Podcasting 2.0 for August 22nd, 2025, episode 231.

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Hello everybody, welcome to Podcasting 2.0.

We are the official spot to find out what's really happening in podcasting.

We don't hold back on anything.

We've got the down, the dirty, everything you need to know.

We are in fact the boardroom.

This is where it all happens.

And on that, we're the only boardroom that was at the Podcast Standards Project meeting.

I'm Adam Curry, here in the heart of the Texas Hill Country and in Alabama, the man who attends all the meetings while holding down two jobs and going to school.

Say hello to my friend on the other end, the one, the only, Mr.

Dave Jones.

Exactly what episode number was this again?

Did I say it?

231.

You said.

Yeah, well you won't hear that because that's just the fake opening.

And then once we have a show title, I actually expertly edit a new opening on to every episode.

So it's like, wow, he already knew the show.

They know what they're gonna talk about before they even did it.

That's amazing.

It's magic.

It's totally magic.

Welcome to episode 231.

Hey, Dave Jones, how you doing?

Good.

Okay, great.

That's it everybody.

See you next week.

You call me.

Mid mix swallow, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Hello boardroom.

Good to see y'all.

Good to have everybody here in the board meeting.

Is Nathan back?

Who's back?

Because I saw a few of the board members in Dallas.

Who did you see?

I need a full report.

You need a report, yes.

But can I guide the report though?

Yeah, I would like to guide the report.

Okay, I'm not sure what that means, but I'll fly with you.

Go ahead.

Okay, what it means, I would like to know, first of all, who did you see in person?

In person?

Well, of course, Rocky Thomas.

Oh yeah, Rocky.

She was the first person I saw, because you know me, I'm a baby, and I'm like, hey, listen, when I show up, because I was flying in in the morning, and I've been to the Gaylord hotels, and if you don't know where you're going, you can get very lost.

And below 5,000 feet, I'm pretty bad with directions anyway.

So I said, Rocky, can you send someone to meet me at the front door?

And she was there, she was standing right there.

With a limo, with a limo.

Well, I stepped out of the limo.

She had the bodyguards, everything ready to go.

Right away, I think Ben and Alberto and Rob Kirkpatrick, so Ben and Alberto from rss .com, we walked in, Rocky's husband, Sean, who's a member of the whole big streaming conglomerate.

Yeah, the PSE.

The, see, James Cridlin, saw James.

By the way, James, you know, I forgot about this.

Very tall.

He's handsome.

He's a handsome man.

Oh, that's not what I was going to say.

I was just going to say tall.

He's a handsome man.

Yeah, he's a very handsome fellow.

Todd Cochran, another handsome fellow.

Daniel J.

Lewis, I'm going to forget half the people, of course.

The boys from Buzzsprout?

Saw the boys from Buzzsprout.

Saw Nathan, Nathan G.

Saw- Spurlock, I'm sure you saw Spurlock.

I did not see Spurlock.

Oh, he wasn't there?

No, I don't think he was there.

But why would he?

There's no reason to be there.

I was only there just to, you know, just to plug in.

One of these days we'll have to ask him.

Yeah, one of these days we'll ask him if he was there.

Oh, goodness.

I know him.

Ted, Ted Haussmann from the Apples, he was there.

Oh, man, a lot of people, a lot of people were there.

And yeah, so, you know, I hustled in.

You know, the whole headphone thing?

Justin Jackson from Transistor, I'm sure Justin was there.

Justin was there.

I saw Justin.

Well, I, so I wound up, you know, you're not guiding me anymore, so I'll just take the reins.

I was just, I was just letting you, I'm guiding you into, this part of the guiding is, freestyle, do whatever you'd like.

Well, first of all, I'm on the WhatsApp groups, the WhatsApp groups, the- Oh, man, I'm so glad I'm not on that.

Oh, yeah, no, this is fantastic.

And the WhatsApp group, there was one for the podcast movement.

There was a WhatsApp group and I joined it.

And, you know, everyone's nerding out and they're like, oh, look how many steps.

Everyone's counting their steps.

They're all part of the Borg.

And they're like, oh, how many steps have you done?

How many steps?

Then they're going back forth.

Now, my plan was only to come in for one day and go out, cause I'm plenty busy, you know, podfather business.

So, I hooked my buddy, Mitch Maverick, the periodontist, he hooked me up with his plane.

You know, with the jet.

Well, it is a turbo prop, so it is a turbine engine, but it still has a massive propeller on it.

And Jay flew, cause I'm not qualified on the powerful machine like that.

How was the flight, by the way?

Smooth?

Comfortable?

45 minutes from the airport, five minutes from my house.

I mean, you can't beat that going to Dallas, which is a five hour drive, five hour drive.

And you literally land at Addison airport and you pull up to the FBO, the field -based operator, and it's called Million Air.

I mean, does it get any better than that?

No, beautiful.

Hey ladies, how are you doing?

Got any coffee for me?

I'm just going to freshen up here in the lounge.

So everyone's, and by the way, Starlink is on the plane.

So I'm, you know, I'm doing stuff on the, I'm sitting in the back.

I'm doing stuff on the internet.

You're vibe coding.

You're vibe coding in the back.

I'm vibe coding in the back.

And I see everyone talking about their steps.

So I post a picture of me in the back of the plane.

I'm like, these are my steps.

Flex.

Big flex.

Anyway, so Rocky and I did on the sound stack stage, Rocky and I did a, you know, like a fireside chat.

Now you have to imagine.

This is the headphone thing.

Yeah, but you have to, it's very interesting.

So it's a huge hall with carpet, which for any trade show is incredibly welcomed and appreciated and important.

So you don't, you know, if you're walking on cement, you know, you're going to be very tired at the end of the day.

So really nice plush carpeting.

And just imagine there's maybe seven stages all in this big room in different locations, all completely open.

So just a backdrop, chairs in the front, standing room.

And when you come in, everybody gets a pair of headphones and the headphones have three controls, on, off, volume knob, and a channel selector, which the outside of the headsets illuminate in the color white, green, red, purple, or blue.

And that signifies the channel.

So if you want to listen to our, if you want to listen to our fireside chat, you had to be on the white channel, which I did remark was rather racist of everybody.

And I thought this would be the worst experience ever.

It is hands down the best thing I've ever witnessed.

It was- Yes, because we're sitting on stage, we have hand mics and you have the headphones on yourself, but it's almost- I'm seeing a picture of you right now, yeah.

It's almost- You and Rocky.

Yeah, it's almost like you're doing a podcast with everybody in the room because they all have the headphones on.

First of all, you can make, you can see everyone's listening to you because if someone had a different color, you know, you call them out like a body catcher.

You're like, hey, you're red, get out of here.

But because of that, everybody's engaged.

You know, I've been on lots of stages and you're always looking at the audience and you try to, there's always one or two people you catch their eye, you know, you might look to them a couple of times because they smile back or they laugh at all your jokes, very encouraging.

But there's always people like on their phone, looking away, talking to their neighbor, none of that.

And then we do Q&A and, you know, there was a lady there and she was handing out the mic and it was, you could hear them perfectly.

They could hear me.

It was an incredible experience.

Yes, and then later I walked to the stage where James was interviewing the guy from Coat Hanger.

What is that?

Goal Hanger.

I think Coat Hanger is better.

Coat Hanger.

And I was standing way in the back behind all of the chairs and they had the headphones on, just switch it to their channel.

You could hear perfectly.

It was very enjoyable experience.

As much as I always like an amplified room, I mean, I get it.

I'm all in.

I apologize for being negative about it.

I mean, I was too.

Just hearing it described, you're like, oh, this is a train wreck.

But evidently in person, it works.

Eric PP says, how did they handle applause?

Well, yeah, there's no applause.

No one applauds.

You can't hear them applauding.

It's like, you can see people's hands moving, but you don't hear anything.

And because it was a big open room, applause doesn't really carry that far.

And with the carpeting and everything, it doesn't bounce around.

Then had lunch with the RSS boys, which is kind of funny.

Like, come on, we'll take you to a steak dinner.

My restaurant's closed.

Well, we'll go to the Italian place.

Restaurant's closed.

But we'll maybe we can get some bar food over here.

Bar closed.

I'm gonna say, there's the marketplace, which is basically stand in line, grab a sandwich.

And that was perfect.

The food court.

Yes, the food court.

That was perfect.

And then they said, well, why don't you come over to the PSP meeting, the Podcast Standards Project?

That was interesting.

Now, I think they were doing a couple of these.

They had one the previous day.

This is, you know, so it's a nice room and everybody sat in a big circle and held hands and shared a secret.

And Justin from Transistor was kind of running it, which was, he's very good at that.

And it was an interesting vibe, I would say.

Almost immediately, you know, well, let's talk about HLS and video and streaming and video and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, video, video, video, video, video, video.

Now, this was an open session though.

This was not like a closed door meeting of the PSP.

No, no, anybody could come in and- Okay, good.

And, you know, see Rob Walsh was there.

Todd was there.

The RSS guys, Buzzsprout guys.

I'm sure I missed many others.

But, you know, obviously they focused on the video.

They're talking about all these different things and the protocols.

It could be all agree on one type of encoder and et cetera, et cetera.

And someone said, hey, Adam, since you're here, what are your thoughts?

On video?

Yeah.

Buckle up.

Yeah, I said, well, honestly, I think you're all wasting your time and money, but it's okay.

You can podcast PDFs for all I care.

He said, I'm more interested in lit.

That's where I think.

And then it kind of went to the, well, we can do a lit over HLS.

At a certain point, the one thing that was interesting is, you know, so what is your concept of what the Podcast Standards Project is?

What are they supposed to be doing?

My understanding, the way I see the Podcast Standards Project is as a way to wrangle the hosting companies to support a base set of 2.0 tags.

I've always seen it as a way to get the hosting companies on the same page so that the hosting companies define the way that they're going to move forward in phases to adopt next generation podcasting tags.

Agreed.

And I think that was the general idea.

But what happened pretty soon, and someone actually said, hold on a second, what's going on here?

They were agreeing on certain standards, you know, certain tags that will be implemented.

And then it's like, okay, well, that'll be optional and that'll be optional.

And someone said, well, what's the point?

If we're sitting here agreeing on things, but it's optional.

You know, and then I was getting pings from the pilot.

He's like, you know, unless you want to wait, we can go now and go in between the storms.

Oh, yeah, that's a good idea.

Because everything was backed up and you know, the ATC was routing people around and we're small compared to some of the massive jets that are out there.

And I guess they have priority.

So I had to leave at four to get back to leave.

And I was, you know, we got back home.

I was happy.

I was happy to be home.

I'm glad I didn't stay overnight.

Because, you know, it would have meant, because it was like 9.45, our session.

So I would have had to go up Tuesday, stay overnight.

They probably would have wait until Thursday, but I couldn't do that because I got the show.

So anyway, thank you, Maverick, for the lending me your plane.

You did not tell me it drinks 60 gallons of jet fuel an hour, but okay.

You said, I'll chip in for fuel.

And you're like, oh crap, I should have done that.

I'll pay for fuel, of course.

That's what I said.

I'll pay for fuel.

Cheap, a little bit cheaper than two nights of hotel room.

Well, that's not bad.

Yeah, so it was good.

It was nice to be, everyone asked where you were, of course.

How could, where's Dave here?

How can we get Dave?

Dave's not here, man.

Dave's not coming.

Dave's not going to come to this partay.

That would have been a train wreck.

Yeah.

Well, so the, so the PSP stuff did, when somebody said, if it's, when somebody mentioned it about the sort of ineffectiveness of things being optional, did that change the room at all?

Did they say, well, let's actually enforce some things?

Yeah, I think so.

But that was just a little bit before I left.

So I wasn't there for the conclusion.

You know what, what I did say, though, is I said, I just have to stop for a second.

And say, we are a quarter of a century on.

And I am so delighted to see this room.

I'm just, I just love everybody who's here.

I love that you're in it, that you're all trying to get something going together.

It was truly, I almost choked up a little bit.

It's just like, wow, look at all these smart people.

You know, have all gotten into different, because you always have app guys there.

They're all gotten into different areas of podcasting.

They all really want to make it work.

There's still an inordinate amount of, well, we want to adopt these, so Apple and Spotify will adopt them.

That would, to me is like, we're still doing this.

Who cares?

You know, that's me, obviously.

But, you know, and I think I said, look, if you publish, eventually it'll happen.

Just keep publishing.

That's just how it works.

Make the content, keep publishing.

We have many apps that already understand it.

You know, Pocket Cast is not small.

You know, they're adopting tags.

Just keep on it, keep publishing.

Just keep publishing because it always, these things come from the bottom up.

There's, you know, there's always some software engineer like, hey, what's this thing?

Where can I put that?

And then all of a sudden it shows up and then someone in management goes, wow, you did that?

You used a promotion.

That's one of the things I want to talk to Spurlock about too is the HLS stuff, because I know he's working on some stuff as well.

And I want to see it work.

I mean, I want to see it work.

If we have, I mean, if we can make a viable alternative to, you know, an open distributed alternative for finding video content, even, look, you'll never replicate YouTube.

You just can't because you can't replicate the money losing- Yes, thank you.

Financial incentives that it produces.

It's just, it's a thing that exists.

Well, here's one of the fears that they had, which I thought was valid.

It's like, well, if we start doing this and by the way, the general consensus is to have video in the alternative enclosure, which I think is very interesting.

Yes, that's the right way to do it.

I love that.

I love that.

I think that's a great idea.

And everyone seems to be on board with that.

But everyone realizes that, well, you know, if we push this, Apple's probably going to do video, but you'll have to upload your video to iTunes Connect.

And I think there's a very real danger of that.

Very typical.

See, Apple, the reason- I don't know, I disagree.

I don't think that's accurate.

I disagree with that.

The reason I disagree with it is because they do video already.

They already support video in a very inefficient way.

We need to bring the guest in because this is some tech talk.

Ladies and gentlemen, let's get into the tech talk.

Let's bring in our special guest.

We talked about him on the last board meeting and yes, there he is.

He jumped at the occasion.

Oh my goodness, I can't believe I'm being involved in the bar drum.

Here I come, ladies and gentlemen.

He is behind op3.dev and many more podcasting 2.0, podcastindex.socialprojects.

Please welcome John Spurlock.

Yeah, I took my own private jet as soon as I heard.

It took me a week to get here, but I'm glad to be here.

You rushed over, yes.

Hey, John.

I only spent 30 bucks a gallon.

Oh, no.

Hey, you weren't there, were you, at Podcast Movement?

No, as soon as, so we lived in Dallas for eight years and we recently moved and so I was actually happy to hear that it's going to be New York going forward.

Yeah, so we're in New Jersey now.

We're in central New Jersey.

Where, where in New Jersey?

That's a big move.

Where in New Jersey?

Sort of central Jersey, so like the farmland, basically.

I wanted to kind of like move out as far as I could.

You could tell me the town or the general county.

I mean, I lived in New Jersey for 12 years.

So you know where Bedminster is?

It's kind of like a little bit south of that, basically.

So sort of nearer to Princeton, but she got a job in New Brunswick, which is Rutgers, which is their big college sort of there.

So it's like, yeah, horrible bandwidth, but it's really pretty out here.

People don't understand that when they say New Jersey is the garden state, it's really true.

New Jersey is beautiful.

It's beautiful.

People always say, ah, New Jersey, me, me, me.

It is stunning.

And it has seasons, like nothing against Texas, but it's basically like, I mean, you're in an oven in the summer, but there's really not as much nature, right?

So it's like, I love seasons and it's really great.

Again, except for the bandwidth.

So we have Xfinity here instead of ridiculous, like 10 gig up and down that we had in.

Well, have you tried Starling?

Because I mean, we only use it as a backup because I've got five gig up and down fiber, but Starling is surprisingly good.

Surprisingly good.

As a backup, you know, we got the generator.

So we're going, you know, we're ready.

We're ready.

Do you have a landing strip?

We actually, we have enough room in the back that we could actually, we just need the plane.

Well, if you mow it, I'll come in.

Mow a strip for me, baby.

There's a soybean.

I'm looking at a soybean field here.

So if you land there in the off season, it could work.

Soybeans are soft.

Yeah, you can make that work.

You heard the new, so it's going to be in New York now.

So podcast movement going forward is going to be in New York City.

Yeah, exactly.

But at least I'll be able to drive if I want to go, so.

It's two and a half, two and a half hours.

But I'm really glad to hear that.

Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly.

Well, I'm glad you had a good time though.

That sounds good.

It was perfect for me.

I mean, that's exactly, I wanted to see everybody who I could see and hug everybody.

And that was perfect.

It was nice.

It was nice to be there.

And yeah, it was good.

Yeah, the old Edison Airport.

I think Nathan's from around there too, but that's about where we lived in Dallas, sort of that Northeast sort of area.

Another beautiful area of the Texas.

Nathan's in Chicago though, right?

He's in Chicago now.

Now he is, yeah, I believe so.

Yeah, okay, I believe so.

Yeah, but I disagree.

I disagree that Apple would somehow force people to upload video through iTunes Connect.

I mean, I just don't think that- Can I just give you the reason why I say that?

Okay.

The reason why Apple is so slow with everything is part of their DNA.

They care about one thing and one thing only.

They want the most outstanding experience for their customer, which is why they haven't put a full-on AI LLM into their product because they know it sucks.

And they've published research papers on it.

And they're just like, you know, we'll take the heat.

We'll take the loss on the stock market, but this hype is not good enough for our customers right now.

So if there's any, if they go heavy on video, and yes, I agree that it already does video.

They really don't promote it that way.

But if they go heavy and say, hey, we're really doing video now, and we're an alternative, they are more concerned about the experience for their customer than being part of an open ecosystem, in my opinion.

Well, let me counter that because I think that- Pirate.

I think that this is one of those situations where it's a self-correct, no, it's not correcting.

It's like a, so if you have enough, let me just say, oh, here's a way to say it.

If you have enough money to do a video podcasting solution, then you, by definition, have the means to do it well.

So like, if you think, I mean, the larger hosts, Blueberry, Buzzsprout, RSS, Transistor, you know, Captivate, these hosts that have solid infrastructure, Lipson, they're going to charge for the product, for the privilege, and they're going to build that thing out correctly.

And so, you know, this is not, nobody's going to be streaming HLS video from their PowerPress install on their WordPress site.

Understood.

You know, I mean, they technically could, but that's going to be such an outlier that I think that the hosting companies that are going to make this thing happen, I believe also lend it the credibility of a proven track record of content delivery.

True.

However, let's look at transcripts as an example.

So they may do an either or.

They recognize the transcript namespace tag, but the first thing they did to make sure their customers had an outstanding transcript experience is they were doing the transcripts.

This is what I mean.

They will always want to do it themselves to give their customers, you know, whenever something breaks on an app, it's always the app's fault.

None of the Apple users think, oh, well, that's probably a problem with rss.com.

Yeah, but there's a huge difference between a one kilobyte transcript and, you know, three gigs of video that Apple, in order to support something like this, would have to build out an enormous infrastructure to support all the video that they're going to do.

And Spotify was willing, what do you mean?

No, no.

I don't think they need infrastructure, right?

So to finish your thought, I didn't want to.

No, I mean, if they're going to say everybody uploads their video to Apple and then we will distribute it, they would have to build out a giant HLS infrastructure.

No, that's why they're not going to do it.

I mean, they don't, they're not server people over there, right?

Like name one server product from Apple that's any good, right?

Mac drive.

Mac drive, dot Mac.

Yeah, exactly, iCloud, right?

So they love podcasting, right?

Because it's hosted by other people and they can just like make it look great in their player app.

And that's what's great about apps, can kind of highlight stuff from others.

And I think it'll be the same way with HLS.

Now the problem is if they turned it on today, there would be what, like five videos a day that would show up?

So I think that's part of it.

I was curious about this myself.

So I kind of just wanted to see like off the fire hose of what was coming in, like how many podcasts like use this alternate enclosure, HLS thing today.

And so it's really not that many, but it's cool to see like, you know, Fountain does some, actually Dystopia does some.

Yeah.

And I actually put together a site instead of just seeing it myself.

I was like, hey, everyone might be kind of interested in this as well.

So if you go to HLS.livewire.io, you'll see just like a crappy site with all the videos that everyone's publishing out there today, right?

So this is what Apple would see or any app would see today.

John, did you vibe code this website?

No.

I had some pretty good vibes as I was doing it.

Yeah, mostly coffee vibes.

By the way, the thing, here's the thing that I learned at the PSP meeting.

The actual cost of doing video is not the bandwidth.

I knew that would make you quiet.

I don't agree.

Crickets.

What is it, the encoding?

Yeah.

Compute.

That's, they all agreed on it.

They all- No, see, I didn't.

Well, hold on, hold on.

Wait, listen, listen to what I'm saying.

Not the encoding into HLS.

It's what people feed them.

So people are going to give them everything from Windows video to MP4s, MV4, all these different things.

They have to then re-encode that to some kind of standard.

I still disagree.

I think they're thinking.

Now, if they're thinking that they're going to have to have a fleet of transcoding compute instances, well, on a cloud host somewhere, well, yeah, sure, but you could run a few boxes in-house.

I'm just reporting, Dave.

Don't shoot the messenger.

I'm just a roving reporter.

You could do quote unquote on-prem and run a few boxes and do transcoding for nothing.

Is this going to be one of the sessions that's recorded, by the way?

I love that they're releasing the recordings for everything.

No, I don't.

At the conference.

I don't think this was recorded.

I don't think so.

Ah, okay.

Maybe it was.

Take a step back, though.

I've been thinking about the whole video, audio thing as well.

I'm an audio person.

I love listening to audio.

Listened to transistor radio when I was a kid.

Like, there's something special about audio.

And I think where I am now is that we just don't want to say that like, hey, if you want to do video, if you're good looking and you want to do video, we shouldn't have to say like, oh, sorry, can't do that.

It's only audio, right?

And we have all of the pieces, right?

It's not like we have to do the work of how would we do this?

It's like, you guys did a ton of work to say like, here's a great way to say an alternate enclosure so we're not breaking existing audio apps.

And then we have these feeds.

You know, Apple came up with HLS back in, remember when they hated Flash, right?

They're like, we're not going to have Flash on the iPhone.

So Flash was used for two things.

It was used for video and it was used for interactive stuff.

And the web is actually fairly good now at interactive stuff, but video was still something they had to do.

So they came up with this HLS format and it was using the very, you know, high technology of Winamp playlists.

It's just basically a text file with, you know, streams in there.

Yeah, and if you remember the Winamp stuff, it's like, it's the same thing.

So what's cool about it is it's like, we have the place to put it.

There's all these transcoders now that do it.

And in particular, like it works on a wide variety of devices as well, right?

So it works on a TV just as well as it works all the way down to the phone.

And the client, it's like doing the work of saying like, oh, I see that you're kind of bandwidth constrained at this point, you know, let me pick a smaller bandwidth there.

And the client is doing that.

So crucially the server companies, podcast hosting companies are not doing, they don't have to stand up a live, you know, real 65 server or something on the backend.

Like they can just do what they're already doing, which is do deals with CDNs and like post static files.

And this is what they're doing already.

And from the client point of view, it looks like magic, right?

You can scan to wherever you want, you can go picture in picture, but it's all running off of just really boring HTTP sort of technology.

Hmm.

Yeah, I agree.

This, I think this can be, I think this can be done for, I just think they have to think outside the box a little bit and think about, okay, the answer to everything is not, let's add X more number of compute notes to our AWS account.

You know, if you think outside that a little bit, I mean, now at the scale of YouTube, sure, you're going to have to like, I think it's going to be incredibly expensive, but for the limited amount, I mean, let's be honest.

If you add a podcast option to your hosting company, you're not, how much percentage of your user base is actually going to use that?

It's not going to be huge.

So you're already talking about a small.

What's the point?

If it's not going to be huge and it doesn't compete with YouTube, what's the point?

Well, I think, no, I mean, now competing with YouTube is a, that's a question.

That's what everyone's talking about.

Everyone, that's what everyone, oh, YouTube, YouTube, YouTube, we got to do video.

Well, but yeah, but see, compete, quote, competing with YouTube is, that has to be defined because you can compete with somebody in multiple ways.

If you mean competing with, or if they mean competing with YouTube by being YouTube, by doing the exact same things that they do at that scale, that's, that's delusional, but I don't, I hope that's not what they mean.

I think, you know, the way I would define, I would say they can compete with YouTube though, if you define it correctly.

And the competition is, have a legitimate place to serve video to the mass consumer and have it available on demand whenever it's needed.

I think that they can absolutely do that.

It just will not be at YouTube scale in a, and I don't think they want that though.

Okay, here's the problem I have.

And I like that we disagree because we rarely disagree.

True.

So this is much better.

What I'm looking at here, the HLS podcast radar at hls.livewire.io is actually very interesting.

It's an interface that is interesting for video.

Your typical podcast app is not going to be interesting for video.

So if we really want to compete on a different level, we need different apps that when video comes through or when video is available, function in a different way.

I just don't think that, I mean, it's two pieces or three pieces.

One, YouTube is free.

So you're going to be paying for something to do this.

So that's already a large barrier.

Once you get over that hurdle, what is the experience for the user?

YouTube has a lot going on in their interface.

That's part of the appeal of YouTube.

In fact, the only appeal of YouTube, in my opinion, is the discovery aspect.

That's why people want to be on YouTube because they're getting recommended.

You trick the algos, you get popped up to the top.

There's all kinds of stuff that happens.

It's not just about video.

By the way, if video truly had killed audio, MTV would still be playing music videos on the air today.

See, if we can already do all that stuff that YouTube does, the problem is that people don't look at their podcast app.

So if there's a reason for them to look at their podcast app, all those things that people have been dinging podcasting 2.0 features for, like, eh, nobody's going to use this because nobody looks at their podcast app.

All of a sudden, those people are going to be like, it's become viable features because now customers or listeners will look at their podcast app a little bit more like they do their YouTube app, where they're now expecting to sometimes be able to see things and interact with them.

PeerTube is a perfect example of this.

PeerTube is probably serving, you can correct me on this, John, but I bet PeerTube is probably serving most of the HLS content through podcasts right now.

That's right.

Most of those say PeerTube, for sure.

And they were very early, thanks to Alex's plugin.

Alex, right.

Yeah, Alex did miracle work in creating the alternate enclosure tag and then doing all of the legwork to do pull requests up to the PeerTube guys to get HLS video in the alternate enclosure tag into RSS feeds.

If anybody wants to see exactly how to do this the correct way, go find a PeerTube instance, look at the way that they're doing it with the alternate enclosure HLS.

That is the correct way to do this spec.

This would be my recommendation.

To make this work really well, the first person who comes out with a Roku app or a smart TV app that understands video enclosures will make an incredible impact.

That's a great point.

Yeah, that's a great point.

I just, I think this can be done because the problem, see, the other problem with YouTube is that YouTube, because of what it is and the way that it works, has tons of content that just would never make any sense in a podcast app.

That's right.

It just wouldn't.

Which is good, because there's a signal to noise ratio that is compelling.

I'm totally on board with that.

Yeah, like these PeerTube videos, these are perfect, the ones I'm just scrolling through here on HLS podcast radar.

These things, these videos are perfect for a podcast app.

These make a lot of sense in a podcast app.

And I see no reason why Apple wouldn't just play these.

I don't think they would force everybody to re-upload it.

And I think that it makes sense and I think it can work.

I mean, all you need is a little bit.

It would be more compelling if there was more like general content, right?

Obviously, right?

So it's like, there's somewhat still the chicken and egg.

We'll see how many people really want to publish this stuff.

Hosts like Transistor, I think, will ease that tremendously.

Those, and Fountain that does this.

I think making it as easy as possible for people to just hit a button and it goes everywhere, basically.

Including this, I think that'll, you remember back in the early days of the iPod, right?

They were really touting, some of those shows were really high production, right?

Some of those early video podcasts.

I was really surprised by that.

It's just a matter of like, hey, where are people expecting to see this stuff?

And I listened to this really interesting podcast recently from the head of ESPN.

And they're creating their own streaming service finally.

And they have an app.

And he was saying that like the people younger than him basically, they don't really have a problem like using an app, like going to a particular app to watch a particular thing.

You know, I kind of hate that, right?

But like, this is sort of a bridge it's already been crossed because of exclusive deals and stuff like that.

So if it's something that doesn't exist at YouTube at all, that even wouldn't be a problem.

Now I imagine like, you know, some content is gonna, probably all content is gonna be there and then some will be here as well.

But it's just a matter of like the option, right?

Just taking a step back, just saying like, hey, we can't do this, right?

As a media hosting company, sorry, video is something we don't do, have to go to YouTube for that.

That's, I don't know, that's problematic.

I don't think it takes away from audio in the slightest.

And I think people, just like they shouldn't create bad audio, it's like, no one should be forced to create bad video, right?

Like, that's not the idea here.

It's just an optionality sort of thing.

It's like, you have the option of also doing this.

Yeah.

Yeah, no, this can work.

I like bad audio.

I like bad audio.

I do.

I'm serious.

I like- Well, I mean that in a Jim Rome sense.

Or like, remember Jim Rome always had his rules for callers was like, have a take and don't suck.

So bad quality is fine, but it's like bad, like uninteresting content is like bad audio.

Of course, yeah, all right.

And there's a lot of that.

Oh, there's a lot of that on YouTube as well.

Yeah, that's, I mean, the percentage of like quality, actual quality content on YouTube, and I always define quality content as somebody somewhere actually wants to watch it.

If that number is zero, then that's not quality content or watch or listen.

And so that- Yeah, I mean, you can make a personal judgment about the New Heights interview with Taylor Swift, but a lot of people wanted to watch that and watch it live.

It actually almost took down YouTube for live viewing.

So it's like, it may not be quote unquote, maybe some people wouldn't consider it good content, but it is, like you said, compelling to someone to watch, right?

Someone wants to watch that.

Somebody somewhere, yeah.

Not me, but someone wants to watch.

No.

All right, let's talk about something else because everyone talks about this.

Well, I think, well, I mean, everybody talks, yeah, you're right, everybody talks about it, but I mean, I think, I mean, this group defined the specs that are going to be used.

And I think we can, I think we also have valuable, but I don't mind saying that.

A lot of podcast hosting companies don't even know what PeerTube is.

I mean, because this has always been the struggle with Podcasting 2.0.

Most of the people in Podcasting 2.0 that are actually writing specs and writing tags and that kind of thing are fairly steeped in open source technology.

That's where most of us came from.

We came from other open source projects.

Even James, you know, he was deeply involved in open source projects, with things like OpenStreetMaps and that kind of thing.

So a lot of us are just used to, we're used to living in an open source milieu, but the podcast hosting companies didn't really have a lot of that.

You know, they were not familiar with a lot of these things.

So I'm sure that there's some podcast hosting companies out there that don't even know about PeerTube and they don't even know that the HLS aspect of PeerTube is fully functional today.

It's basically a roadmap for what they need to do.

So I think we have a different perspective, you know.

Conversely, most people in the Podcasting 2.0 group have no idea what it takes to run a hosting company with customer service, people who can barely hold a mouse, who want help understanding, you know, it's a lot more than just the technical side of it.

That's true, that's for sure.

Yeah, yep.

So, you know, and that's, you know, I know that a lot of these companies have 20 people, not all full-time, but they have 20 people, 24-7 on the help desk.

And I used to work for Google and like they do all these tech talks internally and I would just go to all of them because I'm curious.

And like one of them was about, and this is very early on, about content detection, right?

So like, and sort of like detecting horrible stuff, like you kind of go a different level when you do video, when you start hosting video as a provider, then you do an audio, right?

I mean, what's the worst that someone can do in audio?

I mean, they could- Blaspheme?

Blaspheme?

Yeah, the- Satan.

But, you know, obviously it takes a lot of people.

I mean, it literally takes people just like sitting there and we're looking at the worst kind of stuff.

And that is something that you would have to think about as a video hoster.

So it's not, it's not, and it's an order of magnitude more data, but it's also an order of magnitude more of that kind of stuff.

And takedown requests and legal issues across the world.

It's just different.

That's, yes, good point.

Yeah, and you know, now you're talking about having to run through CSAM filters and all this.

It's a big deal.

And it's a lot easier now than it used to be.

There's actually some, I've been looking into some of the stuff and you can get some off the shelf stuff to do it.

And there's some services that are fairly okay to do it.

And remember, there's not a lot of the stuff that would be published.

So I still think it's sort of at a manageable level.

No one is saying like, Transistor is going to be the next YouTube, right?

I don't think anyone's saying that.

It's just like, can we start publishing video if the publishers want to do it?

And a lot of publishers want to kind of own their own stack these days.

They want to be their own media company.

I think part of that is saying like, if all else fails, if YouTube takes us down, you know, like you can go to, you know, myname.com and I have my own little publishing world that includes newsletters, podcasts, video, whatever.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, if all it would take would be a few big shows, you know, to start publishing over it.

I mean, if Rogan started cross-publishing HLS video through the podcast feed, that would, that'd be huge.

What do you think that would cost?

You know, I don't, I don't know.

That's a good question.

Well, I know the terabyte costs are around $20.

Mm-hmm.

Okay.

You know, yeah.

You start pushing content, it gets pricey without, you know, edge servers.

Because yeah, personally, I'm much more interested in what will the small person do.

But you know, what, you know, I'm just less interested in a big, big show coming.

Mm-hmm.

That's kind of always the default.

Well, if a really big show, if a really big show starts using value for value, it'll be there.

Nah, that's not how it works.

This has never worked that way.

It's a very, podcasting is always just a very slow, slow growing, slow burn, five, 10%, sometimes 10% a year, just inches up, inches up, inches up.

It's never been a, oh, all of a sudden.

Yeah.

Yeah, I'm excited about it because it unlocks content.

It's things that you would have never found otherwise, right?

That's what I love about podcasts, right?

You kind of see, especially if you get an app that's like showing you random stuff, it's amazing what's out there.

A lot of the apps are actually not that great at doing that.

They're like, subscribe to this NPR show, right?

But there's actually, if you just do a random search, just like what's being published, you'll find some really interesting stuff.

So I think apps could do a much better job at, you know, the serendipity aspect of like showing the kind of long tail of stuff that is out there that will be interesting to different people, right?

And let me clarify, when I say, because I made a statement that the hosting companies weren't like aware of a lot of open source stuff.

What I mean, like a lot of them, a lot of them are from their, they use open source stuff.

That's not, that's not what I'm saying.

Like they use like Ruby on Rails is really popular and with a lot of podcast hosting, I think they, but using those things and being involved in a specific project is not the same as sort of like being a FOSS person.

You know, like those people are all in on all the, you know, ActivityPub, PeerTube, OwnCloud.

I mean, you have people who are just sort of like all in on the open source lifestyle.

And when you're in that world, you sort of, you know, you see things in a, you see a lot of things that are otherwise hidden.

A lot of people just don't know about some of those things.

So that's kind of what I meant.

So Nathan G, and I put it in the show notes, just published or just gave us a link, HLS costs.

And it's very eyeopening, what it costs.

I'm seeing here at bit rate, this may be audio, I guess.

Bit rate, 96 kilobit per second, duration, 30 minutes, file size, 21 megabytes.

Does he have number of requests here?

Yeah, I've seen that spreadsheet.

It really, yeah, it's, there's a lot of factors in it, right, like how many things you're streaming and each bit is very, and like you said, it's sort of an order of magnitude less.

So I would really love to see kind of some folks publish shows and then actually get some real world numbers on these things, because this is, honestly, this is what the podcast hosts do, right?

This is their kind of value add in the competitive market.

It's like, what kind of deals can we strike with their various providers?

And how can we do some cool stuff with FFA MPEG under the hood to make it, because you can spend as much as you want.

I mean, there's services that will basically do the whole thing at this point and stream, but you're paying per minute and it's kind of expensive, but that might be okay if all you're doing is doing a company's press release or something like that.

But then if you're a podcast hosting company, your bread and butter is like, how can we do this in a clever way?

And not to give any secrets, but there are ways to do this, right?

There are definitely ways to do this with the pieces that are out there now.

I'm sorry, why won't you give away any secrets?

This is the boardroom.

What's wrong with you?

Who are you working for?

Give us the secrets.

Working for myself.

Ah, this is, oh, there we go.

He's sitting in New Jersey.

He's got a eight gigabit, eight megabit connection.

He's going to be serving HLS video for the world.

No, not from here.

No, no, no.

I'm on an Xfinity, like 20 meg up.

Xfinity is already my favorite term.

Xfinity.

Xfinity.

Xfinity, yes.

No, but it's like, it is, it's interesting.

And I think it's, I don't know, everyone's videoed out and I'm kind of videoed out as well to be, I actually don't watch a lot of TV.

I don't know who's watching all these YouTube videos, but it's.

I'm videoed out too.

I agree.

My video content consumption has just, continues to steadily go down and down and down.

Yeah, there you have it.

I've gotten to where, I've gotten to where the only thing I really watch on YouTube is just how-to videos, if I need to do something.

Russian dash cam crash videos.

That's the best.

Oh God.

That's the best.

My video watching is basically like my drinking.

It's basically just social situations.

That's about it.

Yeah, yeah, pretty much.

That, Spurlock, I wanted to ask you about, about the SPC, the standard podcast consumption.

Oh, right, from the last conference.

That's the proposal that came out of the last conference.

Yes, yes, yes.

I like that proposal a lot, by the way.

I really like it.

It's very small, but yeah, what were you interested in, Dave?

Well, I just- In getting it deployed, getting people to use it is what I'm interested in.

I think it's a great idea.

Well, I've got a ton of notes here, but it may be, rather than me trying to read this off, do you want to give a thumbnail sketch of what it is?

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

So if you go to, I think the easiest way to get to it now is just livewire.io slash SPC.

There's a small blog post and then a link to the nitty gritty, but it's really a very small spec.

The idea is, hey, we're all in this open ecosystem.

We have the players that are sometimes owned differently than the server side.

And in order to compete with all the other folks that are integrated, you kind of need the information flow to go both ways, right?

And so right now, apps can kind of leech off of the content providers and say like, hey, you're providing all this good stuff, but they can't see what's going on in the other direction.

All they get is downloads, which is basically like, maybe I auto downloaded it, who knows?

So it would be great for all of us to kind of say like, hey, I'm an app and I know some cool stuff about what's going on with your show that I'm showing in my app.

Overcast has done this for the longest time.

So when they hit, they have to go out and crawl RSS feeds on the server.

But instead of just passing an overcast.fm as the user agent, he's like overcast.fm.

And by the way, your show has 25 subscribers in overcast just as part of the string, as part of the user agent string.

It's a call they were gonna make anyway, right?

It's a call he's gonna make anyway.

It's a call the server is gonna see anyway.

So SPC is basically just taking that one click forward.

It's the same idea.

But instead of like passing the numbers down in the user agent, cause that could get unwieldy.

It's just saying like, here's a URL.

You hit the secret URL.

You get all the information for this show that I know about for my app.

And then what's cool about it is there's no new tags, right?

There's no, even if you hate the podcast namespace, podcasting 2.0, it's horrible.

Like there's nothing, no namespace requirements.

There's nothing that relies on servers.

It's calls that are already being made, but it just exists kind of above that layer.

So in theory, there's really nothing that prevents Apple or Overcast or anyone from doing this, right?

This is something that anyone could do and it doesn't require a handshake.

So you could start collecting this data as an app and making those URLs available, but maybe no one hits it right away.

And then it takes them a while, but let me tell you, if you're on the server and you're seeing these cool URLs coming in and saying like, here's information about the show that you're, you are gonna integrate that, right?

You're gonna say, oh, this is great.

And so none of this requires meetings.

None of this requires authentication.

It's secret in the sense that private podcast feeds are secret, right?

So they're just a URL that's unguessable.

And that's part of the spec on how to create those.

But if the host wants to share those with a larger, like an analytics service, they can.

But by default, since it goes directly server to server, even your analytics companies will not see this, right?

So it's OP3, for example, won't see this going back and forth.

So the podcaster is always in control of, or whoever's hosting their podcast is in control of what happens to this.

And so really the trick is like, what is the payload?

What's interesting on the other end?

And when I was back in the, what was it, the Evolutions Conference in Chicago, I had a bunch of conversations about this.

And the thing that sort of surprised me is like, if you had to stack rank, like, what is the information you're not getting now from these apps that you would ask for in a standard way?

Number one was the retention graph.

So kind of like how far, you know, it's great, like a play is great, but like, how far did they get, right?

Like, where did they drop off?

It's kind of like that cool graph that they'll show on OP3 for all the Adam shows, right?

Where you can see who's streaming and where it drops off.

I don't know if that's useful or not, but I find it kind of interesting.

And it kind of like reinforces kind of anecdotally what I would have thought.

It's the only stats I ever look at.

Yeah, it's kind of cool, isn't it?

Sort of saying like, it's more than just like a download is a download.

It's like, oh, I see that when we start this segment, people start to drop off, that sort of thing.

And only the apps know this, right?

There's nothing that the server can tell just from downloads coming in.

So this is one way for the app to kind of make this available and make this available at scale.

It's all static data, right?

So the app can kind of like recompute this whenever it wants.

It doesn't have to do this in real time, but it's kind of a nice, simple way for apps to provide this data and for servers to obtain it on behalf of the podcasters.

Yeah, I was thinking that to start with, apps could just give the basics.

They could just give like a follower account.

Exactly.

If they have it.

I mean, there's always gonna be some apps that just don't even have this.

I mean, if they don't have a backend or...

I mean, I'd love to give it from the Godcaster because we stream episodes and I'd love to add to that a report of how many people just dumped into an episode and streamed it.

And I'd like to get those numbers back too, which is something they can't get at all.

That's exactly why I got to thinking about the SPC and talking to John is because I was like, I was thinking the other day, as I was doing some work on Godcaster, I was like, we need to start thinking about a way to give some stats back and this actually makes some sense.

And we could be an app that pushes how to do this.

We could start the ball rolling on this.

We already have a producer login.

We could add it right there.

That's a good idea.

Yeah, that's a great idea.

And it can be done incrementally.

So you don't have to add it to all your shows.

You could start out with one or two shows, right?

It's nothing that says you have to do this for all the shows.

It's just like, as you do it, Apple the same way, like if they wanted to do it on some, but not others, it'd be totally possible, right?

So it's all very loose, right?

The big thing that I guess we would all need to agree on is like, it's just a JSON document that comes back.

Like what are the standard fields in there?

Like what are people mostly interested in and what is worth the trade-off of like expensive for the app to compute, but also it provides a lot of value to the show.

And like you said, I like the idea that it's almost like advertising.

It's saying like, hey, Godcaster is great because it sends all this interesting stuff that you weren't getting otherwise without a portal.

Yeah, because we don't have followers per se.

So in most of our stats, I mean, we would on the podcast side because when we publish our stuff back out to podcast apps, you know, that's just goes out as an RSS feed.

So we could probably, but then that goes, that's into the hand of the app.

So we really don't have those numbers very much, but we would have like total listen time and things like that.

We could push that back out and that would probably be really helpful.

I don't, some of the examples you have, I don't really know what a histogram is.

So I don't think I could do that cause I don't even know what it is.

I always scroll past that.

I'm like, all right, whatever that is, it's pretty.

I mean, it looks pretty.

Dave, have you seen the graphs that we have at OP3 for the value for money shows?

So it's the live listen graph.

It'll show, it's just a bunch of bars, right?

So it'll show like, now that one is actually fairly detailed, but some of them are just like- I can do a bunch of bars if that's all it is.

I can just make a bunch of bars.

Yeah, it's just grouped into, some histograms are very low resolution.

It's just like 25%, 50%, 7,500.

But that one is like, you know, it got to this minute cause you can calculate that, but just whatever.

It's like, you know, they're in the desert here.

We got to give them some water, right?

It doesn't matter.

Just anything is better than what they have now.

Even if you give back the listens, I mean, they know what you're getting from a download point of view.

So they can do that math on their side and say like, oh, this many downloads results in this many listeners.

Then they can take that ratio and apply it else.

So it's super useful.

It's like signal, right?

It's a signal that they do not have right now.

Yeah, so that would be a good way to say, well, yeah, I like that idea.

Cause you're saying, here's total, I'm giving you back total listen hours and I already know what the downloads are.

And here's a correlation I can make.

And that correlation may be different for every, it will be different for every single show.

You know, that's not going to be the same.

It'll be different for every app too.

But listen, like I'm sure everyone knows the math that happens in podcast world is not as precise as, we're not launching rockets with this math.

That's the George Bush fuzzy math is what the podcasting uses, yeah.

No, I think we should do this.

Cause this falls under the category of things that I think need to exist just so that somebody else coming along later doesn't try to reinvent a wheel that is going to fall off.

This is the best proposal for a way to do this that I have seen.

And I cannot think of a different way to do this that would not be just an immediate no.

I mean, everything, every proposal we've seen about stuff like this has always been some different version of rad.

Oh yeah, very complicated.

And I just don't think that's, I think every one of those things are just going to fall flat on their face.

This one actually seems doable.

So if we, but we just need somebody to do it.

And I'm willing to put that work in.

It's worth saying like there is nothing listener specific about this, right?

So all of these statistics are aggregate numbers, right?

They're just like, there's nothing that would ever be at the level of a listen in these ads.

So in that case, it's not like- Now, where do you stick this?

You just stick this in the header response?

In the request.

So as the app, when you're requesting the no agenda feed, right?

So you're, it's just a HTTP request.

Instead of saying like, I'm coming from Godcaster, you say, I'm coming from Godcaster and for your show, hit this URL for it.

And then they can choose to do nothing with it or hit the URL periodically to see what's going on.

That's literally it, like it's so basic.

Everything else would complicate it, right?

And every time you introduce more complications, you just lose people.

You're like, no, I'm not going to do that.

Nope, I'm going to push this off.

So the idea here is to make it as simple as possible.

I think the proper way to do this, if you agree, is would really probably just be push, compile, compile this response, this JSON response, compile that into a document, stick it in object storage, and then send that back as the URL, the callback.

Exactly, so that would be the idea is that you do this periodically every day, every week, whatever, right?

And then on your time, we don't want to bankrupt the apps here, but it's just like, if they already have this, they can go through for some shows and it could be a threshold where you only do it for shows above 100 downloads or something like that.

So it's not like it has to be everyone, but it could be a static, so that was the idea, right?

There's nothing that's dynamic.

It could be, it doesn't take query parameters like query by year, right?

And give me the minute by minute.

No, it's like, this is a static file.

And so it can be stored on object storage or your CDN of choice.

Yeah, that makes sense.

I mean, if you already have the stats, why not?

You just need a server.

So like you said, it's like, it's not gonna work for an app that's like purely in the app store, but a lot of the apps nowadays, and I know even the ones that started out app only, they introduce a server, right?

Because there's some good stuff that you have to kind of have on a machine that you control and that sort of thing.

So that's where this would live.

Now, sometimes they don't, sometimes apps don't have a, they'll have a backend, they'll have a server, but the server's not really doing this type of stuff.

It's like Castamatic, you know, he's got a server now, but it's mostly doing like pod pings and stuff.

It's not doing this.

Right.

So that would be different.

The other, yeah, and the other thing I think you just mentioned, did the other potential barrier here is that nobody really wants to be in the stats business.

You know, it's kind of a sucky business.

We should also probably address the elephant in the room and it's the feedback I get sometimes.

It's like, oh, this is valuable.

I can charge for this.

Give me half a cent for this, for sure.

Yeah, right.

And to me, that is just like totally missing the point.

It's like, this is information so that these loose pieces, so that we can stay a loose confederation, right?

If we don't pass this information back and forth, then we're just not going to be as interesting as a full stack, right?

We're never going to be able to compete.

And yes, I guess if if like Apple podcasts wanted to charge, maybe.

I'm trying to think of like the largest app that you would actually pay to get this in a standard way, maybe.

But even then, I mean, this is not rent money that we're making here, right?

This the job of an app is to have something worth paying for, either from the listeners or from the sponsors or advertisers.

Right.

Like it's not to like nickel and dime you on the stats on the back end for podcasters that don't have any money anyway.

Right.

So right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, but yeah, I agree.

We can just we can just give this back.

And, you know, with the the apps may.

They may be resistant from the standpoint of wanting to of not wanting to be in the stats business.

You know, hey, we don't want it like because the thing about stats that blows.

Is that it takes so much storage.

I mean, these the hosting companies, if you know, if you see it, when you when you see there or hear them talk about their stats databases.

I mean, they're just terabytes of, you know, gigantic databases that are just like so easy to break.

And and it's it's a really bad business to be in is the stats business.

So and if you get them wrong, you know, like if suddenly you realize that you were recording stats wrong, maybe you had a bug in your stats collection that was calculating something wrong for even a few days.

I mean, going back and fixing that is really difficult.

I mean, if there's one thing about the IAB that's positive is that they come in and try to, you know, and give you they give you as a hosting company a reason to audit your stats and find out if there are bugs.

Now, now the end result is fuzzy math like we all like we all know, but at least some it gives you a legit reason to like really do some intense code review for a while and check your stats and make sure that you're not messing something up.

But it's just a messy business.

And I'm sure some some apps are probably just like, nah, we know we'll never want to fool with this.

But if you have it, you might on the on the hosting side, if you don't want to do this, you can always use OP three or get my OP.

How's that going, by the way?

How's that?

How how is OP three doing?

I love OP three.

And whenever someone asked me about something, I I've been, oh, you can look over here because we don't care about stats.

We just care about value.

I mean, I see I see the hits, Adam.

I see.

I see who's looking at that.

I'm burning your late at night, baby.

I mean, but Dave's totally right.

And like OP three does about 17 million podcast downloads a month at this point.

And I think there's about thirty three hundred non music shows.

There's a ton of music shows as well.

But the non music, I think is about thirty three hundred.

Wow.

And but it is it's not cheap.

Right.

So you can look at our costs.

You can go to OP three dot dev slash costs.

I thought it would be given the nature of this project.

I wanted to make sure that all of our costs are fully out there in public as well.

And I had to do some things once it started growing and we started having larger shows on board to like really cut off the various filters that are provided.

You can you can save it all, but it's you pay for it on coming back out.

So slash costs with an S.

Yeah.

So OP three dot dev slash costs.

Yeah, it's not it's not opening for me.

I already broke your server.

Oh, here we go.

I got holy moly.

And so that I'm not hiding anything there.

So that's everything either 500 bucks a month.

And yeah, yeah.

So it's not it's not inexpensive.

Now, you could probably do this cheaper if you had a secret server chomping away on this.

But I'm running this all on public cloud flare.

So like in theory, you can say you can see if you wanted to.

You could trace every request back to like where it's stored and you can see that like no IPs are being lost.

But so it's a little more expensive than otherwise might be.

But the upside is it never goes down.

So it's never been down for the I think three years now that it's been running.

And it's yeah, people are coming on board all the time.

A lot of agencies like it because they can put it on all their shows and get kind of an apples to apples comparison.

And did I mention it's free, right?

But why don't you have just you don't have a an open value giving link?

You know, we did back in the day.

Oh, you mean like a little button there that's like, give me a coffee sort of.

I won't give you a coffee.

I'll give you a gourmet.

But I can only buy sponsorships.

I want to support you.

Well, I do like the idea of kind of a one time sort of payment.

I should get my act together on that.

So maybe right by the costs or something.

Yeah, I think I even the sponsorship links are on GitHub, which is not ideal.

That's what I'm looking at.

Yeah.

But again, this is a free sort of thing.

Like I do this with out of goodwill, basically.

So I have to kind of limit the time.

There's a lot of management that actually is involved.

So like yesterday or two days ago, like every year, La Liga, which is the Spanish football sort of a.

Yeah.

League.

Yep.

They have these insane blocks, so they will go to the orange and like all of the Wi-Fi mobile providers in Spain and be like, block these IPs during this time period.

Wow.

When the football matches are live.

And now a lot of people run stuff on these, you know, cloud services like Azure and CloudFlare.

So they can pirate the signal and get it anyway.

Yeah.

So all of these sites will like, you know, stand up a quick CloudFlare thing to do so that they are legitimate things that need to be blocked.

But unfortunately, these IPs are shared.

Yeah.

So every time these blocks go into a they do a network block and you're out.

GitHub goes down and GitHub uses CloudFlare for this.

And unfortunately, OP3 sometimes is hit by this.

So and every I get emails every every year at about this time, like, oh, it's La Liga time.

And this actually CloudFlare is taking them to court in Spain.

So it's a little better this year.

But anyways, I had to do a fire drill a few days ago and upgrade.

I'm paying a little bit more now to get into a different pool of IPs that I think right now will will escape.

But it's really hit or miss.

CloudFlare was telling me that some of their enterprise customers are affected, right?

They can't do anything about it, basically.

So it's really a region by region thing.

But anyways, that sort of stuff comes up.

But I spend, you know, a little bit every day making sure that new shows are onboarded and spam is taken out and that sort of thing.

So it's but I really I love this idea, right, that anyone can have stats.

It's not something that you need to pay through the nose for.

And it's something I would use that's like not going to sacrifice listener privacy, which is actually a tough tradeoff.

And really, no one in their right mind should do it.

But I could like I could kind of see, you know, being a tech person, I can see how to put that together.

So what are you doing these days, John?

What's the big plan?

What do you what do you I'm sure it's all secret because, you know, you're still a Silicon Valley kind of guy.

But we have an NDA for the whole boardroom.

So you can feel free to talk.

We're good.

We're good.

We're good.

I am not a Silicon Valley type of guy.

I just had to slip it in.

What are you working for?

Google in Cambridge.

So that was definitely not Silicon Valley.

That's true.

That's true.

Well, I've been working on a podcast app for a while.

And I'm a you know, I work for Android on Google.

And I love it.

You know, I think obviously most people listen and and watch podcasts on their phone, on their mobile devices.

So, you know, I've been working on an app.

I don't want to ideally compete with all the other cool apps that are out there.

Right.

So I don't want to be another like, hey, this is overcast, but a little bit better and doesn't crash and doesn't look horrible.

You know, it's like, yes, the world probably needs one of those.

But I would hate to take away share from those sorts of apps.

Right.

And so it's like I don't.

Yes, I could do that.

And I have actually an app that I use that kind of does that.

But I kind of wanted to take a step back and say, like, what could a podcast app look like?

Right.

So this is like podcast app from the future kind of thing.

And I did I do think I hit on something that there's one thing that I, again, ideally, like we just take stuff away from YouTube and Spotify and not from the others.

I did think I think I hit on one thing that I could do as the first like major feature of the app that both of those do that no one else does.

And then it kind of like is in its own space.

Cool.

So I'm hoping to get it out this year because, you know, they have the new new OS cadence.

Yeah, I think it's coming.

The new phones are being announced on the 9th of September, but I probably won't be ready for that.

But it's going to be it's going to be a weird app.

Let's just put it that way.

You know me.

I like I like different weird apps with an attitude.

That's what I've been waiting for.

So I anticipate that.

Let me ask you, since you did work on the Android side.

Any insight?

I'm very, very sad, actually, because apparently Google will no longer be supporting the AOSP hooks on their pixel phones, which means graphene OS is pretty much going to die.

From what I understand, I was already having all kinds of problems texting people.

Yeah.

You got a real phone, brother.

I do.

I had to get an actual phone, which sucks.

Yeah.

I mean, it's open source in theory, right?

Android, but it's kind of like backwards open source.

So all the development is done internally at Google.

Then every year they poop out, oh, here it is.

Boom here.

And like they have an issue tracker.

But as I'm sure you know, like it's the same sort of thing anywhere.

Like there's actually very few developers working on Android.

And so they just are hit with this fire hose of like, this doesn't work.

This doesn't work.

And so the the feedback from the AOSP stuff.

I mean, that's the last on the list, right?

Yeah.

Unless it comes from a partner or that sort of thing.

So it's a very difficult position to to do all of this.

And again, they do this out of their, you know, those the goodness of their heart or services.

Yes.

Well, no, I mean, but it's sort of funded.

No one could do this if they didn't have alternate sources.

Right.

So it's sort of like they're in a weird position.

Well, I've gone full in on the Borg, man.

I'm on a Galaxy Z seven flip.

Oh, really?

I thought you meant Apple.

All right.

Once we know, no, no, no, no, I, I, I will not go to Apple.

Nope, nope, nope, nope.

It's funny.

Like, as soon as I quit Google, I got an Apple phone and just to kind of get familiar with that ecosystem.

So I've been on Apple ever since.

I like their I like their world.

I like their nice, comfortable world.

But well, enjoy that.

You need you need to have both.

You need to have both, especially for one thing.

Don't you have to have like an Apple device for testing?

Well, that's what Dave and Paul have.

We're for Tina.

Tina has a Apple and I'm constantly saying, hey, babe, can I just install it?

Let me just put test flight on.

She's like, what are you doing to my phone?

Yeah, don't worry.

It'll be fun.

Let me just kind of just put this in your.

Can I just test out your car, play in your car for a second?

I'm sitting in the garage.

She's like, you should you should at least open the garage door when you have the engine running.

You're going to die.

Tragedy struck today.

Podfather down to testing, beta testing a podcast, died in the car.

The car play will kill you, though, so I can confirm that.

The the thing about Android, though, is that I was talking to Alex about this the other day is that Android is has way more like weird restrictions and bugs than iOS.

Goodness.

Yes, it does.

Well, just think about the position that they're in, right?

Like Apple has they can work.

They can go knock on the door of their hardware team and be like, yeah, this isn't working.

Yeah, they got one house.

Yes, they have their like pixel devices, and those are actually fairly new.

Like they used to have the Nexus devices.

And so those would actually work very well.

But and, you know, they you know, they have they talk with Samsung and that sort of thing.

But it's hard to make that is, I don't know, as bug free as possible.

I got it.

It's just this.

Sorry.

Yeah, go ahead.

I was going to say the amount of crap you go through with a brand new Android phone, the amount of I mean, you've got T-Mobile installing stuff.

You've got a Galaxy, Samsung installing all kinds of stuff.

Now I'm using a vault warden, bit warden, password manager, and every single time I don't you want to use the don't you want to use the Galaxy password manager?

You know, even though you've clearly said, no, this is what I want.

I want to use this.

They keep popping it up.

Now, just all and then and also Gemini.

Hello, I'm Gemini.

I can fix your email like, no, go away.

And it just keeps coming back like bad Mexican food.

You know, it's just, oh, no, it's just like TVs, right?

They're not making any money off the device.

It's all about the upsells after the fact.

Yeah, like at least they're not upselling you on podcasts.

They used to also Samsung also used to have a podcast thing where they say free podcast.

Yeah, that's gone.

At least you're.

And it's actually interesting.

It's a great opportunity for Android podcast apps, right?

There's really no equivalent of, you know, and this is why YouTube is really taken off is like that's always on the device.

Yeah.

Every device.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

Now that dog catchers died, we there's nothing left.

Dog catcher was what?

Who was it, Dave?

Early on, dog catcher.

If I recall correctly, we killed we broke.

We killed it.

Broke down.

We broke dog catcher because it did not handle namespace.

Yeah, exactly.

We don't get this namespace and we'll correct.

No, it was it was it was a very specific thing.

What I think it was transcripts was live.

And it was the live item tag.

Yeah, you're right.

You're right.

You threw the live item.

If if you throw a live item tag in a channel, dog catcher just like barfed its guts out and died.

And it was and it was really sad.

It was sad because because, you know, people would email the developer and the developer would email back and then copy me and say, these guys are doing it wrong.

Oh, really?

You got that email?

Oh, I got several of them.

Yeah, that's that's the publisher.

Their feet is broken.

Like, oh, OK.

All right.

You can always have a soft spot in my heart for dog catcher, though.

It's I got Android on day one and they actually had a listen.

They called it listen.

I think it was part of the operating system back in the day.

It was a great podcast player that shipped with the old, really old looking Android day one.

And then they went through all sort of, you know, they had Google Music, Google Podcasts.

But it was just some, you know, someone on the team really like listening to podcasts.

And I was like, hey, this is great.

Like, let's do this.

As I always say, as I always say, it's always someone on the team down below who's like, what is this thing?

Maybe I can add that in there.

I can just put this in here.

That's a keep publishing people keep publishing.

There's your show title.

Keep publishing.

Yeah, I'm looking for dog catcher on that place.

Play Store.

And it's it's a gets a goner.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, it's still there.

I listen to Libsyn to get their stats and it has, you know, about the same number as Podverse, that sort of thing.

It's like they're always like neck and neck.

And I was like, who's going to win this?

Really?

Yep.

Yep.

Because Podverse is my number two app for no agenda.

Well, this is a cross on Libsyn shows, so it's probably a sense of like, I guess, and stuff.

But yeah, it's not on the Play Store.

It's not on the Play Store.

You must be people must be sideloading it or something.

I don't know what that is.

Or there's not update right?

Android doesn't update.

So.

Huh.

This yeah, there's no there's you you can't find it.

There must be like that would be an interesting investigative reporting is to go and find where these dog catcher downloads from Libsyn are coming from.

How how are people downloading with dog catcher when dog catcher hasn't existed on the Play Store for three years?

Phantom.

Yeah.

I see some of those three.

So I'll do that.

Also, we'll see.

We'll see where they're coming from.

We need to track these people down.

I used to I remember when I had my very first Android phone and I'm trying to remember what I think it was.

Man, I can't remember what what phone that was, but yeah, I had dog catcher and it would immediately fill up the internal storage.

So I had to put an SD card in it specifically for dog catcher.

Good times, baby.

Good times.

Very good times.

Hey, we're speaking of time.

We're at one twenty.

So, Dave, I don't know what your day looks like.

I got a yeah, I got a hard out pretty quick because I've got to.

Did you get the power back on at the office?

Yeah, that's yeah, that was resolved.

Man, Transformer blew up right next to the office.

And that's that's like the third time since I've known you.

We're on an old like we're in an office park area that was built like in the 70s.

And all the buildings themselves have been refurbished and are all very new and nice.

But the actual infrastructure for like.

So here's so here's something funny.

Like when our when our firm moved into this building, the this building had sat empty for quite a few years and it used to be a bank.

And so then there was fiber coming through that area.

And unbeknownst to all the contractors and everybody who was working on renovating that building for us to move into there, the fiber that served all of the offices around that area went through this one vacant building.

There was it was like a loop that went through this building.

And so when the when the contractors came in, they just saw all this all this fiber and wiring hanging out of the wall and they just ripped it all out.

And as soon as they as soon as they cut it, boom, everybody was down for like blocks.

So the fiber had been running through this building and serving this wide area for so long.

And it was this huge ordeal.

I mean, those didn't have anything to do with us, but it's just this old infrastructure.

So there are a lot of the electrical in that, you know, is like run underground and so there's like, you know, some of it's rotten and stuff.

Anyway, as we learned, as we learned with the Godcaster app, a lot of people buy competitors names in the app store.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

So guess who's bought sponsorship on dog catcher?

Oh, who?

Cast box.

Why not?

Why not?

You picking up the dog catcher people?

Yeah.

You spend some money on that.

No, but I got the kid, the kiln guys coming.

So we have a kiln.

My wife, you know, she's an artist.

She does pottery and stuff.

Yeah.

That's what she's telling you.

Who knows what she's doing in that kiln?

I'm just drying out the weed, Dave.

Don't worry about it.

It's OK.

It's all good.

Yeah, we got a we got that guy coming soon.

So I got a bail.

All right.

Let us thank a few people.

John, hang around if you can.

Be nice, because we did get some boost during the show.

We got Martin Linda's Coke, who always for some reason boosts twice.

Amazing always is 1776.

He says the long tail of indie podcasters, freedom of expression.

Go podcasting, Adam.

Thanks for sharing your experience from the conference.

I like the debates between you, Dave, and your guest, John Spurlock.

I'm not good looking, but maybe I will start a video show doing a Western style tea ceremony.

But I'd watch that.

All the best.

Martin, author of a tea book, sketches, ideas and notions about the second most popular beverage in the world.

P.S.

Ombudsman is a Swedish word.

OK.

Triple five from Salty Crayon, which is a swan boost.

Audio is king and so is key sent.

Go podcasting.

Yeah, Sam Sethi checks in with seven, seven, seven.

And wouldn't you know it?

True fan supports peer to HLS via the Alt enclosure.

Here's an example.

Yes, of course.

Of course it does.

That's Sam is whatever we talk about.

Sam implements.

I love that.

Anonymous was triple eights.

We've got Eric PP with three, three, three with a pew pew.

Dreb Scott, one, two, three, four with a pre-show boost.

And T.J.

the raffle with triple seven.

And I hit the delimiter.

See, we get these are not sorted.

So I'm going to go through here.

So we got Jesse Anderson.

This is a paper, some PayPal's Jesse, Jesse Anderson, 15 bucks.

That's a one off.

Thank you, Jesse.

Appreciate it.

And there's no note on that.

But Silicon Florist, 10 bucks.

Thank you, Silicon Florist.

Timothy Voice, ten dollars.

Oh, look at this.

The boys from Buzzsprout, one thousand dollars.

Holy moly!

Bam!

Shot caller, 20 inch blades on the Impala.

Keeping it alive, boys.

Thank you so much.

Thank between Buzzsprout, RSS.com, Blueberry.

You guys really, really make a difference.

Fountain.

Yes.

Appreciate you.

Appreciate you all so much.

Thank you, Buzzsprout.

Did you talk to Kevin and Tom?

How are they?

Briefly, briefly.

I really didn't have the time I wanted to spend with him.

It was I mean, it was insane.

It's insane, the old man.

Like everyone's pulling at me, you know, like, oh, come over here.

Let me take a selfie, selfie, selfie.

We're going to do a selfie, selfie.

Oystein Berra, five bucks.

Michael Goggin, five bucks.

Thank you, Michael.

Christopher Reamer, ten dollars.

James Sullivan, ten dollars.

Cone Glotzbach, five bucks.

And that's that's our PayPal.

Thank you all very much.

Thank you.

We need to have Tom and Kevin back on.

I don't even know what they're doing.

And I've completely lost track.

You know, you know what?

In the PSP circle.

They were all that, you know, like, well, what are you guys going to do?

We're doing stuff.

They're very secretive, very secretive.

We're we're we're doing stuff.

You know, don't don't love podcast.

Yeah.

Don't worry about us.

We're doing stuff.

Sorry.

Just upload to our pod roll.

Upload to our pod roll.

Upload to our Buzzsprout Connect.

Yeah.

By the way, wasn't there some fracas over pod roll?

A fracas?

I don't know.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Here's what I think.

If you want there to be, there is.

Here's what I think happened.

Not what I think happened is Lipson.

I think they bought a company.

No, they're just called Podroll.

Yes.

So Podroll.fm was started in 2022.

I met the guy or the tech guy that's part of it.

He went to one of the conferences and then that term was in the air.

And then Kevin, if you know, next month was like, hey, I have this great idea called, you know, for a new tag called Podroll.

It's a different idea.

You know, Podroll.fm is kind of the feed drop sort of thing.

It's like, we'll take over your RSS feed and insert stuff.

So it's kind of a different concept.

But if you look at the Lipson, what they did is what they are.

You know, they integrate, right?

They don't develop, you know, do a lot of development.

They integrate with and make the other person do the integration.

But that's that's basically what it is.

So they didn't acquire them.

They're just like making it easy for podcasters to basically like integrate Podroll on Lipson.

Right.

But the problem is.

It's got nothing to do with podcasting.

Exactly.

It's a naming issue.

Yeah, that's what.

Oh, well, Lipson can say that they support Podroll now.

Is that what we're saying?

But the craziness of this service.

I'll put them on the apps list.

The craziness of this service is that you basically sell an episode in your feed to somebody else.

Which this is a that's crazy.

When if I'm subscribed to a show and somebody and somebody does a feed drop, I will unsubscribe from that show.

Yeah.

Yeah, of course.

That is the that is the worst rude thing.

Like I used to I used to listen to Club Random, the Bill Maher podcast all the time.

Yeah.

And he started he started feed dropping some other show in there.

It happened like twice.

Wow.

And I was done.

I just unsubscribed.

I was like, no, I'm out of this.

Unless they that just makes people mixing in like, OK, like, you know, they have the original podcaster mixing in like, oh, you know, check out this part.

And it's like but they don't do that a lot of times.

It's just like, boom, here's another episode.

Just drop right in.

A lot of the NPR shows now will at the end.

So it'll like the show will be done, but then they will include in the same episode, like eight minutes of another show.

And I like the idea of that.

I mean, it's easy to skip out.

But if if there was more metadata around that, I think that'd be nice because I'm sure it doesn't work that well.

Right.

It's just more of a word of mouth sort of thing.

And it's not at the beginning.

Yeah.

As a listener, I'm with you guys.

I hate those.

Yeah, it's just like, why would you why would you sell your your listeners that way?

It just seems short sighted to me.

But I'm sure it's apparently very high CPO.

Now you can do it on Lipson's.

Yeah.

Piss off your listeners on Lipson.

Whoo.

There we go.

Salty Crayon, thirty three thousand three hundred and thirty three cents.

I'm going to hit a ball.

That was nice.

A 20 inch blade on the Impala.

Nice, nice booster gram.

Thank you.

Curio Castor.

It says, Howdy Dave and Adam.

Just want to say a huge thanks for all you've done to build and built with everyone for podcasting 2.0 and the music.

I think the remaining ones of us music podcasters can confidently carry the banner of V4V music when you all move on to full on God casting like Hello Fred.

It's been full of scissors and we're happy to keep running with them.

Five by five in the pipe.

I don't think we're going anywhere.

Nobody's moving on.

Yeah, I think we're good.

I think we're good.

It just adds to the pile.

Yes, it does.

Let's see.

Oh, let's see.

This is oh, this is last year.

Martin Lindis got the true fans 1776.

Adam, best premises with your fire chat at the podcast movement conference.

I asked Rocky Thomas on LinkedIn if it would be possible to listen to your conversation on a new modern podcast app.

She replied, quote, Working on it.

We'll let you know, unquote.

I will do an episode on podcast events on my new podcast.

Swing that gig.

We planned an unconference potluck conference in in Gutenberg some time ago, but the pandemic came along and it was not possible to arrange it.

Bummer.

Let's see.

And we got a few of those.

Here's the delineator.

Comedy blogger 13320 through fountain.

Howdy, Dave and Adam.

Yesterday on no agenda, Adam mentioned a certain PayPal co-founder and his transhumanism.

Well, race for immortality is one of the main topics of the best science fiction TV show of 2025.

Alien Earth that I hereby recommend today.

It's available on Hulu and Disney Plus.

It's an epic sci fi.

Alien Earth is set in the year 2120 and tells a story of synths, cyborgs and body horror aliens.

Too scary for ladies.

So watch alone or with your man friends.

Yo, CSB, with your man friends.

Yeah, that's awesome.

I think I think CSB may have been drinking because there was a lot of misspelling in that.

Yeah, it happens.

Oh, the Mary Oscar, Mary.

Oh, send us 2000 sets through fountain.

He said, thank you.

Thank you, Dave, for all the hard work on fixing this issue.

I think he means the soundbites issue.

Oh, yes, it was quite an issue, Oscar.

Yeah.

Yeah, you're welcome.

Oh, thank you.

By the way, on that same note, John, what?

Do you I think the jump in transcripts might be Spreaker.

Oh, OK.

I didn't take the time to actually look into it.

So that's great.

If they're producing more transcripts, that's awesome.

What made you identify them?

Because I look I just reverse sorted that table just to see what the you know, to see if there was like an obvious trend of one host over the other, like with the most when the most recent transcripts are coming in.

And I see like an overwhelming number of Spreaker.

And I don't think they were producing it in that volume before.

Oh, that's great.

I'm just taking a look here to see it's still like they're still taking off.

And Spreaker produces a ton of shows.

So if they're auto transcribing, that would definitely be very nice.

Did we know that?

I don't think we knew that they were doing transcripts, did we?

The royal we here.

Yes, yes, we.

Yes, we.

I don't remember.

Did they put out some sort of announcement?

Because I don't remember that.

So I think this must be something that they just flip the switch on.

Well, we love that.

This is good news.

Good news, everybody.

Yeah, they have good guys over there.

They they're.

Yeah, yeah.

They were there at the conference as well.

Did you talk to them, Adam?

I I'm sure I only took selfies with them.

No, I wish I wish I had.

It was it was tough.

Everyone's walking around doing stuff.

You know, it's just it's tough.

It's hard being me, John.

Hard being me.

Celebrity life.

No, please.

Well, thank you very much, John, for being here.

We appreciate you.

Appreciate all you're doing for for podcasting, for podcasting 2.0.

Put no I subscribed.

I got on your subscription here to help out with OP3.

Appreciate it.

No, I appreciate you, man.

This is I realize like you're not shoving it in my face enough.

Remember, the number one reason people don't give you money is because you didn't ask for it.

So you got to you got to be a little more assertive.

Put a big button there like we have on podcast index that or get the bottom of that page, a big red donate button.

People can send their fiat fund coupons and PayPal to us.

And it's really appreciated.

And well, we'll have to have you on again.

Of course, we will.

When when I'm looking forward to your app, I'm very excited about that.

Yeah, nice, nice.

Yeah.

Believe me, once that's out, you're going to get hit in the face with that.

Everyone's going to hear about that.

Cool.

All right, brother.

Dave, have have a good time with your kiln.

You can kill things.

I don't this thing is a three phase and it needs to be rewired for single phase.

It's so far beyond my electrical.

Just stay away.

Stay far away when the guy come our way.

Do that.

Exactly.

All right, everybody.

Thank you very much.

Boardroom for being here.

We will return, of course, next Friday for another board meeting of podcasting 2.0.

You hope you have been listening to podcasting 2 .0.

Visit podcast index dot org for more information.

Go podcasting.

I like bad audio.