Casting 2.0 for April 23 2021, Episode 34 it's all hands on
deck. Like swaby. Get up there in the rigging. everybody.
Welcome to the weekly board meeting for podcasters point oh
podcast index.org, where we discuss everything that's going
on around the big movement, the revolution in podcasting. I'm
Adam curry in Austin, Texas. And in Alabama, the man who has a
head for Hydra and a body for bodybuilding. Ladies and
gentlemen.
I always try to figure out what you're going to lead with. I put
what the show title is going to be. I got I just knew you were
going to do checking all the boxes.
Checking all the boxes. Yeah. Wow, I didn't even think of
that. the check
box that broke the world.
The check box that busted stuff.
Yeah,
I think that the show covers more than the mistakes of mere
small competitors. Wouldn't want to see the fun to seem too petty
or anything like that. So yeah, yeah, it's a jam packed show
today a lot to talk about. We also have special guests
stopping by we've got the co founders of captivate.fm mark
and Kieran will be talking to them and in a bit. But while
Dave, somehow I have the feeling that about a year ago, maybe a
little under a year ago, you and I were talking and we're saying,
you know, what is the what is the apple decided to turn stuff
off for, you know, seems like a week kind of thing in the chain.
And no one's really ever looked at it. And we decided to build
this thing with two missions. One is to preserve podcasting as
a platform for free speech, which you have to actually it
has to work to actually be able to have free speech flowing
through it or any speech, and also retool as a platform of
value for all parties involved. Part one turned out to be pretty
visionary that, that we saw that something could happen and
something did.
Yeah. I mean, so that's, that's the real, you know, burning
question is,
what happened? Is
it? Is it on purpose? Well, to me, it says like, is it on
purpose? Or it? You know, it all boils down to is it is it
malicious? Or is it ignorant, like or incompetence? Okay,
well, that that's the way I've seen it play that's like this,
both sides of the spectrum there, but I don't, I really
just don't think it's either. I think it's a middle. I think
it's the middle of the road issue. And I mean, just for
clarity, what you know, what we're talking about, is that,
oh, my god, you're a good podcaster. Well done. Well
played.
Thank you. Thank you. I'll take that. The the issue here is that
Apple is Apple put that checkbox on the new podcast or connect
dashboard. And the checkbox says, do you want to be listed
or some version of this? Do you want to be listed in the in the
API in the apple, iTunes, whatever you call it?
Well, that's not what it says. I think it says Do you want your
feed to be publicly available?
That's okay. That's a little
different. That's a little different than API.
Okay, so do you want your feed to be publicly available? And if
so, then, which seems like a straightforward thing? Do you?
Do you want to be listed? Do you want your Feed URL to be given
out in public API request?
Again, I sound like, again, no, that's not what a podcaster
thinks a podcaster has no idea about an API.
No, Agreed. Agreed. I'm just talking about on a tech level.
Okay. No, okay. Well, it but it words matter, you know, so what
were they really communicating? Did they mean publicly so that
you can get on the apple podcast app? Yeah, that's the part that
was not explained this, like, what does that actually mean?
What is publicly available? I don't know what that means.
Yeah, I got no idea. So like, from a tech perspective, though,
you can make sense out of that. Like, you can say, Okay, well,
this is, this is what they made. And especially after it breaks,
you can say, Oh, that's what that meant.
Yeah, that's easier. We still but that part, we still haven't
figured out which is interesting.
Well, that's what was gonna say. But, you know, it makes sense
when you read it to a tech to a tech guy. But then what we
didn't know was what they actually build was like,
essentially a magic eight ball where you check, you check the
box, and then you shake that shit up. That's when you look at
it and see what to say try again later. Yeah, maybe?
Yeah. Perhaps perhaps. Right. seems likely. Yes, he's
likely. I mean, like, that's essentially what they did. And I
don't. To me, what I think is that is neither competence, nor
on purpose, they're not turning the API off, they're not doing
anything like that. I think the real sort of, I think it was
really going on is that they just don't care. Okay. Partially
flesh that let me let me flesh the other. Okay. When I say they
don't care what I mean is just step back and look at the
context here. This is a, this is a company that makes a million
dollars of profit every eight minutes. The podcasting makes
has made them over the years zero money. And more than that,
it's operate, it probably appraised as somewhat of a loss.
And so I mean, realistically, subscriptions, I think, for them
was about remaining competitive against Spotify, and everybody
else. And I think the main another huge reason was just
turning podcasting from a loss to a profit center. Just and I'm
not not anything big. But if you look across Apple's departmental
Neo profit, and p&l is let's just say they have p&l for all
their different organizations and within internally, and
you've always perpetually got Apple podcast, as this revenue
sort of sink. And I mean, it may be it's only a million dollars a
year that it loses. But still, I mean, a guy like Tim Cook's
gonna look at that and be like, this is annoying. What can we do
to make that thing at least break even if not make something
and the details of how it how the implementation and how it
turned out? I just don't think they really cared that much.
Alright, I have a similar but slightly different take one, you
can tell how important because we really don't know. I mean, I
spoke to James Boggs was it December of last year, and he
was kind of hinting that we're going to do something like
something exclusive, I told him was stupid. And then I literally
said the stupidest thing I've ever heard. And he said, he
never talked to me again. But you can so but I know that they
have a pretty small team and their budgets are constrained,
they have to go through a lot of Apple processes to get anything
changed anything done. It takes them a very long time. That's
their process. And it's a, you know, software development
process. And they have a hardware side that goes along
with that. You can tell how important something is based
upon the amount of time spent on the topic. And in Tim Cook's,
Tom Collins, as I like to call him in his in his little walk
and talk there. Which by the way, I'd like to point out that
he often would would move his hands into a praying position
whenever he's like, and we really hope and he's always
praying, and he is I mean, he must literally be praying that
something works, because if you watch him again, it's like his
hands are always going into a praying position with two hand
two palms together.
God jobs do that. Or was is that a Tim Cook that as a Tim Cook
thing?
That's definitely a cook thing. Or at least, that's the thing I
see about him. I don't think jobs at that could be wrong. So
we spent 90 seconds on podcasting, and how many minutes
that you spend on the purple iPhone. I mean, come on me.
Yeah, it's rare that they had a commercial for it and
everything. In fact, by the time they finished off with this
little 90 seconds of podcasting, I was almost embarrassed that
they had my picture in there on the iTunes. I'd like to correct
something when they say we started with 3000 podcasts in
our in our in our index, but let's just be fair about it. I
gave that to you. Yeah, that's what you started with. And I
remember there was some disappointment when immediately
they put NPR was their main feature that it had almost no
independent podcasts on the on the front page. And you see how
that has morphed. Over time. Even the mighty Apple could not
keep their squeaky clean NPR PBS images, Joe Rogan just dominated
the dominated the chart there and others. So they really have
just moved in podcasting has driven them. I think they have
made money indirectly off of podcasting. It just look at the
stats, you know, up until Spotify is true entry into the
market. Apple was the 800 pound gorilla, which is, you know,
makes you wonder if no one's listening on Android, but it
doesn't matter. They definitely owned quote unquote, podcasting
and to their shareholders. When Spotify came into the market
that looked bad, and and you just can't have a competitor,
taking away your business and owning the mindshare. Whether
it's successful or not, is irrelevant for public companies.
That's a big deal. That's why we saw Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook
the day before the announcement, come out and do a long interview
and and say, Oh, well, you know, we're gonna be doing this and
that and yeah, it was the audio was great. And it's even even
flubbed a few times and kept saying video instead of audio
because it's just the script. It's just a process. That's that
runs in that boy's brain. Now,
the man man notes literally say, that piece of paper here says
Facebook lol.
So there's a number of customers, Apple always talks
about their customers or customers. So their customers
are people who own their stuff on their boxes, mainly people,
app developers or their customers, and how can you tell
that someone is a an apple customers? Because there's a
money flow from that person to Apple? If you're an application
developer, then I believe it's nine is $1,000. Still to be an
app developer?
Now it's 99. a year? Yeah. Oh, it's
99 a year? Okay. 100 bucks a year, right? Oh, I thought it
was more what was the what if one point something was 900 or
something, maybe if you go to the conference, you're going to
spend money, it doesn't matter. You're the customer. They're
selling you access to something and there's a relationship
there. There's a relationship with podcasters, as witnessed by
the podcaster briefing, that everyone who has a podcast
registered on on Apple received, but also because there's
existing relationships. I won't say the necessarily customers,
but I think they are the hosting companies received a briefing.
And, you know, hosting companies do have agreements with them on
updating and pinging, you know, special API's and stuff. I don't
know exactly who or how that works. But was definitely not a
customer is the independent podcast, app developer or
anybody who uses this API. Because you're paying nothing
for it, you're not a customer. So that right has never bothered
Apple, because they they look going back to the origins of
podcasting. When I was using my Mac drive to serve up mp3 files
to a bunch of nutjob developers who were you know, where you
subscribe to feed and downloaded all all. All episodes in the
feed right away. I mean, I was pushing so much bandwidth Apple
went and apparently from Steve Jobs, himself said, Yeah, just
let's give him what he what he needs there. And we'll see how
it plays out. They have no problem with bandwidth and
storage. But you're not a customer. So you're not
represented inside the company. That's how big companies work.
You have someone representing the customer, and multiple
customers. So there's someone who's in charge of the hosting
company, someone who's in charge of the podcasters, no one inside
of Apple is in charge of app developers, more anything, you
know, any other website or any application, any application in
general that uses their API, so they were not represented. So
there was no one there to say, Oh, this is gonna break stuff.
Or, hey, you just broke something. And, and that had to
come from outside. So yeah, so So. Yeah. So we're in agreement
on, they really don't care. If anyone is fooling themselves
into believing that they ever care, then I'm sorry. You know,
that's, that's, that's the epitome of Apple fandom. You
can't expect them to care.
Yeah, and that's the thing. It's not a judgement. I mean, I'm
surprised they took they left the thing untouched, as long
as as long as they did. Right? Well, here we are.
You know, some don't know who it was posted on social media
yesterday that said, if you think if you think this is just
a glitch, and everything's gonna get back to normal, then I can
tell you, you're kidding yourself. Because, like, and I'm
not here to say that, that necessarily, that this was, this
won't go that they won't try to fix it in some capacity. But the
desire to do that, where would that desire come from? Like,
how? Where is that desire going to originate? They get nothing
for it,
you're literally they are literally giving away something
for free.
Yeah, and that's not that's not in any big company's interest.
But it's especially not in Apple's interest that else and
not when I say especially not, I just mean, go back to the, they
make a million dollars of profit every every like freakin 10
minutes. It's not in their culture anymore to do things
that lose money. Unless there is some other externality that goes
along with it, that gives them status, for instance, carbon
neutral, the whole green thing. They, they make a big deal out
of that, and it's gonna lose them money, they're gonna
they're going to be an expense for them to some degree, but
they get PR out of it, they get goodwill, they get get all of
that thing and thing with with allowing thede URLs to be
returned in podcast API results. They don't get any further at
all they get as a competitor.
Yeah. It's irrelevant. It's completely irrelevant. And the
funny thing about it to me though is that if you look what
happened and this is indicative of the larger problem within
within all of this thing is, you know, I love Justin ever
transistor. I love those guys. But he now he's reporting back
on Twitter, saying, Oh, I heard I got a DM from an from somebody
at Apple. You know, it's like, I know a guy that knows a guy
whose mom knows this chick who's like grandpa lived down the
street from Tim Cook and he said, it's a bug and they're
gonna fix it. Yeah, I
that's what I heard too.
I mean, like that is is that literally is the way the podcast
industry works.
Yes, exactly. You Thank you very much.
That it's not just and James Cridland called it that, you
know, like, it's bad comms is bad. It's bad corporate
communication. It's, it's more than that. I mean, yes, it is.
But
you don't you don't have a representative within comms at
Apple for for podcast, app developers. There's no path.
There's no file. There's no person. There's no general
email. There's no disk. There's nothing there is nothing for
podcast app developers to never has been. So how can you expect
any kind of comms Apple is very simple to understand.
Yeah. You get like in the on the other hand, why do we even have?
It's a shame that we even have to care about this crap. Like,
because? Well, I
think I think that just to me, that ended. That ended the
reputation is I don't want to say there's any reputation to be
tarnished, but people are not stupid. People who rely on now
for a lot of podcast app developers. It's, it's a side
gig. It's a it's a project. Who knows, you know, this is, by the
way to support them. Please crank up those value sliders
right now boost the show. Make sure you're listening on a
podcast 2.0 value for value streaming set compatible app,
pod friend breeze swings pod station. I like 100 SATs per
minute and I like 500 boosts whenever I think something's
Great. So if
that's the standard set by the father,
yeah, that's my standard. So no, so you confuse myself. Where I
don't even know what I was saying. Dave, I just want to get
the message out I'm sorry, I forgot message.
Messenger. See that messenger. See that?
Who cares what I was talking about screw Apple boost us.
Show that's the show notes that entire show notes. That's the
podcast industry, though. I mean, like, we played this game
with my we played this game with my dog is this big, white,
fluffy, gray pennies. And weevil dog? Yeah, we play this game
with him wherever like his name's banjo. We're like, where
he'll be sitting there in the living room. We're like, Where's
banjo? Where's banjo? We can't find him. And he's sitting right
there. And he starts like it. You know, when you first start
doing it. He's like, Wait, what? And he's just looking at you,
like all concerned. And then the more you keep doing it, he
starts freaking out. He's like, Guys, I'm right here, guys.
Because what was wrong? I'm right here. And that's like,
that's what it felt like this with the apple stuff. Like,
everybody's show disappeared. It's like No, it didn't the RSS
feed is right there. It's just not an apple anymore. In the RSS
feed the whole times. Like, guys, I'm right here. And
everybody's like, Where's the show? And it's like, I'm right
here. Oh, my God, where the show goes. The RSS feeds like I
didn't go anywhere. I'm right here.
So crazy. I heard this on NBC. I think I sent myself a timecode
link. Let me see. Did I send this to myself? I was listening
to the new media show. Okay. And I guess I didn't send that to
me. But I'm listening to the new media show. And now this of
course, when you're doing a media show about new or show
about new media, and you have a day delay, you're gonna sound
silly. Wait, no. In fact, if we had taped our full show on
Wednesday with the captivate guys, who really couldn't do
they have a conflicting thing on Friday, they really couldn't
change. So but now we want to get everybody on. So we did our
little chat with them on Wednesday. But even if we had
had the full done the full show that would have been, you know,
confused, we wouldn't have had all the information. And and oh,
gosh, I wish I had this. So Rob Greenlee of libsyn, he says, Oh,
yeah, well, there's something there's a bug, you know, there's
some bug. And so our feeds not showing up and Todd goes looking
for your shows and the sound he made. You'd like the sound he
made. He saw that his show was was no longer listed. was
hilarious. It was Oh, man, I love that. Yeah, it was like
that. It was really, really good. So, you know. And I think
that, like hope is my hope that this is a little bit of a wake
up call even for. So there's no just talking about Todd from
blueberry and Rob from Lipson. I mean, do they realize what's
going on? I mean, Apple is getting into hosting. And I, and
I don't think, at least not when I, when they recorded that show,
I don't believe that they really, that that really dawned
on them. Now, I don't think it matters. And maybe we move on to
that part of the of the topic here. And before we talk about
the index, specifically. There's a lot of talk, and a lot of that
was not represented in any of these conversations is the
listener. I mean, I hear podcasters and, you know,
analysts like everyone saying, well, Apple will own the
listener, and you won't own the listener. And that is such an
arrogant thought. And I say this after, you know, being here from
ground zero, you don't own anything, even if you have their
email addresses and their you don't own jack shit. You don't
own the listener and get your head out of your ass thinking
about that the listener literally owns you. They
determine and and that goes for podcasters as well as for
podcast apps, that it's you know, I just so I just have to
say off the bat, I feel like we're talking very coy Lee,
about cus about our listeners, our customers, how they behave
what we expect them to do. I don't know. I mean, I would hope
that Apple did some research on the concept of subscription pay
for feeds that only are on one platform. Because, you know,
today Spotify announced that it's actually a leak, but it was
reported by the Wall Street Journal, Spotify is going to do
their subscription service and they won't have the apple tax.
Yeah, yeah. So so now they're just competing on price. And not
even on features or what it means because the Patreon model
I know a lot of people like Patreon, just for the the levels
of support. And I don't know how big the private feed business
really is. And I can see many instances, for instance, I could
see Andrew Horowitz, that if he had some actual stock tips paid
off, then I could see that being a you know, easily a $99 a month
subscription. And you know, that kind of informed information
that people want to have. If you're doing a subscription for
pay show, what the fuck are you giving away for free? What shit
Are you giving away, then people are not stupid. So you know, you
and you're wasting your time in my in my opinion, you're wasting
your time on one or the other product. And along with that
comes speaking of owning the customer, the customer complaint
can has a complaint department. And it's going to be a very
simple process. I subscribed I expect 24 shows a year I only
got 22 boom charge back you're done. Care. True, you're going
to be the center podcasters will be slaves of their own making.
Okay, so
if you get too many chargebacks Apple is gonna kick you out.
That's, that's another that's another thing about this is,
guys. It's like we hear it's like there's this collective
amnesia that happens, where everybody just forgets things
that that were just precious and present in your mind, like, like
a month ago. What? Did we all just forget that people are now
beginning to leave YouTube in these places, and start their
own websites and bring their video and all that content in
house? Yes. Yes. of all these monetization issues. Yes.
And that's a no, no, it's that's not it. It is the spell of Apple
Apple spell is better than black lives matter. They are so good
at casting spells on people. And they've done it again.
Yeah. You have. Okay. So you have that you have Apple which
just announced in the App Store, their app store policies that
they are going to in their, in their wording. They're going to
try to address the scammy apps problem. And so one of the ways
that they're going to do it is they announced that they were
going to start reviewing pricing for apps If you have an app that
seems like it's priced out of line with what it's what it
should be worth, then you're going to get flagged. So if you
know you have some little dinky app that you're charging $99,
for, they're going to they're going to contact you and people
have gotten contacted, apps that have been on the store for years
at a certain price have gotten contacted by Apple and said, Are
you sure this is worth this much money? Because this looks this
seems odd to us? And do you not think that that exact same thing
is also going to happen in the app store? He was played off,
excuse me in the in the subscription world, he was
played off as if, oh, this is great, because you can set your
own price. But you have to imagine that Apple's gonna have
to have something to say about that. If you say, if you go in
there, and you're like, man, my podcast is killer. You know,
that's, that's $100 a month.
No, no, I know, you just gave me an idea. I'll wait until the
checkbox controversy is over. But when I just said, no agenda
show with $100,000 a year, let's see what happens. Can I do that?
I
mean, I think that's 30 day free trial.
Yeah. No, no free trial, $100,000, boom, you could pay an
increment. I know, I'll do the shows. So
this, like, okay,
and by the way, I guarantee you, there's at least one person out
there who will subscribe, it would be worth it just to see if
they paid. Well, and you know, there's all kinds of I'm not
sure how that works. You know, I'm sure you if so what if i
subscribe and I and I'm sick of it. Can I cancel?
Then I get I got no clue. I didn't include any of that. So
to me, all of this description stuff. I mean, whatever. I just
don't know, well, I think it will be mildly successful with
people who already wanted to do something like that to begin
with. But for smaller shows. It's just not it's just you,
it's just gonna be this seems like more of a thing to just
benefit. This is essentially the wall. This is the same as the
Wall Street Journal putting they're putting their online
newspaper behind a paywall. You're just gonna have, you
know, some of these big players like luminary and all these
guys, they're just gonna do the same thing on Apple, and nothing
changed. It's going to be like this sideways shift. And I'm
going to give you a different take, which is arrogant, but I
think it's possible. Okay. I think that that's outside of
Spotify. But people are paying attention to what we're doing.
And everybody kind of had plans like, Yeah, when the day comes,
when we're ready, we'll just capture all that shit, we'll get
rid of that RSS is so annoying. API's are better. You know, we
can bring that in house. We just have to we have to have the
right things in place. I think a lot of these companies have been
looking at the independent to first of all the success of
podcasting in general. I don't think anyone's fooled by that.
This is some big advertising Bonanza for them. It's really
rounding errors podcasting, and it's certainly not high,
certainly not a level advertisers who on podcasts in
general, generalizing, I think that people are looking at at
what we're doing is certainly Spotify is. That's the guy who
wrote this. Who wrote that medium article.
Oh, yeah,
basically,
what you mean George Orwell? Yeah,
yeah, exactly. Orwell over there at Spotify. Who said, Well, you
know, RSS is antiquated and we could use it when you want to
cool things. And it's, you know, it's such hogwash. And that is
true fake news, disinformation, that everyone's kind of
scrambling, everyone thinks that they can capture it. And they
can't in and I'm delighted at what has happened. Because now
we have all of these we have the big we have the fangs are out.
We've got Facebook, Apple. Not sure what Microsoft is doing.
I'm sure they're planning something as well. You know,
we've got Amazon. We've got Google podcasts, we've got
Spotify, we've got these subscriptions, all of this
stuff. And RSS is just going to keep on truckin. And yet, what
we've seen is the arrogance of the tech companies, towards
developers. And by the way, they don't care about you. They never
have they do not care. They will steal your code, steal your
ideas. Apple is the number one company for doing this.
Everybody knows this shirt. They invented the term Sherlock.
Exactly. That so they that's what they do. And then they
patent it and do all kinds of weird stuff and make it
complicated and that's the game but you cannot it's like The we
already saw this fail with advertising ploy out of the gate
for Spotify, they had to open up shows they had to, they had to
make it available on more apps, because that's just where the
audience is. No audience will be completely satisfied with any
app. Everybody has a different vibe, different reasons,
different features. And just, you know, different look and
feel all these things matter to people. It's like, it's like,
give your car, you know, everyone's got one. Some people
like a different type of car. So you're not going to be able to
destroy that. And I think if we done this by strategy, I'd say
divide and conquer is working out fantastically. Because
that's where we are. I've got
I've got thoughts about this. The so I'm listening to pod land
yesterday, like I do, I usually
did at least 3000 SATs.
Oh, yeah, me too.
Until James Kirtland said discourse instead of discord.
Then I want to take it back.
No, suit, you know, you get to Narnia by going through the back
of the wardrobe and your credit and the crazy uncle's mansion.
That's right, you get to pod land. But jumping into James
Cridland, dirty clothes, hamper his way to the bottom? And then
it puts you out in the park?
Can I just say Can I just say as an aside, I love our community
so much. Because, you know, we see we don't see eye to eye with
everybody each other on many different levels. Some just
lifestyle, some political is all. But the code, you know,
it's like it comes down to it. We're all doing we're all here
for the same mission. And we can we can like each other or not,
we can mess with each other. We can make jokes. But what matters
is what is what the code that's created, and the functionality
that we're enabling for the world. I mean that I love that
about what we're doing.
Yeah, it's such a beautiful libertarian community. I did
that. And I was listening, but he was talking about Feedburner.
And he was, you know, I can't believe that Google is like
resor his sin is sort of resurrecting and resto modding
Feedburner. In thinking about that last night, and then it hit
me that I couldn't sleep very much last night, I just had so
much I've
had the same day, five hours night Max, I keep waking up in
my head spinning. I'm just thinking in turn.
Same here. And and this was long, about two o'clock in the
morning, it just hit me. I was like, okay, RSS. We have the
ecosystem that we described with with Apple, Spotify, the silos.
RSS. RSS is how the rebels fight back. RSS is is is freedom. And
Google. I think they understand that they can there's no way
they're too far behind in the podcast space. They're not going
to their I don't think they're they don't have any plans to do
any kind of subscription thing. I think their resurrection of
Feedburner is an attempt is their response to Apple and
Spotify doing subscriptions. There, I think they are going to
try to compete in the podcasting space through some version
that I was thinking about that because there's otherwise this
makes no sense.
So let's expand on subversion. What do you think? So when I
read that, my first take was, oh, they're going into the
hosting business. That was my that was my first takes like,
oh, you're going to add enclosures. You're going to have
people help people manage that you're going to get them
statistics. Hello.
It's possible but say they already do all that with
Feedburner. They just don't host the con they just don't know
hosting enclosures, but
I don't it's a big deal. The enclosure the hosting is a big
deal.
No Sure. Yeah. No, you're absolutely you're absolutely
right. But then they have to act like a podcast host and I'm just
don't know that they get that and to me it feels more like
they are resurrecting that to say this is Oh, open podcasting
is still here because they get there. They get their feeds the
same way that we get our feeds, which is they crawl for them.
Christopher Christopher isane is out there crawling for feeds all
the time. We're taking feed people are emailing us batches
of feed. Basically they they spider forum, they crawl forum,
we do the same. Nobody goes on to nobody. They don't have a
direct pipeline, like apple and Spotify do. They've got sort of
this secondary pop up I know you can submit to and that's not
what I'm saying. What I'm saying is they don't have that cachet
in house like house brand name is associated with podcasting.
So They just pick them up off the periphery mostly. And so to
me, they are perfectly suited to drive RSS as, as basically Bonin
in no way, just like they do the open web, you know, like they
they are in spite of them. And I'm no Google fan. But in spite
of all of the crappy things they do, their core business still
depends on the open web existing. It depends on a
humongous network of decentralized independent
websites, they can search and crawl, and also then pay them
money to advertise to be found. They can do the same thing with
RSS, they crawl it all. And then they'll put in some sort of
advertise, they'll just bake that into the same thing they
already do. In that's the way they compete in that market. And
it weakens Apple, and Spotify by strengthening the openness of
that thing. To me that that's, that's what the whole Feedburner
thing is about and and I hope that's true. Because, like our
show, take, you know, this, this show right here, is not listed
in Apple, it's not listed in Spotify. No, I went through last
night, and I tried to, I went through every podcast app, and
I've got about 10 of them on my phone. And I searched for
podcasting 2.0 in every one of them. The only one it showed up
in was pocket gas. It didn't show up in any other app,
because most of the apps depend on on Apple and their API, and
we're not listed with Apple and never will be. And so that tells
me that the open RSS ecosystem, RSS is not just some markup
language. RSS is it's an animal's a
breed, isn't it? It's a living breathing thing.
It's freedom is what it is. It's it's just having an RSS feed is
no different than having your own website.
It's funny. That's what mo no. Mo thermofax. With Adam Curry.
He said the same thing when I when I showed him the value
block and everything. He said, Oh, so really your RSS feed is
your whole life. That's everything. Yeah, I see. Yeah.
And that that, I would say is the original Dave Winer vision
to and you and you just hit you haven't domain name. You have
your RSS feed? That's it. There's no step three.
in you, you have what we're missing in in that. And I'll
probably say this is in our sort of mission statements. You know,
we have preferred the preserve of podcasting and freedom of
speech and converted to a platform of value. There's
there's an, there's an implied statement mission statement in
there, too. It's not spoken, but it's implied. Is that to
preserve the open nature of the podcasting ecosystem, yes.
Because that you can't do the other two unless you do that
when it's sort of like a silent, what do you call it like a
hidden premise. And to do like to do that, I think the thing
that is missing is more on ramps, like and I'm going to
call out, I'm going to call that bus route here. I love bus
route. I love those guys. But they tweeted out the other day,
how to a guide on how to get listed in all of the biggest
directories. podcasts index was not on there. Yeah. Well, the
biggest were the biggest podcast directory on the internet. And
they did not they didn't list us. So they're telling their
cousin they're not telling their customers
about freedom about this little freedom thing that can offer
Yeah, yeah. And so that and I've seen that, you know, seen that
with other hosts,
you know, and I think those things are just oversight.
Because you have your template it's the same what irks me is
the players you know, I got a I got a solicitation email today
from pod dot link and pod dot link. You know, they're like,
hey, Nathan is on our PC. They're using our service now.
They think
Are you sure on that link? I don't think so.
Yeah, I think they're the ones that just got just got bought
parts pad sites
because I you can't I don't think you can find podcasting
2.0 on their name.
No, it wasn't a no service.
Nope. Told you not there. Anyway, I got I got a an
invitation to I guess claim my show.
No, no, no, no, that's that's that's him pod. Yeah. How'd that
LinkedIn go
search, go search for podcasting 2.0, it doesn't show up.
Really. Mm hmm. And then we'll know where he's getting this
search from there. Because he's not using our search, he must be
using our API, but not the search function.
So then you go to I go to the no agenda page, and it says,
available on. And it's funny, because there's a link to it,
right? There's a link to Apple next to it as Spotify. Let me
click on that, because we're not on Spotify, we better not be the
indeed, we're not on Spotify. So it just has an empty page. Then
there's Google overcast, Stitcher cast, box, Castro,
podcast addict, radio, public breaker, player, FM, I Heart
Radio, pocket cast, and then the raw RSS, which of course, has a
link to they basically, let me see, now there's a redirect to
the field. So they're missing a lot of great podcast apps. And
this is where it gets interesting. Because since
there's no price to compete with, we compete on features,
and the features that the podcast namespace has the
features that our apps have, as people start to understand,
reasons why you should at least be listed in the podcast index,
and maybe even start to author for the features that are
available and send your listeners or suggest that your
listeners check out some of these apps new podcast apps
calm. Instead of instead of helping out they're not, that's
my that's my bottom line. So,
you know,
I think it's just an awareness issue. You have this page of
players and you never add to it, it's just add the player block.
And we all know how it goes. So it's a little wake up call.
There's other stuff out there.
I'm trying to not, you know, I'm kind of passionate about this.
And I'm, and I know that people are cuz, because the one thing I
want to say is I really appreciate everybody. Many
people reached out and oh, my goodness, it was honestly, a lot
of a lot of slack yet. buzzsprout reached out RSS comm
a lot of people reached out to see if we needed any mini money,
any money or help or anything like that, like that. So I mean,
those guys care. It's just that. I like you. I think you said the
spell. It's the podcast industry is under a spell. And the spell
is Apple. Yep. And, and now Spotify. And that if we really
want if if podcasting is going to maintain its openness, if
it's going to continue to exist as an open medium, you have to
break the spell and get out of the and that doesn't. And I want
to be clear, that does not mean you have to come use our API,
because literally like, you know, people have been, you
know, I've heard people say, well, y'all must be really
excited that everybody's using your API now that as a backstop.
Now that Apple is broken, it's like, well, I mean, it's nice,
but we don't get paid for this. I mean, it's not like we have,
you know, 100 more paying customers now, no, we just have
10 times the bandwidth. So, I mean, like, it actually got
harder. It's not exactly a fun, a fun time to be had. But what
one thing that we do offer that may be just as important as the
API itself, is we have our entire index feed database down
downloadable for free, yeah. And so anybody could then pick that
up, and stick that in their service. And now they don't have
to have Apple anymore. That and that can take literally 30
minutes to do and that's the kind of stuff I'm talking about,
like break the spell, and in begin to participate and bolster
the open ecosystem. All we need is more on ramps, and that's why
I brought that's why I brought up the fact that we were missing
from some of those guides that were being put out about how to
get your stuff self listed in in the big in big internet
directories. Like we need more on ramps into this thing. What
and we're you know, I've got this new idea for the piping
service not that kind of thing. Hope maybe that will help. But
really we need hosting company. Here's, I think that I think
this goes two ways. I'm convinced with this. I think
number one Get we need more onramps from the hosting
companies, not just to us. But to all of the open directories
there's us there's blueberry hosting Open Directory. AKA
there's at least one more the cert the apps themselves
overcast, has a full directory, podcast addict seems to have a
full directory, there's there's a few different open directories
around and I'm at a moment open that they have an API just mean
open that they collect these things, more on ramps into the
open directories. In number two, they I think, not just not just
the hosts, but also podcasters themselves that care about these
things, need to start asking their their listeners to use
different apps. Like so if you're a big podcast, to just
ask your listeners say, Hey, have you ever tried out overcast
podcast adding pod friend, pod verse, hyper catcher, downcast,
all of the indie apps out there, the podcasters themselves, they
care about the open ecosystem can make it a point to in their
podcast all the time, ask their listeners to use something other
than Spotify and Apple podcast app. Because that's the that's
the that's the thing that we get told all the time, is that the
reason that Apple is so dominant in this space is because well,
they have 65% of the app market. That could change very quickly.
If podcasters asked their audience to go try out some
other app. The other apps are free or cheap. It's not even it
doesn't even hurt me. And you know what, once you convert
somebody from Apple podcast to some other you have
another you set yet another digital slave free.
Yeah. And they'll never go back because they're just the apps
are just better. The indie app and the indie podcasting apps
are just better.
Yeah, I mean, I was always an overcast user until podcasting.
2.0. And I really needed and you know, had to test the features,
you know, the overcast was definitely, definitely my app of
choice. Now, of course, I'm on graphene. Oh, so that, that
removes that. But yeah, it's a spell. And it's the same spell
that podcasting has been under for 15 years, probably 10. For
sure. The spell that if Apple doesn't do it, well, then who
cares? It doesn't it didn't happen. Now that we've
definitely knocked the spell around, look at all the support
and integration we've gotten from many of the hosting
companies. But we still don't have enough tools, authoring
systems, etc. For all these great new features, even though
there's uptake You know, there's a lot of uptake transcripts,
there's transcript companies making more money because of
podcasting. 2.0. Fact. Yeah, yeah, that's
bad.
Yeah, know. So there's, there's, there's stuff. Yeah, break the
spell, it will happen eventually. It can. The spell is
real. But so is just the old Art of War. And it's divide and
conquer, we don't even have to do it, that they're fighting
amongst themselves. In the old country, we say Australia home,
the faster faster one being carton data from door. Which
means when two dogs are fighting over a bone, a third will walk
away with it. That's nice. And that's exactly what's what's
going to take place. I mean, that's obvious. It's so this
will be maybe this will be in the management books in 20
years. How not to do it. They won't be that important, again,
to the bottom line of these companies. But man, what what a
difference freedom makes in everyone's life.
Yeah. 100% I mean, this this has been, this has been a quite an
interesting week on so many levels. I mean, like, if, Bill,
not just not, I mean, not just technical, philosophical, the
whole thing because it really does have I feel like the
industry has finally sort of woken up a little bit and said,
you know, that we did have we do have a very weird, uncomfortable
relationship with the largest company in the world.
It's not an it's not an actual relationship.
Yeah, it's more like a
we're in Paris. It's like we're, you know, it's like the typical
parasitic relationship, where you have the cleaner fish to
clean out the teeth of the big fish. And the big fish doesn't
eat them, because it's probably just easier. Just let him clean,
you know, and eventually, they say, Oh, this, this is a cleaner
fish. I don't have to bite down on that one. You know, like, Oh,
that's an API request from independent podcast. app is
fine. We'll just leave that. And then eventually, one of the two
fucks the other one It's just nature. It's just how it goes.
All right. So I think enough about that. I mean, I don't
think there's, there's much more to say, other than, we're
extremely happy. I am personally very excited to have overcast
Marco jumping, jump on board who came bearing gifts, I might add,
he immediately saw one of the and I don't know all the exact
issues around the iTunes ID, I know that they're hard to get
they're like, like, like the like the high high valued
Pokemons to go into the woods to go get and shit. So he
immediately jumped in. And he signed up and even made a nice
donation, which will thank him for that in our donation
segment, he came right along and said, here I am. He came
bearing, you know, time, talent and treasure, you know, the
three things that we need with with this open source project.
And for him to be contributing back our missing iTunes IDs is I
mean, what a what a phenomenal entry into into our world here.
Yeah, that was really helpful. Because those, you know, we get
a little nilla Tick Tock per second week, the iTunes, that it
turns the iTunes IDs have always been relatively easy to get. If
you if you've got an ID and you want the Feed URL, that's an
easy thing to do. If you've got the Feed URL, and you want to
get the iTunes ID, it's basically impossible. Yeah. So
we, you know, for a while we were using, we're using a
different API, and we had to, we had to stop. And then what so
what we have been doing in the index, for all this time now is
we we put the Feed URL in, we get the Feed URL from some other
source. And then when somebody does it does a does a call to
the podcast by iTunes ID endpoint and API. It gets logged
in, if it's a miss. If it can't resolve it, if we don't have
that iTunes ID listed. Then what happens is every night, admit at
midnight, the API servers, there's two front end API
servers that actually serve the traffic, each one of them, look
through the logs that grip the logs and see which iTunes IDs
that were requested, did not get fulfilled. And then they go back
and and do the apple lookup API to resolve it in reverse. And so
then, then it will make the linkage between the Feed URL and
the iTunes ID that that's not that great. It's not
a fast way
to do it. No, but it's really it's kind of rely way to do it.
Yeah. It was reliable until this week, it's kind of
Rube Goldberg II
is janky. But so until this week, and that's when I first
started noticing something was wrong with Apple API's. But
right
now, you can't get early on.
I get a cron job every day, I get all the logs emailed to me
each night. And I always forget, one of the first things I do in
the morning is a look. I'm a strong believer on the sysadmin
side of you need to walk into the server room every now and
then look at the blinky lights.
blinking, right?
Right? Yeah. say, oh, that lies and you haven't seen that
before? That's bad, you know. So I get the emails every every
morning, and I look and just make sure everything looks the
same. And one thing I noticed, I guess this was maybe roughly
Monday, Sunday night, Monday night, that I got the email the
next morning, and it has the log of all the iTunes resolutions.
And for the first time, I can remember the the first like 500
of them were all failures. Wow. Well, that's,
that's a Sunday night database rollover. in Cupertino.
Yes. And I was like, Oh, that's strange. And then the next day,
same thing. And so you know that and then James popped up, his
stuff was acting really wonky, and things females are starting
to get missing. So the fact that Marcus showed up with basically
a batch of half a million iTunes IDs was like hidden treasure. So
those things are about I'm still importing them. advocate,
Christopher isane is importing. He's finishing up his import, he
has about 30,000 feeds left to go on his batch of imports. And
then we're importing the iTunes IDs at the same time. So I'm
hoping that by the end of this, we'll have like, most of
everything filled,
how important are these iTunes IDs moving forward? I mean, is
there a conversion at some point where you're not using that
anymore? Or is that is that going to stick with us forever?
yet to be determined, really, because it depends on what Apple
does with this whole thing. Because like, that's the other
sort of techie stuff that went on the last few days is the the
iTunes ID endpoints, there's really two main ones, there's,
you can add a feed to the index through the Add by iTunes ID, or
you can just check if a feed exists and get metadata from it.
With the podcast by iTunes ID, there's also an episode about
iTunes ID. So those three endpoints, they never really got
used very much. Because most of the apps that use the index are
using our IDs. So they're calling they're calling the
buffeted ID and point instead of the about the iTunes ID
endpoint. But then when all these flood of the other aspect
can come in, they all depend on that iTunes ID as their sort of
source of truth. So they started using that. And I started
noticing some weirdness that that didn't like, there's an
inconsistency in the way things were being were being handled.
So I beef those up over the last couple of days and fix some
problems that I didn't really even realize existed, because
they just didn't get used very much. So those are better now.
But like going forward, the you know, if if Apple doesn't fix
this, if it remains just a basically, a, an unreliable API
to get feed information, then I'm not really sure what happens
at that point for the apps, it doesn't affect us at all,
because we never depended on those anyway. But for the apps
out there that have been dependent on iTunes IDs for
years and years. If they stop being able to convert an iTunes
ID into a Feed URL, I'm not really sure what they do.
They'll have to make a convert, they'll have to convert
something on their side.
Right. And is that the podcast index ID? Well, is that an
obvious one? Is that kind of that too obvious?
And I mean,
you know, I don't know. I mean, it makes sense. It makes sense.
It will, it makes sense. For this reason, we make our
database free to download. So there's really no reason not to
use the podcast index ID. Because everybody can have it
right? In for like, they don't even have to ask the API for it.
They can download it and just import it into their database.
And so it doesn't really, there's not a reason not to,
because anything else that you can think of let's just say if
you hashed the Feed URL, or tried to come up with some other
ID will mean feed URLs change, people move host. That's not,
that's not static information. In it, we just learned that you
can't depend on an API. And I would say, you came and fully
depend on our API, it's not guaranteed to be here forever. I
mean, you know, I mean, 25 years from now, we rip I'm out of
here, either. But we've got the full database that connects
feeds with IDs in that open downloadable, free database that
should still be around
means Yeah, like, I can run that, you know, that can run on
its own by itself. It's already automated. I don't even touch
it. It just generates itself every week.
Now does this bring us automatically to Hydra and pod
pain? Because I think we do need a little update on what the hell
is going on in your head. It's funny cuz I showed the drawing
that you posted on the on the mastodon, I said, Tina said,
hey, what does this look like? She said, like one of your
drawings. She seen those so many times boxes connecting to clouds
with little lines and stuff. And oh, my God, like, Oh, I already
understand it
would be fantastic. If only it had been in crayon.
On a tablecloth Yeah. Perfect. Yeah.
Yeah. So I mean, I don't know how deep we want to get into it.
We could talk about it next week. But and the the idea is
basically, and I think I talked about it with Canada Vegas
briefly. I just thought about it earlier. It The idea is that we
would have basically create a web sub network that's dedicated
to nothing but podcast called podcasting. And because the
problem with web sub is it's built for sort of pure
decentralization. And it assumes a world of of an open RSS, like
period. But the podcast world of open RSS is is much, much
smaller. And it's also much more dependent on time. Right? If I
don't get a blog post for a few hours, I mean,
nobody cares.
Who cares? If you don't get a podcast episode for a few hours.
It can be really annoying to freak out time. It is freaking
out. Hey, man, I can't it's not Can you didn't upload
it to overcast yet?
How many times have I heard that? Hey, can you upload it to
overcast Not exactly how it works, by the way, overcast is
one of the ones ones that shows up very quickly.
So I think the the idea is we're not great at this either, we
still have podcasts. Because aggregation and polling is such
a pain in the butt, we still have podcasts that don't update
in a timely manner, right. So the idea here is basically, I am
looking at this as a joint project between, I'm going to,
I'm going to write a bulk of the code. But I see this as a joint
product between venture between us, the hosting companies, in
the apps, and the podcast apps, that means all of us together,
to, to join into a network where the hosting companies, all they
have to do is one thing. Anytime a podcast is created, or
updates, they send a pain to what the receiving endpoint is
going to be notification dot pod pain cloud, they just send an
update and say, this bead has updated in they send the Feed
URL when there will be a network of servers that can they can all
operate independently will run one hour, my desire would be
that we run one, blueberry run one, overcast runs one,
basically, anybody with podcast addict, anybody that has a
directory of podcasts that need that does this type of polling,
they would run one of these servers so that they can
immediately get the update. Yeah, and know to pull the feed,
then they just relay that notification out to a list of
subscribers. And the subscribers are all the apps, the
subscribers, our podcast addict, right? pod friend, hyper
catcher, us, anybody who wants to know about those things, cast
down cast pocket, cast box, whoo, I
see another bubble chart coming.
Yeah. And so basically, it's just, uh, it all originates from
the host, and not just the hosting companies not so it
would be buzzsprout, blueberry transistor, captivate fireside,
all these guys. And then also, any independent podcaster can
can also send a notification, like if you run your if like if
you run your podcast on a on a WordPress, blue power press
website. Anybody can do this. All you have to do though is
it's it's not open, like web sub, you need to create a token,
a secure API is sort of like an API key, you just need to create
a secret. And there's a signup registration process before the
notification servers will accept your notification. And then
they'll pass it through to the other side to the subscribers
list. And those subscribers also have to register. And so the
registration is just to keep all the shenanigans out. Otherwise,
it's basically just web sub. But it's it's web sub, with with an
approval only and everybody gets approved. If you sign up. It's
just not 100% open, like you can just go to it. Right? You have
to you have to be you have to go through the registration
process. I think if we do it that way, is super lightweight.
It's super dependable. You have the podcast hosts. All they have
to do all they have to do is say is do a get request to one URL
notification that popping up cloud with the you Feed URL
anytime a failure anytime a new podcast is created on their
service or anytime one of their existing podcasts updates. And
then on the subscriber side, which is the app side. They all
the anybody who wants to be notified of of all these
updates. They just go to one DNS name, which is subscribe dot pod
pink cloud and do a subscription request. And you don't
subscribe. Like with traditional web sub you subscribe, you say I
want to subscribe to this feed and this feed in this feed. No.
When you subscribe, you get it all get it all the hose Yep, you
get the fire hose because everything Pat. It's just a pass
through which
is easy, which makes it simple.
You register a callback hook a web you register a web hook and
and like you know the name the name of your app. And that's
that's it and then all sudden you start getting your web hook
starts getting the firehose and it and it's also it. You only
have to re subscribe every let's just say seven days. And it's
just a quick resubscribe. And you still get the hose. And if
you go anytime you want to unsubscribe, you can unsubscribe
with. The problem is with web sub, we have almost a million
active web subscriptions, one of our servers spends all day every
day just re subscribing to websites. Because each feed has
its own individual entity. And so you have to subscribe to it
in in this one, and in this one and this one. And before you
know it, you've got, you know, 800,000 subscriptions, web
subscriptions. And so this is not practical. It's not working.
Got it? Got it. Yeah.
All right. Let me just switch gears for a second. Okay.
Multiple fee splits in the TLV records. So we can get
everything working with ln pay. Now moving on to value for
value, streaming payments, for those who don't know what this
is yet. and the value block? Has that been fixed? Is that is that
now functioning? Because I have no idea because everything
happened in a blur in the past couple of days for me?
Yeah, it's all blur to that. I don't know. I don't know if it's
fixed or not, because I was trying to help him figure it
out. And then all the dapple stuff happened. And I started to
get back to it yesterday. And then mark, okay. stuff happened.
Yeah. And now had half a million, you know, add a stamp
to import. So that's, yeah, I don't know, it's gonna have to
be something that I get back to the next day or so.
Okay, is a thing that we can tell everybody, so they know
what to be looking for.
Um, don't set up your value block to receive to receive
sets. Right now, if you need a custom key custom record. Just
don't until, because that that part of the spec came later. And
so thanks doesn't support it yet. Part Four friend does pod
station does and Brees Does, does not if but for some reason.
The they're, they're still failing in a way that I don't
understand. So for now, I just think it's best for people not
to receive sets on on LNP, you can send fine, but don't try to
receive them until we get this figured out and put out a
signal.
Just wanted to update everybody. I just ran a chart and a total
for the seven days trailing this moment. The index has received
103,478 SATs, which represents roughly 1% of 10,347,800 SATs
for this past past week. At the current price. Roughly 50,000.
That means $5,000. Am I saying this right?
No Name. Math matching?
Yeah, here we go.
So when you talk math,
math to me, oh my goodness.
I am say run the Spanx dry.
This is what she said.
She said that
I don't even want to listen to it again. I don't want to know
what Dame Jennifer says to me. Again, I'll give you the I'll
give you that number. Oops, I can't put commas. There we go.
So at today's price you have $5,214 flowed through podcasting
2.0 this past week, what's your piece? What's your piece of it
is what I asked everybody else. So now, why didn't run the
number of transactions. But you know, a greater amount than that
went to podcast app developers. Because we know that certain has
certain apps or take like resist taking 5% I think LMP I think we
finally got Tim to Cooper sent to Yeah, to consider taking some
money. Yeah, we have to we have to beat people in the
submission. Dave, it's crazy. Take the money. You know, and
every app knows for self what they're doing. And that's some
serious coin that's $20,000 a month is flowing from listeners
to the podcast ecosystem. Which Yes, majority going to
podcasters but not just podcasters people who help
produce this show. In fact, 5% goes to Dred Scott Who does?
Does our chapter work? on no agenda. He does that as well
gets 5% there's there's 5% that goes to a Neil Jones no
relation. He's the clip custodian, and then to wallet
providers, app developers, I mean, it's really quite
phenomenal. This this is some real money that's flowing here.
Yeah, that's what I tweeted that the other day, I was like, you
know, what, you know, this is boring. Apple subscriptions is
boring. Wait, wait me up when you can, when you can stick a
subscribe button on any app and have the app developer get get
part of that revenue. Because the apple subscriptions is just
more of it's just more of app developers not getting paid. I
mean,
right now we're at, you know, over a quarter of a million
dollars per year at current run rate is flowing through
podcasting. That is podcasting. 2.0 now, it's not the billion
dollars, but let me tell you, I'm looking at my own wallet.
I'm saying Hey, I got a couple 100 bucks.
I'm literally going to go broke.
I know. I know. I keep like filling up my pod friend wallet
to is like, shuffling between them. You know like, I need some
more money over here. I need some money over here. It is and
it's so much fun to do. This I was used to joy
as using pod friend. And then as my non as my non sat wallet, I
mean set podcast player, my non value podcast player and then
when Martin put in, put in the boost, it was hard coded at 1000
I'm like, oh god, I can't test too rich for my blood. I
can't do it. Well, I just boost half what I normally boost. I'm
a 500 sat booster. Yeah, so I'm just but but I do want to boost
more.
He just dropped it though that I installed the latest beta. Oh,
he's changed it. 500 Yeah, it's a fine. Okay,
but it's still fixed.
I think I think so. I think I just have to add, okay, so I
last night, but but you know, the other the other app that I'm
looking forward to putting the value thing is pod verse.
Oh, my gosh, I'm so ready for that. Yeah, that's another great
one. Yeah.
I think I sent you some some clips. Yeah,
you're saying we play with the clips. It was very, very cool
functionality.
Yeah, that is I didn't realize you could do that. Well, that's
that's
the history of the app. Right. As we learned from Mitch that's
that's where they come from, from, from podcast clips. Now to
be done in some expert way by Facebook. Apparently. We'll see.
Yeah. Oh, by the way, we had it. I get it. A guy called me or not
call me. Email me. From pull up email. he emailed me they just
integrated soundbites. And I've never heard of this group
before. Where is it?
From
headliner dot app. Have you heard of that?
Why does this sound familiar? It's some sort of video thing.
And headline or
video is the best way to promote your podcast. Oh, Julie Andrews
on the homepage. Well, I'm sold. Yeah,
they've got they've got to go to their blog. Do you see a link to
the blog?
Yes, I do.
Go there. And the first post is no more clipping headliner now.
soundbite and nice. Oh, I should Yeah, I should tweet this right
away.
Yeah. And so yeah, there were I'm gonna put them on the apps
page. But that's everything. Like this is like a video thing.
I think they're consuming the soundbite tag and somehow
converting it into like a video clip.
I'm tweeting it right now.
That's good. Yeah, it's cool.
What's it gonna say? Oh, yes, make sure that that your your
features, etc is updated on the apps page. The way I think it
works is you create a pull request and the GitHub and then
we integrate it so that you can update when you have new
features make sure you're live make sure you're listed at all
actually make sure you're there Yeah. tell you why. Why don't we
open up the board room here and and I will bring
you this knee I
know right? Yeah, come on and guys will. Now we welcome to the
boardroom and to the board meeting the guys who I call the
Pirates of podcast hosting. We've got Mark Asquith, Kiran
McKee free from captivate FM Gentlemen, welcome to the
boardroom.
Hello there sir. Thank you for having us. It's
a pleasure.
That ladies and gentlemen is Mark who who may or may not be
doing most of the talking we don't know yet. Karen How are
you?
I'm okay. Thanks. backhoe samsa posh when it when it comes on
something I'm just like, you know in the background to keep
my cool like and do all the talking. It just works that way.
So y'all have a similar Relationship demand. Adam.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, let's let him talk like curry talk as much
as you want us. Hey guys, I'm so, so glad that you would join
us here in the board meeting, as we've been trying to speak with
gosh as as many people who were around independent podcasting,
but certainly podcasting 2.0 and you guys, I believe you co
founded captivate FM, which is branded as the world's only
growth oriented podcast host. Trademark no less.
It is indeed. And we did. We did. We co founded that back in
back in the day back in 2019. And then launched into into
better in August 2019. And I've been pedaling that catchphrase
ever since. But it's been a fun ride as Nikki's been it's been a
lot of fun doing it.
Yeah, it's been stressful. It's been fun. And I think it's by
far the most enjoyable thing I've done. And sometimes good.
Typically, what I've seen is people get into podcasting,
certainly from the technical side, because they had an itch,
they wanted to scratch themselves. You know, I see from
the hosting side, I don't think there's a single person we've,
we've, we've had in the boardroom, who hasn't said,
Well, you know, it's like I didn't, it was hard to make an
RSS feed. Or this sock drawer that sucked. I couldn't figure
this out. And I decided to do it myself or I was doing it and
then all of a sudden it turned into a business. What's the
story for you?
Yeah, that's pretty much the same. To be honest. He is. He is
the classic tale of like you said, scratching the itch fruit.
From our perspective, we sort of transitioned with an, I don't
wanna say an inter in business, but a business that got us into
podcasting, relatively low risk to us. So we, we were part of a
design agency, working across the world, and I got into
podcasts, I'm really obsessive about things. Like if I love
something, I want to know everything about it. So now I'm
gonna be obsessed with MOOCs.
About my brand new theorem. And just before we started this,
yeah, so don't worry, it's an easy thing to be obsessed about.
And I'm looking forward to getting in.
We're, so what was the what was the edge was, and we're, maybe I
should step back, both working at a web services firm.
Actually, I've run some of those. was one more graphic
design one more code. Of the two of you?
Yeah, pretty much. Well, I was I was I was the owner of the
agency. I was one of the owners of the agency. And Karen was a
developer. And I remember getting into podcasting and
really sort of getting obsessed with and then I came to care and
one morning and said, Look, it seems really tough to kind of
figure out WordPress for podcasting. And people seem to
need help with it. Shall we spin up a bit of a service on the
side, and that was always started wasn't a kid. And we did
that. And we
did. And Karen, were you thinking, holy crap, what's this
guy doing? He's about to ruin the only gig that's paying is
gonna go off and be funky. Yeah.
Well, I mean, you know, it's
like, I've always liked side projects. You know, I've always
liked something that I couldn't really, you know, get my teeth
into at night. And, you know, it was a problem. Yeah, yeah. You
know, it's a problem that's waiting to be solved. So now, as
soon as it can smell like, yeah, I'm really interested. I don't I
don't even think I said, I'll think about it. I'll just said
the other.
side project. Yeah, good side project makes the day job
tolerable,
you know? Exactly.
So what was the problem you were solving? Was it the simple
because again, just looking at how, looking at your branding
and what you do and what you're saying on on captivate.fm? What
was the problem? Was it ease of use was it lack of buzzwords,
excluding buzzwords and technical things? And this is
kind of what you're communicating to me on the
website?
Yeah, that's absolutely. And sort of the brand side of it.
The messaging side is, you mentioned, you know, is one, the
designer and one the coder, I'm sort of on the brand side, I'm a
terrible designer on a terrible code. But I'm certainly a little
bit more on the communication side. So it's the communications
it really is the simplicity in understanding the users. And I
think that translates through to how we build the system out and
how we put captivate together. Everything is just really,
really simple to understand. And, you know, if something's a
little bit more complex, we like to add the context around it,
why is it complex? And why can't it be reduced into the most
simple terms? So yeah, you're absolutely right. And Q and I
know that, that that came through in the, in the build as
well, didn't it? We're trying to stick to that.
Yeah. You know, from the start, you know, we always had the, we
always went into the mindset of what we were podcasters. You
know, we thankfully, you know, Mark had the show on and we had
a lot of users from Mike's at our previous business. They got
started and you know, in the podcasting space, so we had a
lot of users that we wanted to use and trial and, you know, we
just spoke to him and asked them kind of what what they wanted
and you know what, what did Wanting to podcasters. And we
just listened, you know, we opened his ears. And, you know,
we're at a point now where, you know, it's by far one of the
most easiest platforms, you know, to use in our, in our
opinion anyway,
what's the top five of things that people were saying they
wanted? This really does interest me for a whole bunch of
reasons. But I think this is one of the unique selling
propositions of any host is? Well, to me, it seems like it's
its ease of use features, and statistical reporting it does
that kind of merge with the top five that you guys saw? Yeah,
I think so. And there was a couple of underpinning things as
well. So there was sort of the tangible things that people
wanted to be able to see when they logged in. And also, you
know, without sounding crass, you know, they wanted to be
pitched those things. But I think some of the underlying
tenets of it were were very clearly the, like I said, the
communication, you know, and also sort of feeling part of the
brand and the company not feeling like they were buying
software from people that were, a lot of people are experienced
in this this alienation because they've been told how to do
podcasting, because it was, you know, it's theoretically very
technical. And we sort of said, well, it is very technical, but
sells a car, but you still enjoy driving the car, you don't have
to understand what happens under the hood. So it was that that
feeling of being a part of something that was vital. And
then the other thing, which Kiran and Karen's put a lot of
time into with the technical team, was a lack of stagnation.
Now, that came pretty, pretty quickly after we launched.
Insofar as we because we came out of MVP, we came out of this
beta phase, fairly quickly, we were we were releasing updates
really, really frequently. And people seem to really enjoy
that. So we went into that more, and we said, What do you know,
what actually will release either upgrades or features
every single week, and people really responded to that,
because they were, they were sort of worried that they will
miss it. And we've seen recently a lot more, you know, they were
concerned, they were missing? How on the latest thing that
would help them. And that really gravitated to captivate because
we, we were very forward thinking with the release of
sir. Q And that was a big one. I know, I had a lot of stress for
you in the team. And it's a challenge, but people seem to
like that in there. Yeah, I
think it's just, you know, being prepared to sometimes, you know,
just really increase, you know, the output. And it's not, we're
not talking massive pieces are built, you know, massive pieces
of tech that have been built, you know, just small, easy to
use things that can you know, be deployed on a, on a quick two
week or one week sprint, you know, it just makes a world of
difference to some podcasters. You know, even if, even if
you've only had 10, podcasters, that have asked you for it, you
know, if 10 people have asked you for it, then it's probably
happened to a lot more people, you know, and he's just, you
know, looking for those little easy to win ones. And yeah, it's
stressful, but I think he's been, you know, worth every
every step of that.
I like I like that approach. Because you have, you know, a
few different in the software world, you have a couple of
different mindsets out there you have Well, if if anybody asks
for it, I'm going to put I'm going to consider it. And then
if a few more asked for it, I'm going to take it seriously. But
then you have another mindset of, well, I'm not really we're
not really going to put it on our roadmap until some, some
overwhelming majority of our users or our customers want it.
And I think, Well, you know, you can understand the logic and the
reasoning behind both of those. But really, I've always leaned
towards what you're saying, which is if anybody wants it, no
matter how much you're taking seriously.
Yeah, it's a challenge to, to make sure that everyone feels
part of it. And I think that's really important for a brand,
especially a brand new podcast in this built itself on being
open and as inclusive as he can be continually. And one of the
things that we always try to do and we always focus on is is
overlaying the requests with a sense of intuition. And
basically, going at it from the perspective or we'll look, can I
see how we would use this as podcasters. Now this sounds very
simplistic, but genuinely would we use this feature today? Like
we put a couple of features out like the single sponsor, single
click sponsor kit, which is very, very simple feature. It's
just a nicely designed PDF that automatically generates when you
click a button. Oh, awesome. headline stats. Smart. Yeah.
It's simple. But the the thing that it solves is not getting
the PDF, the thing that it solves is the education around
what to put in that PDF.
And that yes, and this is something I've noticed, then
you're just kind of jogging my memory about one of the big
things in podcast hosting seems to be the communication with the
customers and the learning and the knowledge transfer and it's
done in different ways. I'm most proud I think does a very, very
good job with having some help desk supported 24. Seven, I
believe. They do educational podcast themselves. They have
blog posts, they do very frequent outreach and email
communications. Then you have blueberry, for example, the
blueberry, you can I think, just schedule a meeting with Todd.
And he'll walk you through anything, anything that you
want. And Lipson, you can probably buy some stock on what
you do over there with them. I'm just joking, you're forced. So
is that the two areas you focus on? Or is that really the main
area you focus on? And how time intensive and cost? Just what's
the cost associated with that it because people seem to podcasts
or seem to really want to have a friendly voice to just have
them? Yeah, it's okay. here's, here's what's happening. Here's
how it will shake out or here's what you do, or here's what
button you push.
Well, that's a really insightful final section to that to that
question, though, because that was the key thing for us. So you
remember earlier, I mentioned that I'm a fairly obsessive guy
when it comes to things that I enjoy. And Kieran is the one
that kind of steadies me. He, and he's I mean, he's the talent
when it comes to the building as well, I couldn't do anything
without him. And it is. What's interesting from from my side is
that the other part of my personality is to be very loud,
about things that I really enjoy. And that's what happened
in podcasting. Like back in 2013 2014. When I got into it
before, before Karen and I got together, I was just rather than
sort of, let's use microphones as an example, rather than
saying, look, here's the answer to the question, which
microphone Do you want to use? And the answer is any one of
these for these 10 reasons, my approach is a person is just boy
use this one, just use that one. And then if you don't like that
one, here are three other options. But your answer is
this. And we didn't realize that that was building the captivate
brand. We were traveling around the world, we would do, you
know, primarily us and going to the podcasting conferences, and
I was doing my podcast around podcasting and that the
outspoken nature of cured and I together the thing that sort of
locally tours, yes, is in a little bit of hot water, because
ice is a relatively small place we live that was the thing that
started to get us noticed, because people liked the
clarity. So yeah, it was it's the content, it's the the
education we do one thing that we've done since 2015 is we do
every Friday, just an open office hours on Facebook, I've
done it every single Friday for the last six years where people
can just turn up and, and just, you know, ask me questions and
dismiss what they want to discuss in in podcast and and
that that's sort of that's the thing that people tell you
doesn't look and you shouldn't be doing it.
Amazingly, amazingly, you're doing it right now with us, it's
the exact same concept is let's just talk about what the heck
we're doing. Let's bring people in to talk about what they want
what they need, which is going to be my next question after I
lead you down right towards the 800 pound gorilla, the elephant
in the room the what we've been able to digest so far of the
apple announcement with their subscriptions, hosting, etc,
etc. Any takeaways for you guys on that yet?
I think he's fascinating that they've they've put the creator
first i think that's that's refreshing to see that they've
done that but there's been a few things where it'll be nice to
get a little bit more light shed on them. We've got a couple of
things as a hosting company. We've got a couple more bits of
data to come through and briefings to do at the time of
recording this we've not yet not yet had those chats
but I think our feelings with Apple themselves.
Yeah, the podcast host brief into just to kind of get so they
also they did reach out and and giving you guys a briefing.
Yes, we booked in for that week.
Sometimes those motherfuckers they didn't they didn't give us
a heads up anything. They used to call me all the time. They
completely shut me out.
Oh, no, it was after the fact just to be clear. Oh, okay. So
it wasn't pre launch. Concurrent?
Yeah, cuz I saw on the podcast Connect, you know, there's a
little thing like we encourage you to use third party hosts
like, okay, Gee, thanks, guys. just felt a little dirty the way
they did that.
That's something I wanted to ask about right off the bat was
that, you know, from what we can tell already, and of course,
this is all very new from what we've been able to glean. I
mean, Apple now is a podcast hosting company. And you know,
if you go in there into your dashboard, in the podcast
connect or whatever the new version of that Flight, a new
flavor that is, you could technically create a quote
unquote subscription podcast but not charged for it. At that
point, Apple is your podcast host. I mean that that's a
little, that's a sort of a confrontational move on their
part against the hosting company.
Yeah, something that Ken and I chatted on yesterday for this,
this very reason to was sort of the way you could use it to do
that very, very thing. And this all led us to a number of
questions, you know, around, we know that these feeds aren't
exclusive to Apple, the commission elsewhere and so on,
from what we can glean. I mean, I might be wrong with that, as
things progress, but it came with a few question for us as
well, I'm Karen, you can you can speak to this a lot more,
because you're much more technical than I but around, you
know, further reporting, or user agents downloads and data from
elsewhere. You know, does Apple want to become that and the
support those that's inherent to that as well, you know, how does
that work? The first second line and third line support for death
to their podcast is there's so many, there's complexities to
this in here. And I know, you, you and I spoke about just
getting back from Spotify to Apple, for example.
Yeah, I mean, I mean,
the only real way I can see Apple becoming a media host, is
it being a separate entity from Apple or been like, you know, an
apple hosting service that goes include an RSS feed that is
usable in other areas. From what I've seen, it appears that I
think you have got to charge for it, you can go premium, freemium
sorry, and, you know, have free long trials and stuff. But, you
know, obviously, I'm still I'm not privy to the entire set of
information yet access, you certainly obviously, just coming
out. But, you know, from my understanding, one of the
episodes at least should should be at least premium, or paid
for. But I mean, some of the stuff on it is fairly decent,
you know, I've been looking today, and there's a lot of
stuff that complements RSS feeds. And that's the That, to
me is the good bit, you know, complementing an RSS feed by,
you know, the app free episodes, for example, I really like the
idea of it, you know, been able to provide your subscribers an
ad free version, you know, when no dynamic content and you know,
just actual, actual content, just proper content. So that I
think that's, that's interesting. But the host inside
just, it raises a few questions from our input, you know, it's
just whatever will happen
is the apple clearly has no bandwidth issues, they have a
new they have a global CDN, they, they're very, very
familiar with the getting data from their end to consumers. And
this and podcasting will be just a very small addition to that.
To me, just looking at what I've seen so far. This is where they
may have not thought it's interesting. So when we had, for
instance, the breeze, lightning wallet, integrate podcasting,
what this very professionally run organizations small in
Israel, but they man, they know how to develop, and they have,
you know, guidelines and processes, and they develop
great products. But they had no idea what they were getting into
with podcasting. And one of the one of the first things that
happened. And we have a lot of experience with that. And you
know, working with all these different podcasts, app
developers, the first thing that happened is, someone said, Well,
this is not rage, I see this podcast listed, I never want to
see this horrible person and my podcast app, and the company
breeze was paralyzed. because they'd never seen this before.
They have no idea how to respond to it. And Brenda immediately
reached out to me like, well, what is it? Well, you know, I
actually should have prepared you a little bit better, round
way to say, what Apple has no experience in zero whatsoever.
In fact, no Silicon Valley, big tech companies have that is
actually communicating with your customer who needs help. You
can't get help from Apple yet you can. It's like, well, I
can't figure out how to publish this. It's not working. When I
press the button, their answer will be make an appointment with
the Genius Bar. I'm not kidding. They do not know how to do that.
I think that is it. Just looking at the news. The people they've
hired, you know, they've hired really smart people who were in
programming and audio production. And they understand
NPR and high end stuff. But they don't know what what customer
services, they just is for this for services. I don't think
they'll be able to I don't even think they know what's going to
hit him.
Do you know it's fascinating to watch that and because there's
there's so much that we see day to day around what is going on
at the top end of podcast in the two 3% of podcasting that gets
the headlines. Yeah, I'd
say 0.2%. But yeah, your point is made. I think it's smaller.
Yeah, I
think I think you're probably right. And it's fascinating
because as we know the industry made up of people that aren't
that the hobbyists or the enthusiasts, they're the people
that are on the periphery is because they're working and
they're doing what they do. And they love doing this thing, you
know, and it's, you're absolutely right in the customer
support. And we saw this through captivate, you know, Kira, and I
still work support, even though we have a team because, well,
two reasons. Number one, you've got to be in touch with the
people that are using the platform if you're going to
develop the platform. And number two, the time that people have
to produce their podcast is so valuable to them, you know, if
you're producing a niche knitting podcast here in the UK,
and I've actually got a friend that does that. She can only
produce two hours per week, but it's so important to to do that,
then when, when the service provider isn't there when she
needs them. He doesn't just damage your experience with the
service provider disheartens, or against the media and the
production and she starts to to look elsewhere.
That's a good point. That's a really good point.
It's such a odd scenario, because you know, very often,
and we I'm sure we all see this, you know, we see podcasting
being compared to everything from YouTube, to clubhouse. And
it's not that it's not the same, because YouTube does his thing.
And he is not assumed the service provider sits in the
middle and provide you with the hand holding that you need to
enjoy everything. So
all they do is take you down or D monetize you if you're a bad
boy, that's that's their entire customer service right there.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And doing it the other way, if you
know, clubhouse and so on. It's an app, you know, you log on,
and you're expected to have the app experience and you sort of
know because it's an app. But if something goes wrong, the
experience of support is more than likely going to be a little
frustrating. But it's an app, it's kind of it's fine. It's
sort of throwaway, we're all right with our podcast is in
this weird middle ground where it must matter so much to
people, because they believe in it. But you can't take away the
personality of it and that your eye is a missing piece of the
puzzle, I think,
yes, I feel like the big tech companies, as a whole have taken
on this mindset of, well, if we're big enough, we can just
basically engineer our way out of customer support. Yes, we
can, we can throw enough money and enough developers at a
problem to where eventually we can write enough documentation
and create a product that works with enough granularity to make
it where nobody needs help anymore. And that is, that is
bullshit. That doesn't work. You can't do that. And you see it
day in and day out with with big tech, their answer is basically
is always rtfm. And you know what? That's just not a good,
that's just not always the right answer. People, people need
help. I mean, we, we have, you know, we're a, we're a donation
based thing. We just do this as a side gig. I'm doing this
podcast on my lunch break. But we still have to be near we
still have users and people use our API and our index and we
still when they pop into our mastodon group with with
questions or problems, you know, we get we get somebody gotta
give them an answer. I mean, we can't just say, you know, oh,
well, you know, rtfm I mean, here's the good, here's
the GitHub. Yeah,
yeah. I mean, that really doesn't cut it. And I think that
that really if you chop that thing out of the podcasting
world, you damage podcasting infinitely
Do you guys have majority UK customers or is across the board
from all countries? What what's prevalent
these primarily us Oh really? Well. No, it's not and when I
say primarily I'm not talking you know, 8020 or 90 1080 sort
of 60% us and then here and I think what 25 30% uk and then
the remainder
yeah 25% uk or 20% Uk then I think quite a bit in Europe
quite a bit in Australia as well and I think with Australia and
New Zealand we're starting to get Are you
guys are which is interesting. You guys a UK company.
Yes, we sat here in the UK right now. Yeah, founded in Sheffield.
And although a lot of people do think we're from the US because
the only time they see us is at podcasting conferences so they
attend like the one that they attend each year we're always
out so they always assume that we're in the US but yes,
you have a great you have a great name it's very it feels
very American to me that's why and to me when I when I hit
captivate FM like these guys are the pirates man. They're like
they got it. I don't know if that's intentional if that was
what you want, but it always gives me a kind of a this is a
cool guys. I want to be with captivate. They're doing
something.
Oh, well thank you very much. That was actually Jess Koppelman
of she podcasts that sort of captivate we were, we were
chatting, we did a little bit of work together and Jess and I
were going to put some content out and we were thinking of a
name for it and she said we should call it captivate.
Because you want to want to captivate your audience and she
said Jess, can I use that for the hosting platform? And just
be in jest you said yes. Interesting. But then, yeah, she
never lets me forget that. He was done.
publish this, but
you both live in northern England. Yeah. Yes, no. Well, I
asked for very specific reason because Dave and I, although
we're not new to this, we've we've never really done this
with guys from the UK. And I think it's, I think it's time
for some pots.
And now it's time for us to
namespace
we're doing it with British guys. I'm sorry, guys from
England. Don't want to mess that up.
Yeah.
Be very careful. Let's talk podcasting. 2.0. Dave?
Yeah, yeah, we y'all were one of the first groups to jump on
board with with the indexes and start, you know, making plans to
get onto the namespace tags. And one thing I want to bring up
those Kieran you put in, you proposed a trailer tag? Is that
something that your your customers are asking for is
like, Where Where did that need arise for you?
is another one from Mark, actually, you know, one of those
good ideas that you know, come from myself. And Mark just
chatted about it? Yes, comment before where you know, the whole
300 episodes on one feed, and then your trailer drops off, and
then you've got no access to your trailer. So then you've
kind of got a pack around it by changing the published day or,
you know, doing something a bit more manual. So yeah, it come up
from from that edema?
Yeah, yeah, it was, it was one of those those challenges, I
think with the seasons as well, when when Apple first introduced
the ability to pop something in as a season. I was, at the time,
I remember doing a talk at podcast movement. And I was
talking about how it's bad made my show. But my archives
seasonal, whereby i'd split the feed what kept my original feed
from a new show. And then I'd sort of split and categorize
things into these evergreen seasons. And it felt quite cool
a time when Apple came along. And just, you know, there are
new seasonal options. Okay, well, thank you for that. And it
was it was on the back of that a trailer. I'm a big fan of
trailers. Whenever we talk to new podcasters about launching
their show, I sort of get personally, because my
background is sort of brand and marketing, I'll get a little bit
frustrated with the social media marketing that podcasters do,
which is always I have new show I have new guests. Which is
tough. You know, you'd be browsing Twitter, I don't want
to listen to a 15 minute episode, because I'm busy, you
know, but give me a teaser. But I saw the trailer thing is
something that could be expanded and Kirin's. I'll be honest with
you here is downplaying his part in that I just said, wouldn't it
be cool to have trailers that were better, and he spent that
entire thing out? So I think you've been a bit coy back here.
Well, I think tags that are often a phrase, wherever I think
tags that originate from hosts, though, are, are extremely
valuable, because it's a direct pipeline to, you know, to needs
like real world needs. And I think the current definition of
that in the proposal, and I think it's an it's a slam dunk
for me, nobody's really had a single problem with it at all.
But the current way that is structured is that you would be
able to, to address a trailer, which would be a separate audio
file, and then you it would tie into the season tags. So you can
say, you know, you have a trailer for season one and
another one for season two. And that kind of thing. Does that
kind of fit the scope of what you're looking for? Yeah, my
God, so I can jump in?
No, no, no, I said you could do most It's okay. But now you you
interrupt, he's fine. So I'm dealing with guys. Not from a
technical point of view. Now he's he's perfect, you know,
perfect. Mark's point of view.
Here my point of view is more about I'm really keen on the the
acquisition flow of listeners, how we acquire listeners and
turn them into to actual subscribers and funds. And I
think anytime you can give someone an easy entry point, and
the spec is perfect for it, because I think that the
inherent issue at the minute with trailers is that you've got
one single entry point, but it doesn't fit all types of
podcast. Whereas what I love about the new spec is that if
you do produce an audio drama, or a fictional podcast in
seasons, or you've got different types, you know, maybe a sort of
Black Mirror esque where everything's a little different.
It gives you multiple entry points where you can really
start to do some marketing, which I think is problematic for
most podcasters. So I think expect fantastically, and I
think I don't think it's a surprise, there's not been much
pushback on it.
Well, that that brings up another thing. So the one of the
things that may have been overlooked with all the stuff
from Apple, their announcement, because it has been it's been so
disruptive on a technical level. One of the things that may have
been overlooked is the fact that they have a new this thing
called an app called Smart play button where it says Hosted take
you sort of into if it's an episodic podcast is supposed to
take you to sort of, or excuse me, a seasonal podcast is
supposed to take you to like, episode one and start from there
of that season. And if it's episodic, it just starts you out
at the at the most recent, and it has sort of different, you
can just hit play and pick up from where you need to be. And I
think that is something that could be in the namespace in the
RSS feed as well, you could say, Okay, I think we can define some
sort of guidance to the app to let the creator decide where the
listener is going to have the best experience of starting
from. And I think that goes along, sort of with the trailers
and the seasons, and all that jazz, if you, you know, the way
Apple's doing it is, it's just like, you know, magic, you're
suppose you just, you know, dump a bunch of stuff into your
podcast, and they'll figure it out. But, you know, from a from
a namespace, and from an RSS perspective, we can easily
replicate that same behavior, but actually give the creator
the the appropriate control over that deal. Do you agree with
that?
Yeah. I mean, that's quite cool. I mean, if you think about it
from like, a TV show point of view. So I'm watching the TV
show. You know, it's like, the first two minutes is a recap of
the previous episode, or by you know, you're watching season
two, and the first episode of season two includes like, a
minute or two of a recap of season one, you know, the
ability to have trailers or even Recaps of previous seasons for
certain types of podcast, you know, audio drama, style
podcasts? No, it's really interesting.
That is, that is interesting. Yes, yeah, I think we can do
that, too. Because the smart play thing, it makes a lot of
sense. I think it's a cool idea. And I think we can easily put
that into the namespace somewhere, to get to give an app
guidance as to where to start. I mean, that just seems like low
hanging fruit to me.
Yeah, I think it would be good to sort of from an adoption
perspective, or what we tend to see with with many users,
because, you know, rewind back to my friend who does the
knitting podcast in one or two hours per week, she saw a little
bit push for time, and I think they're adopting an approach
across all hosting providers, you know, where we can
collaborate and say, actually, look here. Here are the range of
new tags, you know, phase one, phase two, phase three. And
broadly speaking, as hosting companies, you know, we can sort
of market the use of those tags in two different tranches, you
know, tranche one, is this tag helps the listener experience,
and this tranche helps the creator experience. So you know,
funding versus trailer, you know, one could be popped, or
marketed as creator experience, one has listener experience. And
the reason I say that, is that, because these people are so time
bound, and so concerned about awareness that this hobby
suddenly become a little bit busier, I've got to spend a
little bit more time doing it, what should I do? And when
should I do it? And what's vital and what's not? I think, sort of
a standardized experience group and would be fascinating,
because then we can collectively market Well, okay, look, if you
are short on time, we know that good listener experience results
in in more growth and success and less attrition. Do these
three things with your, your your trailer target, and the
other tags, the location tag, and so on. That's listener
experience, if you've only got a little bit of time, do these
ones. And as a hosting company, we've we've taken some of the
burden from you, you know, we've done a little bit of work as
much as we can. I think adoption for the busy podcaster is a
really fascinating challenge for us to solve.
And that's kind of that's actually that's the flip side of
what Dave was talking about, where big tech, traditionally is
like, throw some developers at it, we'll come up with a
solution, we'll code our ways out of it. And this is the
inverse, where you're looking at the problems your actual
customers have. And they say, Okay, let's see if we can solve
this specific thing right here. Can we make that easier? Or does
that remain in customer support?
Yeah, that is a great point, actually. And I think if we
extrapolate that a bit further, you sort of got the, because we
talked about those headlines, then with a nought point 2% of
the podcasters that generate most of the news. The the
worries that come because the podcast industry is changing so
much, how does a podcaster separate from podcasting 2.0 and
the new tags a new namespace? How do the separate that from
luminary Deus Ex, you know, bombarded with this techno sort
of pre empting the concerns and I think that's one of the
hosting platforms to say like our job is to distill and remove
worry, like that's the only reason we exist. You know,
that is that is, you know, this thank you that very, that's
helping me with a lot of my thinking, our primary way into
getting Someone up and running is I mean, obviously, you need a
host, but the whole education process takes place there as
well.
He does. And I think what a lot of a lot of hosting companies
can do, and not I don't want to say a hosting company, cuz
that's unfair. But I think Dave was right, you think you're
right about the big tech thing, what a lot of tech companies,
not just big tech can do is they can, they can assume that it's
on the podcaster, or the user to seek out the education. And for
us, we have to preempt the worrying thing, that's the key
phrase, you know, preempt that worry. And sort of take a little
bit of stress,
I think that's the big thing. So it would be great, then, if all
hosting companies would start an educational Pro, I'm not saying
they haven't. But start an educational program that says,
okay, you know, here's, I mean, everyone has the works with
Apple, iTunes works with Spotify, you'll be able to hear
it here, it works on here, and this and this, it would be great
to somehow start educating people about podcasting 2.0
those features, why you may want to because, you know, podcasters
are the best marketers, you know, when a podcaster is, is
using transcripts, or chapters, or chapter images, and they say,
Hey, you know, this is some extra stuff I'm doing over here,
take a look. And you can see it in these apps. People do that.
And people try it out. And then if you're lucky, if the if the
app is where someone wants it to be, they'll keep using it,
though they may start using it more than we use it only for
that show, they may reach out to the developer and say, Hey, you
know, something's not right here. Can you fix this? Or I'd
love this behavior. That's the education process. I'd love to
see hosting companies engaging more I know everyone's busy. I
know it's it's tough to it's an it's not an easy thing to
explain why why are there different apps? Why do they have
different behaviors, your thoughts on that?
I think is part of the job. I always use the example of
whatever, whatever example I'm using of like a podcast host or
a podcaster. Someone that is basically saying how do I make
my business or my stuff better? I always make the analogy of
like, imagine a plumber turning up at your house. And he is only
the only thing that he is good at his plumbing. And you think
well, that's kind of the baseline like you, that's why
you're here. That's the sole reason that you are here doing
this thing right now. But he's everything else. That makes me
number one, remember, your number two, recommend you a
number three, decide that you do not soak base, everything else
is like the baseline. So I think this education is is the host is
the baseline, the RSS feed to the baseline, no one should be
applauded for providing good analytics. That's the basic. So
the education is where we can stand out. And I think one of
the challenges in podcast hosting as well, it's everyone
gets a little, like little antagonistic at times where it's
sort of, well, we're better than them, or they're better than
them. And it's I don't see any point in that, like, we've
talked about approaches.
So can I can I expect to see so I'm not and if I can help let me
know. I mean, I'd love to see your page with Apple, Spotify,
Google, Amazon, Stitcher, Deezer player and sovereign. Alden. I'd
love to see, you know, more podcast 2.0 or any podcast 2.0
apps on that page. And, and, you know, if there's anything I can
do to help educate your customers and tell them what,
you know, what the benefit is of transcripts and where they do
and don't work, I mean, let me know. Happy to help in any of
that.
Thank you. Appreciate that. Yeah, we've got some some big
design work going on at the minute. So guys, if you're
listening, that's a little bit of work for you. But we've got
to
push it off on gas. Okay, fine. Good old gas.
He doesn't even exist.
That's the humor. I like there it is, ladies and gentlemen,
five years in the UK and now I get it.
No, thank you for that. In all seriousness, yeah, well, we will
absolutely take you up on that.
That I think this is critical because what we're seeing from
you know, now Apple clearly Spotify these and Google they'll
they'll jump in the mix eventually they all these guys
copycat each other. That's that's half of what they know
how to do that, you know, like, it's, it's so critical. We've
been saying this for a while is that RSS and the open ecosystem,
the the open podcast ecosystem built on RSS, can can do all of
these things. It can do there's there's none of these nothing is
is off limits or not possible within the open RSS podcasting
ecosystem. That is possible within a silo, and and what and
when I say nothing, I mean nothing that any Buddy would
would consider to be valuable to the listener, because that's
really where ultimately what this is about. Because even
though even what's valuable to the creator comes back through
what is valuable to the listener, that mean ultimately,
that's all that matters. And so it in there's nothing in the, in
the open ecosystem that can't be done and match or exceed
anything that can be done within apple or Spotify or these these
sort of vertical stacks. We can do all this stuff we can do. We
know we can do the payments, we've already proven that the
payments work, we can do polls that works right now, in theory,
you can iframe a chapter, a chapter marker, there's all
these things that they talk about as if RSS is holding back.
Progress is complete, complete baloney. The thing is, we just
have to do it, you know, that you can you can you can envision
ways to do it. But that doesn't help anybody. I mean, you
actually have to actually do it.
And what Yeah, what are you going to get now? I mean, and,
by the way, I see I also have a creator briefing from Apple,
that's nice. Where tomorrow, where you're going to see now is
a lot of your customers will be very curious, you know, what is
this? What do I do? How to do? Or should I do it? What is DRM?
I mean, these are the things that really putting a huge
burden burden on you guys to educate people and, and just the
more I think about it, that so I'm so happy that we immediately
involved hosting companies and, and the involvement that they've
shown an interest they've shown and development cycles that have
been dedicated to podcasting. 2.0 is very much appreciated.
Because the only thing that's left is, is a couple of people
tweeting, you know, hey, we got some cool over here, come take a
look at Hey, that guy's doing something cool. I mean, that's
not an educational process by any means. And and it is exactly
companies like captivate who are going to who can in fact steer
the future of podcasting period, you can steer the future of
podcasting with your education towards your existing and new
customers.
Yeah. Right. Don't just go back to you know, just talk about the
other point that, you know, RSS isn't isn't a hindrance, you
know, I think, yeah, maybe in times where data service was a
lot less than, you know, you struggle to download, like a one
megabyte file. But, you know, now, you know, an RSS feed that
there's much bigger is not a problem. And, you know, there
isn't as much as an issue as it used to be. So it doesn't matter
how long the RSS feed is, you know, that's pretty much why the
RSS feeds were limited to, you know, 300 episodes because, you
know, he needed to be smaller,
right, which which is, which is actually more in trouble. That's
actually one of I think one of Apple's USPS, there's now you
can unlock the entire archive, upload it all to us. We'll DRM
it. No problem. Yeah, I
bet they will.
DRM stuff, you've got to upload the you've got to upload either
a WAV file or a five by 11. Yeah. I'm not sure if they will
do anything or mp3. And again, that is education.
I don't even think they'll put it in. They're not even gonna
output an mp3. No way. It's gonna be mp4 I'm sure or AC or
whatever. Format works. And Wow, man, they're gonna do the
compression for you and everything. Holy crap. No way in
hell. That's just crazy.
That's just for an audio guy.
No, not for an audio guy at all. But yeah, I mean, so that's,
that's kind of an eye opener for me. I hadn't really considered
just how important until this conversation. I was new as
important. But damn, you guys are really, really do it. You
are the School of podcasting as well for for your customers. And
it's an ongoing education. It does not stop.
You know, it's tough as well, actually. I'm thinking I'm not
saying this from our side, but I'm saying it from a podcaster
side, because they only feel one of two ways. When an
announcement comes out there. They feel either terrified
because they're worried about the more work or the the lack of
technical understanding, oh dear, I've just learned how to
do this thing in podcasting, with my mic and my editing and
publishing. Now, here's another technical hurdle, or they feel
excited. They want to dive in, but they don't know what the
impact the outcome
will be. Right? Right.
Because so many people see see podcasting as a Boolean. You
know, only there are only two outcomes in podcasting for many
podcasters the right thing and the wrong thing. And we know
that's not the case. We know it's these people and community.
But a lot of people are worried about if I, if I go ahead now
and publish a premium episode or put a premium on my feed or even
consider this. Will that undo the goodwill Have my audience
who have enjoyed me for free for five years? Big Question. That's
huge. Yeah.
Yeah. And it might, it could. It could be the answer is it
depends on your audience, you know, because you know, you guys
don't, you may not work.
Now my bottom line is I'm saying now that I'm seeing this, you
guys don't charge enough for what you do. I mean, I
understand the market gives you what it bears. But none of the
hosts really, there's so much extra that's being done. It's
quite, it's quite mind boggling. How about, how about bandwidth?
That seems to be the like the variable here, that is kind of
weird for your business case where you get someone who's
really successful, and that has to be subsidized by lots of
other smaller shows that don't eat up a lot of bandwidth. How
is that for you?
You know, it's a, it's a very classic business model in
podcasting, the idea that that subsidy exists. From our
perspective, we put our price in front like we charge but we
don't charge people for storage, we give people unlimited shows
on one account, we know we don't set them up for RSS feed. And we
say to them, Look, our costs are the bandwidth, here's what you
will get, you know, you'll get 12,000 downloads at this cost
and 60,000 and then 120. And then custom pricing,
you go all the way down that line, you show them the
downloads based upon their file size to or just in general,
Will not you know, actually, we built a calculator for that. So
we have that bill, we didn't put it on there on the website. And
I'll tell you why it is purely back to my original point of
technical confusion is that when we when we started signing
people up for captivate the first user to captivate, it was
a friend of mine called Ian Anderson gray. And he started a
new podcast, and I just onboard him. And I asked him these
questions used him as research and he was very gracious. So
what are your file sizes? I have absolutely no idea nor I've got
the inclination to find out.
We called it
and we didn't carry on.
But what's interesting is in this new world of Bitcoin and
lightning, and how the lightning network is put together, and and
quite honestly, the the younger people who are building this
out, I'm 56. So you know, I'm looking at 3028 2930 year olds.
And the whole vibe is, Hey, man, no one should be working for
free anymore. This is if if we do that we're just shooting
ourselves in the foot. And because of the kind of Oh, it
all has to be free, maybe also a little bit the fear of Silicon
Valley, are they going to come in? Are they gonna screw us over
with pricing? This is all historical stuff, which goes
back over 10 years of how podcasting and podcast hosting
companies evolve, and that they've kind of priced
themselves with such thin margins when something
successful comes along. It just seems like we need some form of
reset for people to understand personally. Although, throughout
the years, we found our own solutions. When I got a bill
like, oh, now it's $600 this month. I was also happy, like,
holy crap, I'm smoking over here. This is great. The first
thing that came into my head was not Oh, how am I gonna pay for
it? I'm going to go broke doing the show. It was it was
incredibly exciting. Now these are much bigger bills and other
people would see. But I think somehow we we didn't set that up
right for you guys. Does that make any sense?
He does, and in a symptom that we often often ponder is how do
you? How do you translate that, and we're sort of very
forthcoming with that, you know, we don't offer a free version,
we don't have a freemium model, we only offer a seven day free
trial, not a 14 or a 28. And the reason for that is that, you
know, I could get free golf lessons, but they're either
going to sell me a membership, or I'm not going to be very good
after them, you know, there is no way to get around the fact
that free is either simply not as good. And if it is as good,
it needs to make money somewhere somehow in the future. And
we've, we I think this might be the northern English northern
British in as we've just been very straight and honest, and
just said, Look, we are a business. And we'll do a really,
really good job for you. These are, what the costs are for us.
We'll keep it as low as we can for you. And if you're serious
about your podcast, and if you're serious about growing it,
not only we're gonna give you the RSS stuff and the stuff that
you expect from a five bucks a month cost, but we'll give you
all that other stuff that we just talked about, what
what do you What's your feeling about coming up? Because it's,
it just seems to me that if you could eliminate the hosting cost
or minimize that to something that is manageable, and you can
you can project regardless of what happens with your customer
base. I think that would put you in such a good place. I don't
know. I mean, I'm just just from what I see from the outside from
all hosting companies because they You would have this this
what has to be one of the biggest costs just eliminated
overnight. And at podcast, index, our social, we've had an
ongoing dialogue, and we're moving forward with the
alternative enclosure possibility for web torrent for
ipfs, distributed hosting ideas. I mean, is that something that
you've looked at? Are you willing to consider? Is it
something that I mean, it's scary, I can understand. But
any, any other ideas on in that realm as to how you can just
reduce the actual bandwidth cost?
just jumping on that one?
Yes, you go. Sorry.
Yeah, algebra? No. I mean, the ultimate enclosures thing for me
is quite a big one. And I think, looking at it from places, I
mean, we've, we've already talked about how, you know, deer
deer is, you know, we can get a lot of data right now on his
phones and cellular, but then we look at countries like India,
and, you know, places like South Africa, you know, where data is
at a premium. And ultimately, closure offers a really, really
good solution. And to be fair, you know, the only reason that
hosts use CD ends is because someone else that never media
house uses CDN is kind of like a stick to hit you with if you
don't use one. You know, there are perfectly good solutions
without using CD ends. You know, there's options out there, you
know, for basic, you know, storage systems. You know, I
think if you look at Daniel J, Lewis did a really, really
interesting blog post about this a while ago, when we first
launched captivate, and it was, you know, about fastest podcast
downloads. And I think whilst it's great to have a fast
download, you know, the people that are, you know, in the UK,
over in the US and Europe, you know, they do it, the streaming
time is so tiny and insignificant that it doesn't
matter, that much. CDN is basically just been kind of
forced into podcasting, because everyone else has got it, and
you know, it's a battle, they're not gonna see the end, you can
always have, you know, separate servers that have got, you know,
the media files with redundancy and backups that cost next and
often. But, you know, that's kind of where there's a little
bit of a downfall in podcasters, in as a whole.
Yeah, let me let me ask you something about that on the
bandwidth side of things, Karen, is, because one thing that we,
you know, we're an egg, we're an aggregator a big one. And so one
of the things that, as I've been trying to trying to fix or solve
here is the same thing that web sub nor pub sub was trying to
solve, that sort of failed at that. And that's the polling
issue, you know, polling for, for feeds. And what, you know,
what we see on a consistent basis is just, you know, we now
have like three point, almost 3.2 million feeds in the index,
there's no way that you can timely in a timely fashion, pull
every one of those number one, your there's going to be some
delay. And then number two, we don't really even want to do
that, because you're wasting so much time pulling feeds that
never update is a website was supposed to fix that. And, but,
but it really just falls down in a lot of ways. So what have in
most, I think web sub web sub is a is a thing that makes sense
for for RSS itself, in sort of like the blogging, traditional
RSS, newsfeed world, but I'm beginning to be convinced. And
basically, I am convinced already, that web sub does
really, really does not fit the model of podcasting, RSS. And I
think, what, what I'm working on what I'm working on right now,
and I was actually doing some work on it last night, just
drawing up some some ideas is, is sort of a closed web stub.
And, and this would be something where the the hosting companies
participate. And paying, basically, just anytime there's
an update to a feed, even a new feed, we have a new feed you
paying a set of web web sub compliant servers that are and
you know, I'm envisioning somewhat some envision multiple
people hosting this. So us, let's just say blueberry, maybe
overcast, anybody who runs an aggregator slash podcast
directory, can participate and run a node on this on this web
sub network. And then all the hosting companies and including
word breno, Sol, solo WordPress installs, all those kinds of
things. All can just, they all know where to ping. They just
ping a DNS and say, here's the Feed URL, and it's got a new
item or here's a Feed URL In this URL, and this feed is brand
new wild day, and then everything and then and then
that network replicates out to anybody who wants to subscribe
as a web sub subscriber. Yeah, I think.
Yeah, sorry.
No, I was just say, I think a system like that could really
finally stop all of the polling, and really become sort of a push
notification system for pot for the pod open podcasting world as
a whole that everybody can participate in, without all the
overhead of these constant re subscriptions to website which
are, which are just
Hey, Dave, and Karen. I'm sorry, I'm just jumping the queue here
for a second.
No, no, no.
What an immense power we have at our fingertips here. I know that
we were laughing on a previous show about how the apple podcast
app is basically a DDoS. system. Because it's polling all the
time. It's it's doing a lot of polling. I'm not exactly sure
you will know better the frequency that Spotify and all
these other outfits are polling. But this is where enormous power
lies. Because the hosting companies, you only need a few
of them really, who are really going to say you know what,
apple, this is not acceptable. You're in essence, you are de
dossing. us you there's no reason for it. Now, it's not
your fault. But here's the new standard that the hosting
companies, yeah, who Apple is now fucking ripping off, and is
trying to weasel in on your business. We're putting making a
stand here and saying, if you want to understand when our
customers and feeds are updated, here's how you can access that.
We're gonna block you if you're polling every three minutes. And
you want to see how fast things change with Apple very fast.
Because then all of a sudden, they get their iPhone users
complaining, I can't find this podcast hasn't updated. Why is
your podcast app not working? Now, it's a big step. because
someone's got to have the Kahunas and work with their
customers to say, Hey, we want to keep our costs in check. We
want to lower our costs, whatever it is, we want to do,
we need to protect everybody in this. And these are just bad
actors. But you can only say when we have an activity pub or
a podcast, pub, whatever, whatever the mechanism is,
there's enormous power there.
That says, you know that that's exactly what Deezer have just
implemented. All the weeks ago, we implemented it, I think two
weeks ago. So so whenever a feed is updated, you basically post a
request over to their API and basically say, look, we've
published an episode, I'll look, he looked at an episode, pull my
feed, you know, to stop this ride for polling,
right, but you have to pull you have to ping them. Instead, they
should be pinging you. That's my point. Why, and in fact, they
shouldn't be pinging you, they should just be a resource. And a
distributed resource for all I care, that doesn't matter.
Yeah, see, that's, that's the thing is, is if we, if we solve
this in a way, where you have one pane that goes into the, to
the distributed notification system, and then everybody who
subscribes and gets that paying out, that's what that's what web
sub is supposed to be. But the problem is, is web sub requires
frequent re subscriptions. And it requires a, a, one to one
sort of linkage back from the feed to the web server that it
is handling subscriptions for that feed. And, and I think what
really, the solution needs to be not private agreements between
individual parties, right, but basically one one system where
everybody just knows, here's the here's the here's the domain,
here's the host name. And that host name is a round robin that
addresses multiple hosts within the podcast paying update
network, whatever it is, and we just say in there's there's a
predefined URL scheme and and you can always just ping that
one DNS name with a predefined URL parameters this scheme for
the URL and everybody gets to participate it's basically push
only website if I think that a system like that makes it where
you don't have to have you know, because these are these are
model is is just going to be okay. Well, now now as a podcast
host I have to make you know, different agreements with all
these different direct Yes, that doesn't. That doesn't scalable
either.
Kiernan, what's the Akira in fact now I did it myself. Karen,
what's the sorry about that? What's the percentage do you
think of bandwidth used on our RSS feed polling versus mp3 file
transfer.
mp3 transfers super high,
you know, sure, super
high. Sure.
RSS polling is not as bad, but it's still a lot. You
know, it's I think it's 10%.
Now, it's probably less than that tip probably 5%, maybe four
or 5%? You know,
I don't know how you feel Karen, but it's when with the polling.
It's less the bandwidth and more more of the server resources.
Oh, yeah.
Yes, resource into I think I mean, you know, if you've got
anything written up on that one, you know, feel free to invite me
on GitHub or anything like that, to be working on, you know, here
at captivate, you know, we'd love to be a part of any,
anything that's open like that, that just helps us all again,
you know, if it saves cost on bandwidth, then, you know, we're
all for that anyway. definitely advise if you've got anything
written up.
Yeah, I think we're trying to solve that problem now. And I
was going down the route of a distributed poll, polling
agents, and now I've thought, you know, last night, I was
like, No, it's just not gonna work. We this, this whole thing
is gonna fail. Unless we solve the not the polling issue for
everybody all at once, at the same time, period. I mean,
otherwise, it's a it's a failure, and I'm not even going
to deal with it. So you know that, yeah, well, hopefully,
we'll you know, we'll start hammering away on that. Anyway.
It's just not day one. Just get your thoughts.
Back to just briefly the namespace. What, what, what are
you guys implementing currently? Hello. Sorry, I'll
jump. In last time. I was. I was starting last time. Any job
said? Yeah, yeah, it's like, yeah, so we implemented the
transcript tag, which is fantastic.
But you also provide transcript processing for your customers?
We don't know. But we we partner over with the team at descript.
Got an integration with a script, which works nicely. Go
straight in, we create the files, you know, we get
everything where it needs to be. And we also include the
transcription on the website as well.
Cool. It's all automatic images, to just all flows through and no
one really has Yeah,
see, that was true. Nice. They can even write the manual ones
if you know if someone's not about the tools to do so. They
can write manual transcripts as well, which is nice to know. So
we've got that one. podcast trailer one as soon as that's
obviously open, you know, we're going to look into that one and
and get that one integrated as soon as you can. There's a few
as well that because I'm not I'm not sure if you were But James
could Linds, a part of the Advisory Board of captivate is
forever pushing everyone, all of the all of the all of the
I'm really happy to hear that I'm really happy to hear that
says so. So what we do have our monthly advisor charts, we
always talk about, you know, what we're going to look to
implement, you know what to get in? I think Yeah, I think
that's, that's far. Yeah, and if you mark on that front, I know
you've got a few ideas on what you'd like to implement. Next.
We've got a few design elements that are coming through so we've
just finally got a head of design in who that the fabled
guys who does exhaust gas
the man the myth, the legend, and as part of that, we're
actually going to implement We've had a few of the fields
like the front end field so things like the donation link
that we use on our websites and in our player and so on, that we
want to kind of bolt the tags on to in the in the back end. So
we've kind of held off a few of those just purely because we
knew that we had some design work coming up so there'll be a
few of those times like the location like the funding that
we'll use our own interface that we've already got, essentially
then we'll just bolt the tags onto the back end of them so
that's another something that guys is excited about.
Is get what is what kind of name is is that short for Gavin and
it just turned into a z what how do you get a name like as
a shot for Gary? gases
gases the
geysers. Okay, right.
I was trying to figure it out like Gavin gas, Gary. Yeah, gas
gas geysers? Yeah.
Got it. Okay.
we all we all have a we have a you have a Christian name and
your pub pub, man. Yeah.
That's exactly how it works. Wow. Um, so I guess the the main
question for me is, what can we do to help you guys, is there
anything that we can be doing different, better? something
new, that would facilitate your life make it easier, better,
faster?
I think just just helping out with education, which, which we
talked about earlier would be fantastic. It is not that there
isn't enough going on? I think it's just that we can all always
just do a bit more. And I think that's for us to drive that as
hosting companies. But even though I'm not the most
technical person on the planet, you know, I'm I'm frequently in
the in the Git community looking at the comments and the
discussions and stuff, and I think, having been podcasting
for certainly not as long as very many other people, you
know, it's instance while 2013 ish. I've still and Kieran is
still seeing a lot of these things come and go. And I think
is, is refreshing the podcast in 2.0, the new namespace just
continues to keep the momentum up. That I think is just keep
the foot down. Because I don't think anyone else will just keep
the foot down. That's what we need.
Yeah, I think I was talking about that a little bit on the
on the mass. But on the other day that don't, we don't want to
go. At first, we were thinking, well, maybe we shouldn't go so
fast. Because we need to give people time to catch up and all
that kind of stuff. And then, you know, but the more I think
about it, it's really just, it doesn't matter, the pace of
adoption. I mean, the pace of adoption, can can lag, you know,
for from a few months, it doesn't matter. It's really what
matters more than adoption, is that those things are available
that they exist, because we I guess we were talking about it
with is with reference to alternate enclosure as well,
because there's a couple of hosting companies are like, Hey,
we're just not really interested in alternative closure. 99% of
our customers are in North America. And bandwidth is not an
issue blah, blah, blah. So but then there are other hosting
companies. Even if there's only one or two, that maybe alternate
and closure is a huge deal. And they need a low bandwidth
version. They really that's that's really they're desperate
for a solution like that. And so adoption is not really the
point. And I think, thinking that as well. It's more
important to just have the thing exist. And then and then that
way, if somebody needs it, it's there. And they can use it in
and they know they're safe using it. Because it's an open
standard. I think I'm I think I'm sort of lining up all along
those lines, you know, here, let the say I'm on board with that.
How about this analogy. So you're hosting companies like
your home, and I just happen to be looking for a new home. So
you know, I want my home to look like this. I wanted to have this
I want to have a backyard. Now. There's all kinds of reasons why
I want it. Conversely, your podcast app, and it's something
I've learned. It's like a car. You know, all podcast apps are
going to drive you from home to work. Because just like a car,
some people want a Ferrari some people want a bigger sound
system. Some people want knobs and dials and blips and blobs.
And some people just want completely clean. Some people
want a Tesla and to die and burn. That's the apple model.
That's apple and Spotify get a Tesla, you know, so but it's
it's personality. So my wife loves pod friend, my my business
partner, my friend Dave, he's just turning me on to pod verse,
it has completely different features that I'm interested in.
And that goes right back to what you're saying, Dave? It's like
the adoption comes with partially demand with insight
with vision from individual groups. And what we're seeing
here and maybe this will wrap it all up, is I don't really think
you can have one podcast host or one apple solution or, you know,
the the valley and yet extremely pathetic effort. Mark
Zuckerberg, Zuckerberg made the day before Apple With what?
We're doing podcasting. Do you know so? So it's it's not it's
just not going to where it's almost like RSS, it's dead will
kill it. It's dying. It's going away. Never again, whoo. It just
doesn't happen. Because people have different people aren't all
the same. You know, they, some people may not want to be with a
podcast host. This is captivate Ooh, scary, who the hell knows?
Now, and that, I think is the beauty of what's going on here.
And everybody has their piece and everybody improves at their
own pace with their own group.
Or versity.
I think that's perfect. So to do that, with their own group is
the real key to podcasting. I remember once the first ever
event I went to in podcasting, and I'm coming from this weird
little town like here and I do is very weird. If you do what we
do to you always kind of feel a little bit on the outside. And I
remember turning up at this event. And finally thinking, you
know what, we fit here. This is good. And that was what was
attractive about podcasting. I think the nought point 2% of
podcasters I get the headlines from earlier. They're the ones
that sort of make it feel like actually it was in this and the
people are doing this because we love it. It's not for us to fit
anymore, but it is this is what is this is this is what
podcasting is and i think that i think that's articulated
perfectly Adam. Yeah,
yeah, that's beautiful. So so in Sheffield, you're the weird Yo
podcast, guys. Is that what I'm here?
All the story? We're from a little town called Barnsley.
Right. And when I said I was going into podcasting mainecare
and back in 2014, the digital support network who is supposed
to champion creative and digital industries in bands, the left is
out of the building. How to start a podcast
now Now, is there a rivalry between Sheffield and Barnsley?
Not when you've got here nice.
Very nice, very nice. Well,
guys, I want to thank you so much, so much for coming on. I
know that we had to do things out of sequence, I'm glad you
were able to facilitate us to to be inserted into the board
meeting. Thank you for everything you're doing for
podcasting and for podcasting to point out the same thing, but
specifically how you're helping drive a lot of this innovation.
And as I said, I make myself fully available to you, your
customers, whatever, if you want to do some, if I can help in any
way with with educational stuff, I do end up that goes for all of
our all of our hosting companies of course. And, and feel free to
barge into the boardroom anytime that you need something, you
know, you got a union dispute, whatever, it's, that's what
we're here for.
Now, thank you very much. It's been a real pleasure. Right.
enjoyed it.
Yeah, likewise, thank you for that. It's, it's nice to be able
to chat and it's nice to have someone that gets the British
humor. So thank you for that.
Thank you guys, cuz you you invented that and it just passed
on to me by assimilation. So it's, it's fun.
Thanks, guys.
Alright, Dave, maybe this is appropriate moment to thank
people who have supported podcast index.org as this is a
value for value proposition. I think that's pretty clear by now
that the only the only thing we care about is value for value
time talent treasure, you bring it whatever you get out of the
index out of this podcast out of the movement in general, Your
support is what is fueling it literally it keeps the servers
running makes everything go and you can support us by going to
podcast index.org scroll down there you see a big red Donate
button that's for your COC bucks through PayPal which still is
very useful. And I believe there's also a QR code there if
you want to send us some status websites and who do we have to
thank today for supporting everything
good group. I want to I want to say off the bat that I think I
mentioned earlier, you know Tom at buzzsprout contacted me and
then at RSS calm asking if we needed any financial help and
that kind of thing and that was great. That was just so
appreciate super heartwarming. Really Yes.
Yeah. It meant a lot and you know we're doing we're doing
fine man we got you know, we've we save our money we don't you
know, we're we've done we've done well to be able to handle
stuff like this but I really appreciate that that sentiment
the yes a Marco from overcast showed up in a big way and gave
us $500 Yeah, nice and yeah that appreciate that and he put a
really put his money where his mouth is. And that mean means a
lot no note or anything that really appreciate that
$500 and half a million dollar it half and half a million
iTunes IDs. It's It's It's an it's a very nice, very nice show
support.
Yeah, very appreciated. The let's see here who got Oh, okay.
I don't know. He said, Okay, here is $50 donation. Nice.
Here's his note. post this hope this helps with the influx, no
weekly shout out necessary go podcasting. Do these there's no
weekly shout out necessary. She'll still get say his name.
It doesn't say anonymous?
I guess not. Okay. And if he does, we'll do it on the next.
If it sounds like someone doesn't need to be mentioned.
There. I just got to make sure.
Okay, so
thank you for that. $50 Oh, Dred Scott. Yeah. dready $4.33.
Dr. You're sending it the wrong way, man. Hold on to that. Well,
of course he's sending Kuk bucks. He's holding on to the
Bitcoin. He's smart, smart, man. He's smart, man. He's hodling
Dred Scott the hodler dread the hodler new name dread the hodler
There you go. And that's so nice. If you drive in it's very,
very kind.
Show number eight says show number. Show number with a
little 33 spikelets sprinkled on top. I keep up the great work.
Can I get a cute you've been Frank defragment a jingle? Yeah,
of course. That's it this is over. All right.
I believe so. Yeah,
yeah. Thank you. Chad, Pharaoh showed up with $33.33 and his
messages is not a bug. It's a feature.
All right.
Thanks, Chad. appreciate very much.
Seeing out Oh Lord, I do not know how to pronounce this name.
GRZEG Oh rz
Hold on a second. Let me let me write that one down.
Alright. GRC eg, Eg O, O RG o r z, I'm sorry. It is Driggers.
Like it's
probably like a Gregor. Somehow we know I have a country of
origin or no,
I get. I get an Oh no, no. That's the on his email. It's
a.pl. So Poland. Ah,
okay. And what is what is Poland have to say?
It just says take it easy podcast. Take it easy.
Take it easy.
All right. I guess that's the name of this podcast. Beautiful.
Well, thank you very much.
Yeah, thank you. I'm gonna say Driggers. Because it sounds
fancy your clothes. Good. Good for me. All right. Thank you
very much. That was a
that's a great dude.
You're right. Good group, good looking group to actually
Oh, yeah. Very, very, very,
very good looking group. All right. Anything else we need to
discuss anything else we need to do? It's been a long one today.
But I appreciate everybody sticking with us. Because, man,
it's just been one of those one of those weeks a lot to do. I'm
super pumped. Man, I'm so excited. It's like there's so
much energy flowing around. There's so much good thinking
reminder that we have the weekly jitsi call, which I think is it
six UTC tomorrow, Saturday, and that's I believe that's still
on, there'll be a link posted on podcast index dot social, we had
a good a good first one last week, and it was just beautiful
to see all the all the different cam characters, I think
everyone's just a beautiful character have different ideas,
wildly different views on openness, or open source. And
what I love is that, you know, I just look at that whole group
and, and I say, holy crap, you know, this is a $10 million
company group of developers who are sitting here, and I'm not
paying anything for them, look at all but look at all the brain
power that is in this group. And they're more honest to each
other, and probably more polite than if they had been in a
corporate environment.
100%
you know, and I love that. It's like, No, I think this Okay,
cool. I think that's all right. Cool. Perfect. There's no
arguments.
Also the the namespace is getting it is getting some
activity or the less
is that sir Jean himself who was just writing up a tags every
week. Yeah.
We should talk about this. We should talk about some namespace
stuff. Next week. We didn't even get to it this week. Okay. We
there's some good proposals out there and see Daniel J. Lewis
wrote up one. Yes, I saw his Yeah. Tom Rossi just this
morning, posted thing about being able to replicate the
whole channels idea. And I think that's a great, that's great.
Yeah, there's some good activity going on over there. I think can
we're about we're about to finalize trailers. Nice. Anyway,
I'm just gonna leave it at that. It's already been like a freakin
five hour shifts.
Yes. Okay.
Well, everybody, this has been good. Next week, we'll have Eric
the shill. I can't I mean, he has a last name, but I always
call America shill. And he is the third partner of podcast
index LLC. And he keeps everything legal for us. And
we'll have a lot of and particularly in the when it
comes to how do we handle income with satoshis? What does that
look like for taxation? What is what's going on with Bitcoin he
studies he just studied the report that came out from the
SEC for all the regulations and you know, and just in general,
he has a he's also developing parts for the the new website.
So I think we'll have a lot of fun having him on the show
tomorrow. And he'll finally we'll have a voice here as well,
which has been overdue.
Yeah. Yeah. And he knows a lot about DMCA and all that stuff,
too. He's He's a DeWalt. Army knife.
Yes, there you go. He's not the shill. He's Eric. The Swiss Army
Knife of podcast index is perfect. Okay. Yeah, I can't say
anything other than I am just super happy. And we will be back
again on Friday to bring you another board. Meaning a podcast
in 2.0. Until then, take care everybody Bye bye.
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