Well, from what I understand, our guest hears this often, but we are chatting with someone who's probably the furthest away from me possible, with the exception of one other we we did, in Australia. We are in New Zealand chatting with Tom Barrasso. He is the founder and developer of Pod LP. And I don't think I'm gonna do it justice by explaining it, but, he basically, has created software that helps bring podcasts to non smartphones
around the world. And, you know, probably most of the listeners don't know how many are out there, but I'm sure we're gonna get some really good information about that. Tom, thank you very much for joining us today. Yeah. Thank you very much for having me. So were you in the podcasting space? Like, did you have interest in podcasting before PodLP? Like, what kinda led you to wanna develop this software? Yeah. But, basically the story starts with the pandemic. Like a lot of
people, I no longer had a commute. I had a lot less, to do, a lot more time on my hands. And, I've been getting into this idea of, as a lot of people are and we'll talk about the types of users that that are drawn to feature phones. But, I wanted one basically for digital detox purposes. I wanted to take it camping, for weekend trips. And the issue that I had, my my girlfriend made fun of me at the time. She was like, you'll never be able to do
that because they don't have a podcast app. And because I was a developer, I was like, okay, great. Challenge accepted. I'll go ahead and build one. It can't be that hard. So that was more or less when I got started. The the big issue for me then, for folks who are probably aware of the timeline was the podcast index hadn't yet launched and so probably the hardest thing as a developer back then was just getting the feeds together, figuring out how to build a
directory. That was definitely the the biggest, challenge to overcome. And then I I launched pretty quickly. I think it took me under a month to actually get it shipped. Although granted, I'll say the very first version of PodLP was about as unglamorous as you can get. Didn't even have thumbnails, because I couldn't figure out how to shrink the images to fit the screen without running into memory issues. So there were a lot of, issues trying to wrangle the world of podcasting to fit,
feature phones. Interesting. I'm I'm surprised you say that it's hard to get information on podcast because, you know, everybody classically, when somebody signs up, you say, alright. You sign up for Apple, then you'll you'll find yourself on, you know, a few dozen, other platforms who basically go into their directory.
Is Apple's API, difficult, expensive? Like, what what made getting the content from Apple more difficult than waiting for a pod to cast index to come along and, you know, provide this this great resource? Yeah. So at the time, I think one of the biggest challenges with the Apple dataset was, or or the Apple APIs were, they're they're obviously not geared towards this type of user segment, and there are a lot of criteria that mandated the need for a, an API that was specific to
this market segment. I'll give you a couple of examples. I I gave the one of thumbnails first off. So So that's something Apple actually does pretty well, but, you can run into restrictions. I know people say like the Apple API is rate limited. When we go into talking about the the version of PodLP that runs in CloudForm, I'll talk about why that was a concern. But perhaps one of the bigger ones was, for PodLP specifically especially launching in India it
needed to support IPv6 only use. Something that podcasters probably don't think about. Basically there's two versions of the Internet protocol. In the good old days you had, IP addresses, IPv4. It basically had four numerical segments between zero to two fifty five. So a number like +1 92 1 6 8 0 1. There were I think 4,000,000,000 give or take IPv4 addresses which is a problem because there's more than 4,000,000,000 people, not excluding all of the devices that we all have today.
So, you can imagine that eventually hit a limit and IPv6 solves that. It has, far more IPv addresses. The the addresses themselves are far more complicated. But, and something I get from a lot of podcasters is, well, why why should we care about this? Right? Because in Western markets, the telecommunication operators will handle backwards compatibility with technologies like NAT six four and DNS six four. They basically make it so that IPv four devices
connect to IPv services and vice versa. In emerging markets like India, they don't do that. It's just too expensive. It's not worth their time. And so podcasters don't know what they're missing out on. And importantly, the user doesn't know because they don't, the user gets an an ambiguous error and the podcast hosting company never finds out because the user is never able to reach their service, so there's no error for them. They can't see how much, potential they're missing
here. So I basically had to have an API that was able to account for things like this and allow me to suppress certain feeds based on the host that they were on. And had I relied solely on Apple, I wouldn't have had the ability to to do things like that. Gotcha. Alright. So they they come along, make it a little bit easier, and and therefore PodLP is born. I think for some folks, I don't think they understand how big the feature phone market is. And and I
guess another way people think of feature phones are dumb phones. Right? Not big, tall screen phones like an Android or an Apple device. What are we looking at? How many are out there? Where are they popular? Yeah. How big is this market still? Yeah. It's a great question. So you heard me mention India. The market for feature phones is still quite large. It's stable in countries like The United States where it has resisted declining probably
because of a combination of factors. So right now the Piedl P market specifically, India makes up the lion's share of use probably about 80% give or take. The United States is actually the second largest market for feature phones worldwide. I think, last year almost 3,000,000 units were sold across The United States. So that's one that surprises a lot of people. Who's buying them? Yeah, who's buying them? That's a great question. I see probably three primary
markets here. One are seniors, a lot of these devices are geared towards older folks. The second are children. Parents buying them for their kids that they want to have restricted use and it's a lot easier to restrict a feature phone that only has say a hundred apps than it is to restrict, an
iPhone with 3,000,000 apps potentially. And then the third is digital detoxers, you know, Gen Z, Millennials, people who are, trying to get away from scrolling addiction and, probably the easiest way that they found to accomplish that is to remove the temptation by moving to feature
phones. Interesting. Alright. So so you those three populations in The US, India, so it sounds like a lot of emerging markets, and a lot of underdeveloped countries where maybe the networks aren't as strong, but, obviously, they still want and need, you know, reliable communication. I guess for a lot of podcasters, we probably don't think a lot about them, especially, you know, ones based here in The US.
Do you see them being like a burgeoning podcast consumption market and one that more people should be paying attention to? Oh, absolutely. I I think probably the single biggest reason why you should pay attention to markets, especially ones like India, is that India is the largest English speaking country if you take into account English as a second language. So, you know, there's over 400,000,000 in English speakers in India, well more than those in The United States.
And then it's just a faster a very fast growing market. Many people are coming online at a much faster pace than in other parts of the world. If you think about the, digital divide for those who have access to mobile connectivity, you still have about two and a half to 3,000,000,000 people around the world who do not have access to any type of mobile Internet connection. That includes basic two g, like, if you're gonna do SMS or calling, like, you get on a a really basic feature phone.
There's a huge huge potential in these markets. And audio has a a a really strong potential because it overcomes a lot of the linguistic barriers that you would get in a country like India where if you exclude English, it's a very fragmented market where you have more than a dozen regional Indic languages that, all sort of compete for, you know, pretty large sizes of
population. Right? There are languages in India that have more than a hundred million speakers that I bet you most people have never heard of before, and audio is just a much easier format to distribute that information in because it's easier to, for the user to consume. It's more familiar. A lot of them are familiar with radio today. So it's something that they're easy cognitively easier to adapt to. So what's the what's the feature phone version of a podcast store like?
What is like, what's the experience like on PodLP? Are there, you know, limitations that smartphone podcast consumers would would visit, or is it really just you were able to shrink all that UX and UI into that smaller screen typically? Yeah. You can shrink quite a bit. PodLP is a long way from when it first launched. There's there's definitely thumbnails now, rich search, categorization for podcasts, feeds that are adapted based on a number of indicators including geography and language.
But beyond that it's got a lot of the basic features you would expect. So if you were to open Paddle P today, it'll take you to the home page. You'll see, a set of podcasts that include, sponsored content. So that's how Paddle P is able to sustain its operations, as well as, organic content that is, ranked based on, as I mentioned, language, geography, and a few other factors. And, then you'd click into a podcast. It would look like you would expect today.
You have the ability to subscribe. You can change the sort order. You can download individual episodes, on the KaiOS version. In CloudFront, that's not possible, and I'll I can talk a little bit about why that's not possible, technologically. And then, yeah, you can play, you can scrub through a podcast, you can do seeking, there's a sleep timer functionality. So a lot of the things that you might expect are there, but I'll say probably the biggest thing that isn't there,
would be automatic downloads. The platforms today don't have that capability and that's something that probably shocks a lot of people in the podcasting world, certainly shocks, subscribers to PodLP. Because, if you think about it, if you have an iPhone or Android today, when you click subscribe, you're so used to having that episode ready there for you. But what that also means is that when a user clicks subscribe, your, download numbers are pretty tightly correlated to,
the number of subscribers that you have. It doesn't mean that and a problem that I'm sure everyone in the podcasting world knows, listens are not downloads. That that is the exact opposite in the future phone market without the ability to do automatic downloads. Every download that you get from an app like Paddle P is an organic, listen that is triggered by a direct user action. Right. So it's it's down not all
downloads are listens, but all listens are downloads. Right? Because there are some services that, you know, list the their stats differently, and and it's you know, for a lot of people, it gets very confusing. What so because you have access to the podcast index, should folks hearing this who are like, oh, that is a, you know, big market and my content would actually make a lot of sense there. Do they have to get themselves onto PodLP, or are you already kinda grabbing those those
feeds from the big directories? Yeah. Not anymore. Since the migration roughly a year ago now, Podolpi is using the podcast index for its back end, so there's no need to submit your feed directly. I think there's an old landing page for that, but it basically is just grayed out and says there's nothing that you need to do here. But if, of course, if you're excluding your feed from the podcast index, then, it's very likely it won't get picked up by PodLP, and there currently isn't really
a way to manually override that. What would downloads on PodLP look like in my stats on, you know, standard hosting platforms? Oh, the short answer is it really depends on what host you're using. From the very beginning, I've had hosts that were very proactive. For instance, Buzzsprout, I think they added support for the PYDLP user agent fragment back in probably 2020, not long after it launched. Many posts have been reluctant since then.
So if you're looking at PYDLP download today, you're gonna see probably, I could think of at least five or six different things. So it comes from and it's stemmed from the two platforms that PodLP is currently, supporting, KaiOS and CloudPhone. KaiOS is a mobile
operating system based on Firefox OS. So if you get downloads from PodLP, and your host doesn't support the user agent, it's probably gonna look like either Firefox, browser, Linux, or occasionally Android because some, KaiOS devices will put Android in the user agent fragment to force websites into a mobile view, so it's sort of a workaround that ends up misattributing
downloads. And then if you're on Cloud Phone, it's a little bit different it's going to look like browser, Google Chrome, or Linux and that's because the CloudPhone user agent, CloudPhone is a remote browser basically like Opera Mini, but it runs using the Chromium engine. And so, yeah, hosts will misattribute,
Pinelp downloads, pretty much all over the place. And CloudPhone's even more difficult because they use, like Opera Mini, they have a fleet of servers that does transcoding, on the fly to be able to serve content to these types of budget devices. And so the IP address ranges that you're gonna be seeing traffic from is much narrower on Cloud phone as well. Gotcha. So I I have to ask, are you a primarily feature phone person, or are you on smartphones and you're just making sure
podcasts are accessible to everyone? I'm on the smartphone for a variety of reasons. But, yeah, it's obviously they're quite difficult to use. There's a number of services that I unfortunately need, on a bit more regular basis. And these devices, because they're so budget tend to have a narrower frequency band and because I'm traveling in places like New Zealand, it just gets quite difficult to be able to have a phone that actually works in multiple
countries. You end up sort of buying a new phone everywhere you go. Although I do have a very extensive collection of these phones, I probably have, I don't know, fifteen, twenty of them at this point. That's great. Yeah. You know, I I just wrapped up watching a series that was, you know, supposed to take place, like, late nineties, early '2 thousands, and everybody in the show is using a flip phone. And I'm watching that going, you know,
I I don't wanna get rid of my iPhone. Right? It is powerful. It is important. There's a lot of things. But sometimes I wanna leave that at home and just carry a flip phone for people to call me on. I think that would be so awesome. So we have been chatting with Tom Barrasso, founder developer of PodLP. You can, take a look at what they're up to at podlp.com. Tom, before we let you go, some other questions we
wanna ask you about, you know, podcasting in general. The first is, you know, you have solved a problem for folks who are not who do not have access to smartphones in bringing podcasts to them. Are there other places in podcasting where you would like to see improvement or you're thinking about, you know, maybe solving problems for us? Yeah. I actually submitted a couple of recommendations to the podcast index when they were coming up at their,
the namespace, the RSS namespace. Unfortunately, I don't think they got widely adopted. Alternate enclosures was a big one. I know the podcasters like to record in the highest quality possible and it makes sense for the types of markets when you're prioritizing, say, Apple. But obviously for accessibility, it's just a waste. People streaming, high bit rate podcasts on a four g feature phone that outputs to a really grainy speaker are not benefiting from that
quality. If anything, they're just wasting their data on it. So I think that was one. Similarly with, thumbnails like I mentioned, it was always unfortunate to me but, because we always focus in the largest possible device categories, most album most podcast artwork is 2,000, three thousand pixels in size. That is 10 times the size of the screen that these things render on. And
so, again, it's just wasting pixels here. In fact, I've had many people when they come to put do a sponsor on PaddleView, they ask, you know, what does it look like? And they see the scaled down version at a 28 pixels and like, what? I can't read any of that. Like, yeah that's the point, you can't read it because, you you you couldn't, you know, how could you possibly read on on a half an inch, a
quarter of an inch of screen real estate. So yeah I think just getting people aware, I think that's the biggest thing being aware that there's millions of people who would like to consume this content and finding ways to make it more accessible. Technically, finding ways to make it more accessible, in terms of, yeah, the the places that you distribute on, the the devices that you consider, and the markets that you, you
know, target. Alright. Have you ever hosted a podcast or do you just like supporting it with, software? I haven't hosted. It's something I've definitely thought about. I've just I've always heard the advice from folks that if you're gonna, you know, start a podcast, it has to be something that you really love because, especially in the beginning, it's not a good business. If anything, it's probably more of an expense. So, yeah, I think I'm just waiting for that idea to come around, but
I've always wondered because I have this platform. Right? Like, I have a place that I can promote my own material, that I don't have to pay for. So, it's certainly something that's crossed my mind. Yeah. I mean, with your with your level of technical expertise on podcast and, you know, coding, I'm sure you can provide a lot of value, to folks who wanna have a deeper understanding of what's going on and and, honestly, not just where we are, but where we could be going, especially with a lot
of the, you know, RSS two point o stuff. So I I wanna ask you about tech on your wish list because usually people say, like, a microphone or whatnot, and, you know, you've already brought tech to the table for us. So I'll ask you this instead. What podcast are you listening to these days that your are your favorites? The kind that, you know, whenever a new episode comes along, you are gonna stop and go over there, or
you are not going to miss an episode of that show. Are there, you know, a few that are just, you know, always on your, you know, regular playlist? Oh, yeah. And you can tell this probably from my website. They'll usually be the ones that I'm featuring, inadvertently in screenshots and other promotional material. So, yeah, I listen a lot to Planet Money from NPR, and, how I built
this. Yeah. Just the inspiration of some of these stories, hearing other creators and how they were able to successfully come up with ideas, build, scale, and just the challenges that they faced. Like, for me going through Paddle P, I found a lot of curve balls. There's, like, legal challenges to operating in the Indian market. There's technical ones, like I mentioned, IPV six. There's a lot of things that you just wouldn't think about if your
sole focus is, the Western world. And so, yeah, it sort of forced me, to to reconsider that that view and, yeah, expand my technical horizons. Gotcha. Well, once again, we have been chatting with Tom Barrasso, founder developer of PodLP. You don't have to go over there to submit your show, but you should check it out and find your show's link and start to put that on your website next to your other buttons and, you know, show that you are thinking about folks who don't have who don't necessarily
have a smartphone. I think that'll be a really, you know I I it's interesting to see it would be interesting to see more of those, popping up in the coming in the coming days and and years and whatnot. Well, Tom, it has been a great pleasure. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you for having me.