for the industry, and thank you for being the title sponsor for the Empowered Podcasting Conference. I have heard so many good things about that conference. Yes, if I can work out how to get there, I will, but uh I'd need to work out how to get there, so that's a thing. Um and next week uh is Podcast Thon, which is a big week for podcasting. Um uh lots of people uh supporting this, but also lots of people doing specific shows about your favourite charity. That's all you have to do. Uh, there's more information at podcastthon.org.

Sam Sethi 1:21:54

And uh just add captivate, congratulations for being the supporter and sponsor of it as well. Yes, indeed.

Human Announcer 1:22:00

The Tuck stuff on the Pod News Weekly Review.

James Cridland 1:22:05

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

Sam Sethi 1:22:11

Well, I'm gonna ask you some questions, James. It's been an interesting deb well, you know, go to the source. Um now, uh there's been some interesting debates on the GitHub related to transcripts. And uh one of the questions that's floating around is you know, at the moment the transcript tag has multiple formats text, HTML, SRT, VTT. And uh the question was should we now adopt one single format, which is VTT, which is what Apple support? Um, should we replace the JSON format, which is currently popular amongst podcasting 2.0 apps, um, and just have one? What are your thoughts?

James Cridland 1:22:56

Well, I think from um uh from my point of view, what I am keen to do is to look at what people are doing in terms of the podcast transcription tag in this particular case, and then work out um is there something that we should be doing with the uh with the specification to make it easier, to make it simpler. And so in the current guise of the uh podcast transcription tag, um then you can produce a transcript in SRT format, in txt format, in HTML format, in JSON format, and in Web VTT format. Um, my uh proposal would be to get rid of most of those. Um get rid of the SRT file because that is not as helpful as it as the VTT file. Um, VTT files are supported by browsers, um they are supported by you know all kinds of things. It's very easy, by the way, to make an SRT file from a VTT file, but just make it simpler for those of us who are making shows, but also those of us who are making podcast apps and everything else, just get rid of the SRT file because we don't need it, and just have a VTT file in there. Similarly, um, getting rid of the uh of a text-only version of the transcript, you can build that from the VTT file if you really want to. Um that might be useful as well. So there's um a lot of sort of simplification there, just making it easier, instead of following the rather complicated spec as we do now. Let's make the spec simpler and easier. We lose nothing from that. Um, and that should be a good thing for all of us, I think.

Sam Sethi 1:24:52

Now, Web VTT has chapter support, but we also have four chapter formats as well. So, what do you reckon we should do there?

James Cridland 1:25:00

Well, Web VTT has chapter support. The chapter support, my understanding is, isn't supported particularly well in browsers, and anyway, the point of chapters is that um in uh in VTT you you can label a chapter name, but you can't add links to it. So it's not actually capable of what we would want in terms of um podcast chapters. Um, we already have three different chapter formats. I really don't want a fourth one. And so uh to make something which is easier and simpler for everybody to code to does not include adding a fourth chapter to the three standards that we are already using in the podcast world. So please know um your web your web VTT is there as your captions file, and that's what it's there for.

Sam Sethi 1:25:55

Okay. Now here's one that I uh saw Dave Jones posted about it on Mastodon. Um Castro Podcasts, who have their own podcasts, have launched uh another app called PodSeek. Did you have a look at this one, James?

James Cridland 1:26:09

Yeah, that's interesting, isn't it? Um uh yes, why are they doing that instead of um shoving that uh uh code into Well I I I did download PodSeq and fundamentally disappointed is the this summary I'd say.

Sam Sethi 1:26:25

I you know, when I read the it takes full advantage of podcasting 2.0, gives the richest possible experience to get from an RSS feed and includes transcripts, funding, person tags. I was going great, new app, let's have a look at it. And then I downloaded it and uh it was basically taking I I don't know if you recall, Spotify had a trailer feed that it you could do on the mobile where you could flick through vertically, um horizontally. Oh, yeah, yeah. Sorry, vertically. Uh and you know, a bit like a Tinder or bit, you know, whatever. And you you then say, Oh, I like this one, add it to my playlist, add it to my playlist. They've taken that concept for discovery by using AI to do a little bit about what PodgeShrink did, which is what we talked about last week, you know, giving you a summary um of the show, and then you go, Oh, that sounds interesting, I'll listen to that one. That seems very clever, but then you get into the actual app and it's very, very uh basic, is the only way I can describe it. And some of the RSS 2.0 features or podcasting 2.0 features are missing that I couldn't see. So I don't know if it's a this is our alpha trial testy stuff that we're gonna be doing, we're gonna throw it out the front door, and then we're gonna bring it into Castro as part of the main product, or vice versa, we're building this new version of a product and we'll deprecate Castro once his version is fully up and running. I don't know which way they go.

The Inbox

James Cridland 1:27:52

Well well, the one thing that you will be able to do with PodSeek is um it uses the um the foundation models on your iPhone, the AI on your iPhone to do various things about, you know, answers pulled from, you know, what does Adam Curry think about this? Or what does, you know, um uh what does Joe Rogan think about this? Because it's gone through, it's already produced all of the transcripts automatically, it can then use that as a training set of data and all of that. But um there's n I there's nothing particularly unusual about that it that there've been products. Available for that for many years now. So I'm not sure that it's a particularly exciting thing, but always good to see new apps. So worthwhile taking a quick peek at PodSeek if you want to. The Castro, I mean, of course, the benefit of Castro building it is that Castro already has all of the boring podcast stuff is already done. The podcast directories and the links to RSS feeds and all of that. All of that stuff is already done. So this is essentially a bunch of new ideas put over an existing podcast app.

Sam Sethi 1:29:05

Watch this space. And finally, uh Friends of the Show, Headliner, has added a social media scheduler, allowing you to control when and how your podcast and video content is shared across different platforms.

Human Announcer 1:29:18

Booster, Booster, Boostergram, Super Super Comments, Zaps, Fan Mail, Fanmail, Super Chats, and email. Our favorite time of the week, it's the Pod News Weekly Review inbox.

James Cridland 1:29:32

Yeah, so many different ways to get in touch with us. Fan mail by using the link in our show notes or boosts or email, and we share any money that we make as well. Two boosts this week from the ugly quacking duck. Thank you, Bruce, using Podcast Guru. Two, two, two, two sats. So it's another um row of ducks. Um and he says, I'm running a week behind on episodes. I am still here, and glad you two are also. Thank you for the episode 73, and that's very kind of you. Uh Bruce, uh, thank you uh for that. Do we have any messages in TrueFans as well?

Sam Sethi 1:30:09

We do. Uh Seth Goldstein sent us 142 sats and said, Great interview. Spotify should be watching very closely to what Apple is doing, and they will adjust time will tell. And I think that's when we were talking about changing Spotify's model to more like Apple's API model. Um Silas sent us 222 sats. Um I actually had to pause the show because I was in a store when you played that AI summary. I started smiling like an insane person due to how dry and off-putting that AI summary was. There you go. Yes. Um we Silas went on to say, I'm hard at work on my app. Uh, I think this was the no, it's still the same one, but it's from this week's show. Uh, none of you saw my leak of how my search engine works. I posted on podcastindex.social. That was a couple of weeks back after James mentioned some search thing where he couldn't find himself. Right, there you go.

James Cridland 1:31:06

Oh well, well, there you go. Uh Silas, thank you uh for that. Thank you also. Martin Lindescog, who has said his goal is to adhere to the gamification of the leaderboard on TrueFans and try and catch up with super fan Neil Vellio in the near future. Correct. This is exactly what you should be doing. Maybe it could happen around my birthday, the end of May. Uh, maybe it could happen around my birthday, Martin, which is uh next week. I'm glad to see that you have the ducks in a row, James and Sam, with or without the trivia fact-checking stuff. It's good to hear that you have an AI editor. Not so sure about that bit. But uh yes, uh, thank you, Martin. That's very kind of you. And again, another row of ducks uh from you as well.

Sam Sethi 1:31:45

There's a great programme on Radio 4, which is um you've got to sneak seven facts into a 30-second conversation piece, and then people have got to work out if those facts were true or false. Maybe we should try that in this show. I think we who knows. Who knows?

Sam and James's week

James Cridland 1:32:02

That might be a good thing. Yes. I wonder I wonder who would play the part of David Mitchell. Um, thank you also to our power supporters. Rachel Corbett is one of those, also Rocky Thomas is one of those, Ms. Eileen Smith, Claire Waite Brown uh is also uh one as well. Uh it's uh good to see you all uh supporting us, and uh thank you uh for doing that during International Women's Month. And uh you too can be a power supporter. Just visit weekly.podnews.net. We really appreciate that help that um uh keeps us going. Uh and that's an excellent thing. This isn't uh part of the big Pod News conglomerate. Uh this is just Sam and I. Uh so thank you uh for doing that too. And what's happened for you this week, Sam?

Sam Sethi 1:32:47

Well, I don't know if you listened to it, but I listened to Katie Law's podcast interview with Justin Jackson. Obviously, she was on the show last week where you interviewed her. Um, she did an interview with Justin about Podcasting 2.0 and the Apple video announcement. But what I found most interesting was it was on Substack. There was a it was a live podcast video podcast, and then after that it was available as a private feed. Um, and then eventually it was in her RSS feed. So I think it's just obviously uh something that I'm watching closely, what Substack does. Um, but I was I I I like the fact that it was live, and it's interesting because m um, you know, lots of YouTube people do live as well. Um we talked about Podbean getting rid of their live. So um I don't know. I just think it's it's an interesting model. And um if you have a look at her Substack as well, um she's using you know um certain episodes are paid episodes as well. So again, a bit like supercars, a bit like Patreon. I see this as where I see um the next generation of podcasting for me is you know, audio, video, and uh paid subscriptions. So yeah.

James Cridland 1:34:03

Yeah, no, it is, it's very good. It's very good. Well worth um well worth a listen. Uh Pod the North is the podcast that you need to go and find. And uh anything, anything true fans that you want to tell us anything that you're launching next week? I'm sure you're launching something.

Sam Sethi 1:34:16

Well, no, I can't launch it until you get a press release. So uh press release on its way. Yes, we uh are ready to launch our video hosting, so we're gonna be doing that at $30 a month. Um, and it's MP4 based and it is streaming. And yes, I will document it before you ask. We're gonna send you a link after this so you can see a demo of it. Um, but yes, um, we've been working hard on that. So uh yeah, video hosting from TrueFans coming up next week. Excellent, very nice. James, what's happened for you? Come on, I've got this really weird URL in front of me.

James Cridland 1:34:52

Yes, you do. Uh it's a thing called an XTE Inc. It's an X4, it's a tiny, tiny, tiny little ebook reader. Um and uh it's very, very cheap as well. 69 US dollars. So uh really, really cheap. It's a really nice little thing. Uh and the reason why I I thought I would mention it is firstly because you know, uh because I got one of these a w um a couple of months ago, because of course I did. Um, but also secondly, it's it's it's fascinating how these things um how these things work because essentially the um the firmware is pretty awful. Um the software on it is pretty bad. It's not a good user experience. But someone else has worked out how to write the firmware for it and has written some really nice firmware, firmware called CrossPoint, I think. Um so he's written some really nice firmware which does a really, really good job, and it really is the difference between a really not very good product and a product which is excellent to use. And the weird thing is that that difference has been done by some guy who is just doing uh uh an alternative firmware for fun, um, and I just find that fascinating. And the parallels between this little e-ink reader device and podcasting is I think really interesting, where you've got people who are making not very good things, but in you know, as part of their big companies and everything else, and then you've got a bunch of people um within podcasting 2.0 and elsewhere who are going, okay, well, what can we really do here? How can we really play with this? Um, and I just find it fascinating that this is happening in the fur i in the hardware world as well. Um, but yeah, if you're looking for a tiny little, it's um about um it's about half the size of your big iPhone, you know, ProMax. Um it's got a it's got a MagSafe ring on the back so it can actually clip onto your iPhone if you want it to. Um tiny little thing. Um but it's really good as a little ebook reader that you can stuff in your pocket and you don't have to you know carry a bag around. You can just stuff it in your pocket, and if you're waiting for the bus or you're waiting for the train or whatever, and you can just read a couple of pages, it's brilliant and works really, really well. So um so hurrah for the hurrah for them, so far as I'm concerned.

Sam Sethi 1:37:25

Nice, yes. I'm not sure I'll be purchasing one, but very nice.

James Cridland 1:37:29

No, no, well, you know, because you can't read, obviously, so you have to uh use Audibles to read for you. Me and the Donald. Yes. Anyway, uh that's it for this week before we go diving into politics. Uh all of our podcast stories taken from the Pod News Daily Newsletter at Podnews.net.

Sam Sethi 1:37:47

Yeah, you can support this show by streaming Sats. You can give us feedback using the BuzzSprout fan mail link in our show notes. You can send us a boost or become a power supporter like the 23 Power Supporters at weekly.podnews.net.

James Cridland 1:38:00

Our music is from the excellent TM Studios. Very much looking forward to uh seeing uh Chris from TM Studios uh next week in Riga in Latvia. That should be fun. Our voiceover is Sheila D. Our audio is recorded using CleanFeed. We head it, we head it, we head it, we edit. Should have edited that out. Still, there we are. We edit with Hindenburg. Um Nick will be uh in Riga as well. So looking forward to seeing him. And we're hosted and sponsored by Buzz Sprout. Start podcasting, keep podcasting.

Human Announcer 1:38:32

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