The latest from our daily newsletter at podnews.net with Magellan AI. She shoots, she scores. Goalhanger, the largest independent podcast company in the UK, is to release a new show tomorrow. The rest is football, Daly Brightness. It's a new show hosted by England women footballers Millie Bright and Rachel Daly. Promising a deep dive into the heart of women's football, it's the second brand extension from Goalhanger. The first, the rest is Politics US, was launched a year ago.
Futuro Media has launched Futuro Plus, including an expansion of the podcast company's shows and ad-free access. The company's using Supporting Cast. The shortlist of the sixth annual publisher podcast awards has been released. The winning podcast will be decided by over 50 judges from across the world. There's also a publisher podcast summit on the same day, June the 11th, in London. The ParaPod Podcast Awards are now open for entry.
The awards highlight top podcasts exploring the paranormal, true crime, conspiracy theories, metaphysics, ancient history and more. A podcast app Metacast has published its Quarter 1.25 retrospective. The web app now supports transcripts, the mobile app supports chapters and it does a much better job in sharing images for shows. They've also, as have we, suffered from AI bots, costing them an arm and a leg.
And thank you to the Geopolitics and Empire podcast for becoming our latest supporter. The show conducts interviews with prominent international experts on a wide range of topics from the left, right and beyond. Podnews supporters like them help pay for access for everyone. It's a Monday, so time for some tech stuff and this one's good. Many podcast apps have consumption data on the shows their listeners consume, like followers and listens and even completion data.
But that data doesn't come back to podcast creators because there's no standard mechanism to do so. So a new proposal from John Spurlock called Standard Podcast Consumption, or SPC, aims to fix that with a uniform and simple way for podcast apps to securely make a show's aggregate client-side metrics available to the podcaster.
The way it works in a tweet length is podcast apps host one new API endpoint, they assign each podcaster's secret keystring and provide those in the user agent when server-fetching the podcast's RSS feed. And the podcaster or hosting company can easily pass those out of their logs and use those for subsequent querying. Well, the metrics shared are aggregate metrics for each show, so are entirely privacy aware. They're inspired by Overcast, which shares total followers in this way.
So we know that this show has 251 followers over there, for example, and it's simple and easy to add. We think it's a smart idea, though it does rely on podcast app developers to integrate for no apparent benefit to them. But at the very least, the standard format of JSON data could serve as a useful tool to get cross-app consumption data back to podcast creators. Also today, Android app Antennapod version 3.8 is out. Among its new features, leave comments if the podcast supports this.
Yes, it adds a comment icon to the top bar, which simply opens the URL. It's a super simple way to achieve cross-app comments. It should, but might not, open BlueSky for the pod news daily, which is this show. If not, we'd be happy to also add support for Mastodon comments as well. So let us know if you're using Antennapod version 3.8. PodPace is a new tool for podcast speech normalization.
It allows users to upload podcast audio files, analyze speaker words per minute, and adjust speech speed per speaker. It uses Assembly AI for speaker diarization, i.e. who is speaking now. But it might be a starting point for podcast apps wanting to improve their playback engine. The excellent playback engine, by the way, is the only reason that I use Overcast. And I've linked to a blog post explaining that today from our show notes and our newsletter at podnews.net.
And Faircamp version 1.3, which is an open static server alternative to Bandcamp, now includes full support for hosting podcasts. All you need is static hosting somewhere, like Amazon S3 or the equivalent. We'll link to that today as well. In People News, Mike Joachim has joined N2K and CyberWire as an account executive. He joins from SupportingCast and two cyber security companies.
And in podcast news, something more human tries to not just talk about a better world, but build it instead. And this week, hosts Sam and Elliot tackle digital dementia and what they're doing to reverse their own and build more genuine human connections. Also today, Who's Smart It has hit 25 million downloads. It's designed to be the funniest educational podcast for kids and families. Giggly Squad and the extremely parasocial world of podcast girlies get a fulsome write-up from Vox.
The show claims 44 million downloads per year. And more than ever, we all need a bit of inspiration, positivity and practical wisdom. Your daily dose of hope is designed as an uplifting journey to empower you to face life's challenges with resilience and optimism. So you can start your day or listen anytime you're ready for an encouraging, hope-filled message in just five minutes. And this podcast is sponsored by Magellan AI. Stop guessing, start optimizing.
Magellan AI attribution improves ROAS and targeting. You can optimize your campaigns with Magellan AI. There's a link in the show notes. And that's the latest from our newsletter. To read all the stories and subscribe for free, we're at podnews.net.