Like London buses, you wait ages for one new podcast app and three come along at the same time. We talk with Chris Messina about NEW YouTube, Spotify and Twitter podcast apps coming soon.

So podcasts now we were at podcast movement and Kai Chuck came on stage to a packed room and said nothing, but subsequently you've found out what their plans might be.

You know, I'll be interested in it, languished in my inbox for the week. And then, um, Tuesday morning I thought, oh, I better go and have a read of this and see if there's anything interesting in it. No, no, no, no, no. Click, click, click, click, click. Oh, what's this? Um, and yeah, I was seeing wireframes of the new YouTube podcasts, homepage. I thought, wow, that's really exciting. So YouTube is doing, a number of different things.

It's looking at ingesting podcast, RSS feeds directly, which is. it is looking for well, good or bad, depending on who you talk to. Um, it has a new podcasts home page, which will be at youtube.com/podcasts. Don't go there now because you'll just get a 4 0 4 error. they are going to be selling audio ads. Uh, Google are going to be selling those and other third parties as well. Uh, which is good. And you can guess therefore that the might be some rev share in terms of that.

And they're also redoing some analytics. they promise, uh, quotes new metrics for audio first creators. And they've got, um, a slide in there with, logos, for Nielsen, for Podtrac and for. And my guess is in terms of the charitable stuff. Well, that was bought by Spotify, last month. So perhaps that slide shows people that YouTube have worked with in order to understand what it is that they need to be doing. All really exciting and, um, could really change the industry.

If YouTube goes ahead with all of this.

So that in one RSS feed you have in the enclosure tag, both your MP3, and your video MP4, or do you think people are going to be uploading directly to YouTube their video and how will that work with their RSS then having two different feeds?

We'll snap at your, um, nail logo on there, and ingest it and make a, in Daniel, J Lewis, his words, fake video, of a podcast you can of course upload your own video in there as well. And this, 86 pages. PDF goes into all of the, hows and whys to do all of that. But, um, uh, you know, it strikes me that actually really quick and simple thing for YouTube to do would be just to say, give us your RSS feed. We'll pull in your audio and we'll make that into YouTube friendly content.

now of course, They've used the word ingest and the word ingest, I think means that they will take a copy of the audio and then stick it into the big YouTube fan server in this. And then of course isn't necessarily good news for podcast hosts. and isn't necessarily good news for those people who rely on dynamic audio insertion, or particularly who rely on things like programmatic ads.

Cause you know, if you're wanting to give a different ad to somebody who's in Virginia to somebody who's in California, then it's the, this solution probably isn't going to do that. At least not from your podcast hosts. So I think that there's clearly some questions there. The PDF that I go and actually goes into detail and I might be putting some of this into pod news this, uh, evening as well. Um, uh, my time while I'm writing it, um, goes into details of some podcasters who have just.

Audio in with a thumbnail image, um, and saying that's fine. it doesn't work as well as video, but it's still absolutely fine to put your podcast in that way. So actually seeing that from YouTube is quite, it's quite interesting too.

And as I've said in this podcast in the past, the pod news podcast gets around 35. plays every episode and a 35 sounds tiny. But when you compare that to a typical podcast app, that actually it's up there with, frankly, it's up there with Spotify. It's as large as that Spotify is. I think what that's showing you is that it is still a good place to put your podcast as long as you think about it. It's just being another app. I think it's a great place to put a podcast, but really exciting.

Chris Peterson, who. Used to be one of the very big cheeses at iHeart. he says that YouTube adding podcasts via RSS feed could be the biggest inflection point that the podcast industry has seen massive audience and a powerful search engine. Um, absolutely huge. Rollie Ortega saying, imagine YouTube adding podcasts. It's like merging it with Google podcasts into an all in one app.

And one of the biggest search engines combined with audio video platforms for podcasting and adding RSS feeds to, you know, how, how exciting could this be and adjust again, really surprising that YouTube have clearly been Hawking this out for the last couple of weeks.

Talking to publishers, why would they not take the, take the industry seriously and unveil this sort of thing at podcast movement, instead of some glorified promo for some, you know, for some podcasts that nobody really cares about, about, you know, how they videoed something, you know, why were they not talking about this? It's absolutely crazy to me, but then I'll never, I'll never understand PR companies.

It's always been run by the search team anyway. On the other side, clearly YouTube is not going away either. And yes, they've had a couple of different, integrations in terms of podcasting. They found a couple of, of different integrations in terms of music services as well. But clearly YouTube is where they're putting their media. That's the fundamental there.

So, uh, you know, I can't see them losing interest in this, in the next couple of years, particularly if it owns the money, which none of their previous things did. I mean, Google wave never owned any money. Um, you know, Google reader never owned any money. So from all of that sort of, uh, side, I think, uh, I think there's, you know, obvious benefits here, if it can earn some cash and you would assume that it probably.

And as you flick through, you get that little snippet and then suddenly if you want to, I guess you add it to your episode list so you can create a playlist of podcasts you want to play later.

Potentially came from pods, which was a podcast discovery app, which it bought for $50 million, $50 million, uh, last year. So you had a quick chat with Chris. Um,

And I think they use a number of different techniques to surface content from the podcast episodes individually, namely they offer a sort of a mini transcript. They seem to find maybe interesting parts of the podcast to draw you in almost like a mini automatic trailer for each episode. You can just swipe continuously up and down and as actually the thing that was most interesting to me about it was of course, two things. There's now a podcasts button in the tab bar.

So that's significant considering how I would say spelt the Spotify experience has been for years. It's very hard to get anything new in there. It's mostly home search and library. And in addition, each episode that has a little preview card has an add to your episode. A button. And so that's the conventional way that you essentially say, Hey, I want to listen to this, put this on my queue. It's coming up next.

So I got to imagine that the whole idea here is to surface podcasts, to increase discovery. What I imagine is that what Spotify is seeing is that people may be subscribed to two or three shows that they really like on a regular basis. In my case, it's more than 30 or 40, but obviously I don't list all of them. And this is a way of sampling a lot and finding stuff that you might actually want to listen to. That goes a little bit outside of your range because.

It doesn't show you episodes just from podcasts. You've subscribed to, it sort of is a mix of stuff that you've subscribed to and then things that are adjacent or similar. So I guess maybe the way to think about it is if you've ever turned on Spotify radio for me, This is the same thing for podcast content. So it's at the episode level and not at the show level.

So we're not finding new show to finding new episodes, which is consistent with the way that they allowed you to create a playlist of episodes. Now, it's obviously you're using AI to create the audio grams that the trailers, but one of the things that you said is you add it to a. Can I share that list with people.

So I think I understand what you're getting to, but yes and no. So your episodes is essentially like your backlog of episodes, you know, the collection of all the things that you've hit plus on, I found this very confusing when I first started using Spotify when it was in beta in like 2006. So obviously I've been on there for a long time, but you can get plus, and it just adds whatever the song is to your music.

So in a similar way, You come across a podcast episode, you hit, plus it gets added to your episodes. You can also add it to a queue. I find it very irritating and annoying because it intermixes your music queue with your podcast queue. And those are very different modes for me. So that's not quite working yet. However, the same convention applies. So clearly when Daniel talks about Spotify being an audio platform, but he wants you to be able to.

Kind of anything into your library, which will of course include audio books soon. In addition to music and podcasts. The reason I ask is because I can create a music playlist and I can make it shareable, collaborative. Even you could have a joint it's already works that were guests. Yes. So I would, I would put on a couple of things. I've been watching Spotify pretty closely when it comes to their podcast offerings.

So I was a refugee from Google podcasts, which for a while, stopped working with my apple watch. And that was like terrible. And then anyway, The Spotify podcast experience has gotten quite good. And I actually do a wheeled between both music and podcasts. And I think I do fairly well in both. I have actually started creating, in fact, I have a folder inside of my Spotify playlist. That's just for podcasts. And so I collect thematic podcasts and you can make it collaborative.

You can share those podcasts list. In fact, for the technium write them experience, which I recorded with Brian Nicola. If you go to Christmasy, ended up me slash podcast, I embed the playlist of. Podcast episodes because it's a subset of the overall episodes from the technique, right. Home show. So anyways, that already exists. That's there adding to your episodes though, as I understand it is a private feature and it doesn't automatically presume that you want to share it.

So just in the same way that I can connect my Facebook social graph to Spotify, and I can then see my friend's music playing can only do anything in the same way to see what podcasts you're playing. That is a great question. And perhaps after this call, we should try that out. I honestly, I don't use the Facebook integration for seeing what my friends listened to musically, but like I said, well, I'll try this afterwards.

And you can confirm to listeners whether or not you will see the podcasts that I'm listening to in Spotify, because that is a use case. I had not actually thought about it, but if it's audio and I'm doing a social listening session, I don't see any reason why. Podcasts would be special. Maybe people have privacy concerns about it differently, but if you expect that your friends are watching or seeing what you're listening to musically, I don't know if podcasts are special.

Okay. The next question I've got is Spotify has got the capability to create an, a music, audio type DJ set. So I can say, Hey, the next truck up is Julie port, and then I can play it. And then it does it get pretty badly for somebody who owns a radio station. It does it really bad. Like it's there and it exists. But my brain extension is that, hang on a minute. If I can do that with music, why can't I just record a podcast inside of Spotify? Think about some extension they may go to.

So there's a couple of things that are going to be coming down the pipe for Spotify that I think are very interesting from a social listening experience perspective. One, I think it's pretty clear that Spotify greenroom is going to be folded into. The Spotify is going to be called Spotify live. Exactly. Now Spotify held a concert series, a virtual concert series last year called Spotify live. You can get to [email protected].

I imagine that they're going to continue to promote that brand for a number of different things. In terms of live music shows there'll be one, but I think joining into and having maybe pre concert, post concert events, things along those lines, the fact that Daniel has sponsored a soccer stadium suggest that live soccer is probably going to becoming to.

Uh, Spotify and you will have pregame post-game and maybe during game live streams coming out of the Spotify app itself as well, greenroom itself was first focused on sports. So you can see that clearly they need to get into live sports thing, because they want to be a new type of radio that is supported by personalized ads. That is the future of Spotify. That is their business model. And so that's likely going to be what happens going back to some of the features.

We'll support that you mentioned to possibly recording a podcast and then maybe cuing the podcast or queuing clips and things like that. I gotta imagine those things are coming, but I do know that there's some interesting elements when it comes to group listening sessions on the same wifi network. So there's some social stuff happening on a local level. There's another feature that I discovered. Called guest the lyrics, which has not publicly been released as far as I know.

Um, I found a Spotify playlist that has the same icon that I found in the app. And what I'm guessing there is just, as you can now read or see the lyrics of your favorite songs for a Spotify music tracks, you would be able to invite someone. To play a guessing game with the lyrics game, with somebody else. Who's also on Spotify and that'll probably be a premium feature. So they're looking for games as a way of engaging with their user base in more social sharing and interaction.

So this question of this is a little bit adjacent, but I think related there was a product called I want to say it was called road trip and it was called. Matt Mazzeo was an investor in it. Anyways, was working on it. It's now called, I believe it's called campgrounds. They just rebranded relaunched. I hunted them a prototype, but essentially it links to your Spotify account and allows you to create social listening. So thematically either might be like a Radiohead group.

And then the people who are interested in radio head will go into that. And there'll be someone who's deejaying or posting links, which are essentially Spotify songs. And that kind of creates more social engagement and interaction. And a clubhouse is also working on stuff in the same vein. So anyways, this is a roundabout way of answering your question, which is, I think that the way you're describing this comes from the podcast.

Like recording blends as opposed to the behavior of socially collaborating on audio and then producing the output of that to whether it's a special Spotify playlist or something else. And you already see. Type of content with something called the get-up. If you're a Spotify subscriber search for the get-up, you will find a personalized playlist where they have the radio hosts that are interspersing their commentary in the news with songs that are personally chosen based on your interests.

So if I were commuting again in a vehicle and driving around, I might find this as a preferable, you know, and I also had car thing, let's say, which is of, for Spotify. I might find that interesting or compelling to have a personalized listening experience without having to fuss with a conventional terrestrial radio. Yeah. Okay. I'll look that up. I haven't seen that one. That's cool.

Now. The other thing that I think you surfaced was the idea of captions and possibly a transcript within Spotify. So this already exists. It has existed actually for quite some time. I know you guys talked about transcripts on a recent episode and really wanted to encourage more people to include them. And as you mentioned, for one reason or another, I don't know the podcast hosts or platforms just either don't take the time they don't bother with it or the quality.

To do it in an automated fashion. Just isn't good enough for it. It's very expensive. I don't know. That's one of my cares, because what I've noticed is that the Spotify produced podcast shows do include a transcript, which is automatically generated. And that automatic generation that's probably not perfect, but it is going to get better over time. Trial by content is the one that I sent you guys that I found they were doing a couple of things that are worth pointing out.

So one in an episode itself, if you use anchor or Spotify to publish your. Podcasts, you can include a poll. And a poll is just a way of gauging the audience and getting them to come into the app and possibly eventually probably see ads or visual content, but they also include an episode transcript, which you got to imagine. One is necessary for search. It's useful for maybe snipping and creating clips, which doesn't quite exist yet, but may come soon.

And then of course, Pods integration, which we first started talking about does require there to be a textual or text-based transcript in order to create those audio brands. So regardless the transcripts are being created, they're being indexed for search.

I think it's just a question of how the data is surface to the user and whether it's included when the episode itself, and then the metadata, or if it's something you have to get to from within the Spotify experience, he had 12 by content and I can see. Timestamps against it. It's a bit of a mess to be honest in terms of looking at it. Yes. But clearly someone's put an SLT file into it. So I'm just curious as to how the SLT file got added.

It was mainly done by Spotfire or was it done by the content creator? I guess we're not low for awhile. Yeah. I got to imagine it's by the, the show producers. One thing that is, I think, worthwhile and important is to remember that. Spotify itself does support a timestamps. And so at the very least within the Spotify universe, anything that is a Spotify original or from the ringer, for example, they want to demonstrate what the platform. So the FA I don't know if there's an SRT file included.

It could just be whatever they have on the backend and they're going through, and they're adding those timestamps links manually, because what's amazing about Spotify is that it is just a web browser. It's this is a special purpose web browser, but the entire thing is built with JavaScript. So everything is run off of links. And so as long as you get a timestamp, then you can go to it. And it's not something that's special. That's encoded in the.

I guess the other thing that we were talking about last week was Spotify released their details about the semantic new search that they're building. So again, that in itself makes it interesting because once you got a transcription in there and you can do semantic search again, You suddenly have a greater contextual search capability, two problems though, right? Cause one of the problems is the intent.

So when you go to search for something, absolutely like maybe you want to see a number of different perspectives or opinions about a topic and you want to learn more, right? Maybe it's gardening or something when you're doing something very specific, that would make sense where your search intent would be very high. It's quite. And surfacing content from transcripts can get you into content. That would be very relevant quickly.

On the other hand, though, from a recommendations perspective, I think that's why this pods thing is so interesting is because it's starting to use signals from your own interests and what you've listened to before to inform the other things, to show you. Now, in order to do that, you'd have to use some sort of AI to draw connections between the content. And that's going to require text analysis. Maybe you can do it with direct audio analysis, but I would think that another.

That would be necessary, would be to just index all the texts and then see the things that are related and then to show you stuff as a result. Okay. Last question on Spotify, let's move on to Twitter. This isn't available for everybody. It's probably not going to be available to anyone outside the U S anyway, that's spelling 200% of every feature of every platform. I don't know about the geo restriction. I can tell you that I'm on Spotify is test flights. So I am on the early release version.

However, I was actually first tipped off by someone who goes to. At sleep well, cap on Twitter, he follows my hashtag new Spotify feed and was like, Hey, I think his daughter or a friend or something had the feature. And apparently this person is in one of these reverse of a holdout group. Like they get all the new features first and it is the case that I got it because I'm in the test flight. But this person that took me off.

Even think to look for, it seems to be just a regular like Spotify app user. Look, we wait and see, as James put at the end of the article, it may never come to light. It may just be a texting, right? Moving on now, Twitter again, that seems to be mirroring much of the activity that Spotify is doing. You know, spaces seems to done really well. We know about Twitter blue. We know that they're working on some decentralized stuff. Again, one of the things you surfaced worse, they've got this tab.

We don't know. Is it a tab? Is it going to be a button that as a tab and what's going to be within that tablet? Is it just going to be my RSSP that I'm sharing or is it just going to be everyone in my social graph? How's it going? Yeah. And to be clear, I have not seen the feature itself.

I believe Jane mentioned Wong has probably shared some screenshots of something that looks, or at least like the fact that there's a placeholder and that's coming, but we also noticed that the Twitter spaces icon has changed to something that looks more like a mic. And there is this question about positioning, whether it's, you know, Twitter spaces, which I noticed now the Twitter space, his account has renamed itself to just spaces. I don't know.

Obviously all the backstory there, but it is interesting to see them move in a direction that might be more common, more familiar, more accessible, and that podcasts has obviously become something that's quite popular, quite well-known quite well adopted. And at least in terms of users seeing the spaces thing and not knowing what that is and not knowing how to click through.

If there is going to be audio content, there are some that as long form, obviously you have to position spaces, recordings as some type of content or some type of experience. I know that they've hired another, I don't know if he was at formerly at apple podcast or someplace else, but they're building up a team that has worked on podcasts in the past, and certainly are interested in a audio centric. I don't want to say audio first, but audio centric experience for Twitter.

I would also point to, you mentioned Twitter, blue. I think. Twitter is greater efforts. I'm not going to say that they've stalled, but they certainly well, as a creator on Twitter, I don't make any money from Twitter. I never had when I probably never will, but I've got tipping. I've got super follows. I've got ticketed spaces. None of it's working at least from Haven gold. And if ti as well, I do, I also have an NMT profile photo, which I had to pay for.

So the irony is I'm just getting sucked out. It's like a big mosquito or something, but regardless. I don't know how well all of their creator tools are functioning. They had a, a creator like program where they were trying to pay some people to do Twitter spaces. And they're not like YouTube. I'll put it that way. What does this come down to? I believe that there are those people who are creating or want to create probably exclusive content and podcast seems likely.

So there are a lot of people who have large audiences on Twitter who are probably being courted by Spotify or call in or clubhouse or other places to create exclusive content that's recorded. And Twitter needs to essentially meet the moment and provide functionality and services to those folks because. Let's say that I did have an exclusive podcast. I would rather sell it to my a hundred thousand followers on Twitter than try to build up a new follower account on Spotify or elsewhere.

So in that sense, I think Twitter is behind a bit in terms of providing. I guess the right kind of marketplace for creators that want to offer exclusive content. And I don't know if this is going to go in this direction, but certainly for the creator side, which is more of a one to many relationship where I'm charging my super Follies, one to two bucks a month, and then they get Mike's as a podcast. That's cool. If I'm a Twitter blue subs.

Then maybe that gets me some exclusive CNN podcast or something as part of my subscription. And so anyways, to go back and answer your question the way I think that this feature is going to work based on what I'm seeing in terms of the strings inside of the Twitter app, is that these will be podcast recommendations that come from the people that you follow on Twitter. So if you are Twitter, blue subscriber, you already get top articles.

What top articles does, is it aggregates links to news sites that your friends are. And in a similar way, if your friends are sharing links to podcast episodes, now, I don't know how they're going to do indexing of podcast links, because obviously there are so many different platforms, but if you imagine a service like pod link, which I use to link to podcast episodes, because it aggregates all the different sources and then whatever player you choose, you can.

Twitter, we'll have to do a similar type of identity layer that says this link is for this episode. And it's also this episode on Spotify and on Stitcher and the rest. And so I think in the short term, it'll just be a place for you to surface trending podcast episodes that your friends are listening to. Now, the irony of this that maybe it's not the irony, maybe it's just the timeliness of these things is that Twitter actually launched something called hashtag.

I want to say in like 2010, roughly, and it completely failed, you can find the articles on tech crunch and they didn't really know what they were doing and it was early days, but it seems like it's a similar idea where essentially is using your social graph to inform the recommendations that it gives you. And that seems like a really sensible idea, right? From a discovery perspective. I think it absolutely makes sense. The question, I guess I had was twofold.

The links that I think we've seen so far, have them bounced back into Spotify to play that, for example. Sure. Is it going to be the United nations of links or you could go to overcast, it could go to anywhere app or whatever, or is it going to be only a relationship between Spotify and. The, the other one that is interesting is well Twitter ever consider having a player built into the app. So instead of taking you out the wall garden, would they just make you stay within the wall?

Garden seems a little bit old to then bounce you out of the system. If what they've done is waited for you to get into the system in the first bedroom. This is, yeah, this is an absolutely great question. For number of reasons. One is what is Twitter and how to people use it. I certainly use it to discover links and to find out what's going on in the world. And then it go to the.

Wherever it might be on the rest of the web, the open web to read more or to learn more, but you bring up an interesting point when it comes to podcasts. Of course, it's of the open web. The content happens to be audio instead of text. And so if Twitter is a type of browser, if you will, then I can play YouTube videos inside of Twitter as an embedded experience. So if I see a link to a podcast, why would I be able to do the same thing?

You said that will Twitter ever launch a player inside of the Twitter app? And the answer is they already have, you can already listen to recorded audio from Twitter spaces. So why would they do all that investment in a player which plays prerecorded, right. And not give you the ability to play and be threes that come from the open web. I would imagine one people are interested in this, speak up and share your perspective and your ideas about this.

Personally, I would love to see Twitter be more of a United nations neutral player, and allow me to connect to my preferred a Spotify Spotify podcast player, a podcast, I suppose. I know my preferred podcatcher and then to continue listening in whatever player I may choose, I would find that very valuable and it would be a really great kind of ecosystem play, but whether it works for Twitter's audio advertising ambition. Especially as it's becoming much more of a competitive space. I don't know.

That's a really big question. And I suppose probably the new Twitter CEO has some thoughts about that. That last couple of questions. One of the interesting things for me is there's a new extension tag for the podcast index called social interact, which allows you to put a URL within the RSS feed to where you want your comment system to be. All of those options is to allow you to use. Has a URL. So you started tweaked, take the URL of that tweet and then embed that in before you publish.

And then all of your comments stream gets added from Twitter. So Twitter is now your commentary, but again, just as we said, you have a player and suddenly you have a comment stream, your social graph there. Boom, you're done already really interesting because at least you have a UI model that I would say SoundCloud probably. Where you can leave comments at specific timestamps. It turns a little chaotic, but I think in the Twitter case, that makes a lot of sense.

Whenever I host my Twitter spaces, I do a couple of things. I will post links to the nest, which is essentially the pin link section of the space as it's going on. And what I'll do is I'll actually reply to the tweet that is announcing the Twitter space so that I have the history of all the links that were. During that space. Now this probably is getting too personal, but I don't record my Twitter spaces because I find the audio quality sucks and it also expires after 30 days.

So I think that it's very important that the podcast that I produce and share do have some longevity and live outside of the Twitter ecosystem. But nonetheless, to your point, I'm already using. Uh, a specific tweet, which links to a podcast, which is the Twitter space and having all the comments in line there. So I really liked that idea.

I think it's very interesting in terms of this spec protocol, social interact feels like a little bit of a forced language vernacular, but I appreciate the intent. I think the podcast index is trying to create a comment system. I was at podcast movement and, uh, Chuck who was there from YouTube was, you know, say one of the biggest reasons. Uh, YouTube as a podcast platforms. Cause we've got comments and everyone sat around the room going okay, but it's coming fairly soon.

So it's not a big differentiator, but it is a requirement to change podcasts and from a one way medium to a two way conversation, I think. Yeah, I think that's really interesting. And again, to point to the way in which Spotify is allowing. Podcasters podcast producers to include the polls. And I would say that Spotify is very reluctant about opening up social channels and interaction. I just feel like they are quite skeptical of social in general.

I mean their Facebook integration, which has been there, I want to say since 2008 or 2010 or something literally has not changed at all. And it really is just a passive kind of a viewing experience. And in a way, they've, you know, a lot of the controversy until this year, of course, with the social interactions that have bogged down places like. And Facebook and I guess now Metta, but nonetheless, those comments and the way that listeners can respond.

I think that level of engagement not only is something that podcasters want, but it's something that listeners really want. And so if you don't provide it on your own platform, they're going to find other ways to have those conversations where the podcast or is not included. I also think that from a monetization perspective, it makes a ton of sense if I can go in and maybe this is speaking more to Twitter as possible.

But for me to be able to let's say, have a tweet, um, which represents the podcast episode and then to have my super followers be called out or identified for me to respond to them because they're literally supporting my work and to be able to elevate those as opposed to people who are just no shit callers or whatever that you don't have them in my interest in mind. Yeah. This is how YouTube does it with podcasting for live recorded video episodes.

So sure people in the stream comment while watching a live video broadcast of a button, I can pay $5, $2. It highlights it in the comments and then they can call them out, say, Hey Chris, thanks for the $10. Yay. Great question. Bank my bank. Right. Uh, like I don't know if it will be like, I think the live thing is going to be interesting and that's a little bit adjacent to the recorded podcast episode where you're. Like going for the, after the fact to playback.

Cause I would think that listening, let's say to a live stream, like a Twitch stream two days later, unless you're really deeply involved or really loved the content. Like you're not going to want to listen to all the thank you for that. And for that tip and a two, a displaced would be in that context. But exactly this brings onto the last thing. Most people aren't aware there is a dollar icon against certain Twitter handles.

And when you click on it, it brings up payments with Satoshis and Bitcoin. And then when you click on it, the digital wallet. Hey pro-style is cash app. Thanks Jack. For leaving that one in the background. Surprisingly, I haven't seen a real big noise push. Twitter to tell the 300 million plus people that, that actually exists. And I haven't seen a big rollout of it, but it all seems to work.

Okay. Again, just for those outside the USA, it doesn't work for us because we don't have Stripe and we can't there for actually convert our fit currency to the payments in balance. It shows a course of direction. And so going back to it, instead of giving you a heart or a, or like I could actually with your podcast within. Make a micropayment to what your tweet or to your newsletter or to your super fallout or to whatever. So there is a mechanism.

It hasn't been rolled out properly, or it hasn't been rolled out very well if at all. So I wonder when that's going to happen, but again, just one last thing, going back to Spotify then. Feels like something that's missing within spotter. They've got the open access system to allow you to create subscriptions outside of Spotify, but there isn't a micropayment system within it. So I pay my 1499 for the family account, but Spotify don't seem to have another Mexican.

Other than ads to actually take any more dollars off me, what Twitter will do and how they'll service it to make it much more because it's not really working right now as in people aren't using it. And we'll, do you think, I guess, Chris, rather than what I think Spotify will find.

A micropayment system of a similar nature, man, this is such a hard question because I think most of the big platforms seem if I think about Netflix or if I think about Spotify, I think about audible or Amazon, they prefer to have what's it called a buffet style approach to content. Or you pay one monthly fee, you have a relationship with the aggregator and it's, I suppose, Amazon and apple do a pretty good job of providing additional merchandising for individual items.

If you don't want to subscribe so you can buy the individual audio book or the individual ebook or things like that. But if you buy the all access, then almost everything is included now to your point, I do think that there are going to be. Probably podcasts, premiums or exclusives that are an additional premium within Spotify. I think from a content perspective, from a influencer slash relationship perspective, that's going to be necessary. And like you said, the open access thing is there.

So you have a surgery and did the room, or did their.fm that are both using that, but the experience sucks. So my sense is that they're probably using that to. Explore and experience the rails. I don't know that Spotify really cares about the Oakland web, to be honest, it's abstractly interesting, but it's not like Twitter, right? Not like Jack Dorsey or Pirog who worked on blue sky. It's there. Someone clearly was passionate about it at Spotify. They launched it. It's out there.

I couldn't get it to work with trajectory. I suppose. One of the reasons. Just as a point of interest is because there's also automatic and WordPress. And I believe that open-access works possibly with some WordPress plugins or something. So that's like over there and given that they're so large WordPress powers, I don't know, 40% of the web or something. That's. Adjacently interesting, but ultimately not a great experience.

So long-term, I would imagine possibly by the end of 2022, and I'm just making up a date, but just given how much time we have left in the year that Spotify would probably explore experiment with offering podcasts. Raider is the ability to do exclusive drops or the types of content that might be more ticketed spaces and things like that. Like the Spotify. Greenroom into live thing, creates an opening where you can charge for ticket access to any type of audio content.

And that could be a podcast recording. It could be a subscribers, only experience, live events. The Twitter is just gone on there, him visted or ham-handed or him headed like whatever, but they have product market fit with a certain type of experience and changing it or evolving. It seems to be a little bit challenging for them. I'm not writing them off. I get enormous undervalue out of Twitter, but getting into the creator relationship business seems to be something that they're really.

Struggling with, I think it's good to see both platforms experimenting, but I don't think they're joining up the dots very well to make a bigger picture of what they are trying to achieve. I think it's, it may take another year before we all see the parts working. One more, one more thing that I would add to that is just the nature of how we experience content, I think is undergoing a dramatic shift in ways that are very hard to understand when you're so close to it.

As I was going through Spotify podcast discovery experience, it occurred to me that there is no experience that is Netflix for podcasts. In other words, where there's almost like a shuffle play where you just turn it on and it's stuff that you're interested in, like radio used to be in theory. And so I imagine that Spotify would love to get into that business and to run that type of content offering for the most part, because the ads would actually not be that offensive.

They're just part of the experience. I see it with my Google home device. Now, whenever I ask it for the news in the morning, they're usually there's three or five ads on my, my personal smart speaker, which I thought I bought, like to avoid all that stuff. So it's coming, it's going to happen. And. I just think that Spotify has such a better sense for the content experience and just letting you open the app plus press play.

And it just delivers things to you based on your mood or based on the time of day or things like that. Whereas Twitter is so much more pull based. You have to find people, you have to follow them. They're getting into topics and they're getting into the sport hashtags of course, and some other stuff, but it's still, I think, a long way off before Twitter. Embraces being. And I mean, they don't want to be a publisher or a platform.

And so that tension means that they're not quite riding the wave of, I think user expectations of content should just be there. It should entice you excite you interest, you entertain you, and you have to do quite a bit of work on Twitter and in the Twitter ecosystem, I think to get to that same level of experience that comes, I think a bit more handily within Spotify, the thing that's. The starting point from both platforms. One was a text-based platform going into audio. Yep, exactly.

That's right. Last question then apple seems to be, Hey, anyone want to show the apple tree? Because somebody is asleep at the wheel over there. It doesn't seem like a lot's going on. They becoming less and less important in the ecosystem. They only remain important. I think because they're the default podcast app on the most used phone. That's it?

Yep. I got to imagine that either from a leadership perspective or from a team dynamic perspective, or just from a relationship perspective, they're just less interested in podcasts because it's not very visual content, right? You look at all the money that they're putting into apple TV, and that is like visual, sexy stuff that they can use to sell hardware. And it's really hard.

I think, to go from selling an audio episode of a podcast to getting a high-end phone or something AirPods, or of course a great platform. Podcasts, but there's no interactivity. You think that you might be able to do something there if apple were thinking along those lines, but for the most part, it feels it's like a fourth, fifth or 12th priority when it comes to the content engine that apple is turning into.

And in so much as there are apple subscriptions, I don't know that many people who are using them are taking advantage of them. So, yeah, it's hard to know. Also I want to be. I'm representing a kind of American or U S centric perspective because that's where I live. And that's the, the media environment that I'm in. It may be the case that in other places around the world, these experiments and these creator economy initiatives are actually working more effectively. I just don't know.

I haven't seen it, but certainly it doesn't seem like the podcast subscription stuff is, has taken off in any real measure. Chris, thank you so much for your time. I won't take any more of it up, I guess. We'll watch this space with fascination and let's see how it all. Christmas Eve. Thank you so much, Chris. We can never get ahold of you if they need to find out more about you. You can find me on [email protected] is my website.

And don't forget to listen, to take meme the ride home, the technium ride home. Yes, that's right. Yes, exactly. Thank you so much. Thanks Chris. Cheers.

And if you do that, obviously this will be in the show notes as well. If you do that, then it opens Spotify to this new podcast tab and you can play around with yourself. And it's pretty cool. I'm keen to find out who is going to be promoted in there, whether it's, I mean, it's clearly not just Spotify shows. Um, a friend of mine saw something which was a very nice. Uh, podcast all about Joe Rogan and misinformation that they will be promoted.

So who knows quite how this promotion stuff is working, but, um, it does look really cool. And it does look by the way as if it has been baked into the Spotify app for some time, because, uh, I tried it on my iPod touch, which I haven't actually given any power to since the middle of January. Um, and that had the code in it. So it appears to have been there for a while. So. Uh, so hurry up, Spotify. What are you waiting for?

Can't quite work out how to turn it on, on, um, you know, on real Android phones, but a good bit. We'll carry on playing around with that and seeing if we can work.

Or is it just going to be a case of, um, looking at your social graph and finding what your friends are pointing to? Again, it's a discovery channel, but we don't know what's in it.

And if there's anybody from Twitter listening as if that would be, uh, then, uh, please do get in touch [email protected].

Um, and Twitter, I'm not sure how long they will allow video for, but they could extend it beyond their current limitation of two and a half minutes. So it looks like video as well is going to be a big player in 2022 for all podcasters

So you can very clearly see that, you know, video is an important thing. And, um, you know, I mean only this week, uh, Sam, you've heard about the launch of, or the upcoming launch of talk TV in the UK, which is a Rupert Murdoch TV, sh TV channel. Brilliant.

You know, you, you wake up in the morning. Radio always kills TV in the, in the early morning. And so actually giving radio the spotlight makes sense. Whereas in the evening, uh, TV, uh, always does better than radio. So actually. Um, you know, the only weird thing I think about talk TV and taught radio is that they've called them two separate things. And actually it should just be called talk, um, because it's a product which is available on both the radio and the TV.

Um, so you, you can very well see that podcasts work in that same way. Um, And the podcasts don't need to be audio anymore. Uh, and some of the work that the podcast index, well, the new podcast namespace has been doing, uh, has been to get those working better, you know, in terms of, um, in terms of being able to flick between video and audio versions of the same, um, podcast as you listen, which I think makes a bunch of sense as well.

Um, and it will be interesting to see how that works for people. I mean, at the end of the day, quite a lot of people use radio just as a really simple, uh, user interface of pressing the. It starts making noise. You listen for a bit and then you press the button and it stops. Um, so can you do something like that with a podcast? Yes, absolutely. You can. So Sirius XM doing that while I heart media is, um, doing even more stuff to do with, uh, podcasts companies.

Um, they've bought what they've done, a collaboration with a company called collab, um, producing a. New separate podcast studio, which is, um, looking at family-friendly stuff. It's called cure activity. Somebody called Mr. Jim, no idea who Mr. Jim is. Um, but you know, iHeart media, seemingly investing even more into podcast, exclusive, um, content.

Um, there are a few things which aren't that, um, consistent in there, but I think that's because it's sort of, you know, part one of a multi-part, uh, redesigned, but, um, it looks good. So many congratulations to overcast. It's one of the top five podcast apps. Marco is one of those people who spends a long time on something to make sure that it is properly good and continues working on, on the app. And so it's great to see him continuing to do.

Um, and you license clause, which is allowing apple to use your podcast when they're promoting apple podcasts, which I'm surprised that they didn't already have. Um, but they've added that. But the interesting one, I think is they have added. Bit of a clause or about the right to label or remove your shows. And they're talking about, um, I think about, uh, content standards. And so, um, I suspect that this is a reaction to Jeremy.

I suspect what happened is some lawyer overpaid lawyer at apple suddenly thought, oh, well, we should be probably doing something about this Joe Rogan stuff. And so there's talking there about, um, about, uh, content standards and talking about the right to, to label or remove your shows, um, in the future as well. Then the other thing might be worthwhile mentioning is that they're licensed clause does mention stuff about guests.

And so I believe that one of the things they are looking at doing, and they may already already do this, given that I don't use, uh, apple podcasts is, um, to give you links to other shows that have had this particular person or. Guest. and that appears to be co-defined in their terms of service now. So it's always interesting reading the terms of service and seeing if there's anything new in there. Uh, so that was quite fun to do.

So depending on where your headphone connection is on your desk, whether it's on the left or on the right then you've actually got. Uh, control over which side of the headphones that cable goes to, which is a former radio presenter. And as somebody that, um, had a, um, a headphone connection on the left-hand side of the desk, but the, um, but the cable went in on the right. I could have really benefited from. Uh, so thank you rod for being 25 years too late.

Um, but it's a very good to see them launching new stuff, uh, which is all good.

Um, so very disappointing to see some of these figures, but the reason why is that neither apple, nor Spotify, nor Google supports any form of transcripts in their players yet. And, um, that's what would be really good to get fixed. And as I said on the new media show last week, which was live at the podcast movement, you know, I was saying, do we have to wait for a legal case? Uh, or can we move on and actually make our podcasts more accessible, uh, to other to other people.

It's important to, uh, just bear that in mind that said, um, what this data also shows you is the most popular languages last year, which, um, was interesting. So English is number one with 770,000 podcasts, uh, active podcasts last year. Uh, then, uh, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Italian, Mandarin, Chinese, and then Japanese, Japanese ending with 13,000 active podcasts in 2021. I'm suspecting that this isn't a fully, um, complete list because, uh, Indonesia.

I've been doing tremendously well as well. And there are no numbers for that, but great to see, you know, so much growth in terms of languages from other countries as well. And I'm always surprised at podcast hosting companies, podcast apps that haven't been translated into a. Into other languages as well. This is supposed to be the quick hit section. And that was a very long answer. Wasn't it?

So, uh, over in, uh, Europe, uh, Paul GMO, uh, in Denmark has bought a dag and knocked day and night, which is the largest podcast publisher in the Netherlands. They have over 60 shows. Um, and pardon me, I was gonna put some of them, but not quite, and it's not telling us yet, um, who they're putting, but they kind of put some of those behind Podemos monthly, uh, five-year old paywalls. So that's interesting to end up.

And it's a podcast discovery platform, uh, showing you podcasts about specific places, which is really nice. Now I'm an advisor for a company called maps.fm and maps.fm does essentially this, but has many, many more shows in there and is a much more rounded product in there as well. Um, so obviously I heart. Uh, well potentially seen that and thought, well, that may be is something that we might want to end up doing.

Um, given that they've got local radio stations, of course, across north America. Um, but, uh, there is definitely something there in terms of localization and, uh, you know, information about locality around podcasts.

As I said, a couple of weeks. At scale, Dave says it's pretty terrible. Uh, push only blockchain solution is the only scalable solution for the podcast industry to move forward on that front. Um, so he's posted a bit of data, uh, around this, on Twitter. Uh, what, what did he end up posting around?

Um, and I, cause I was curious about the 15 day exploration period, cause I thought 15 days to expire. So basically what, how a website works is you go into the pub and you say, have you seen Dave? Uh, and the barman says, no, I haven't seen Dave. And you say, can you tell me when you next? See Dave, and then you go away again. And what web sub is, is the bomb and giving you a ring because he's seen Dave. Um, so that's basically where.

Um, and do you have to go in and ask the landlord behind the bar every 15 days, um, uh, is what Dave Jones is saying because otherwise, um, your request will expire and the landlord will forget all about your request. Um, so I went to have a look at the web spec and the website spec, well, that, that lease that 15 day expiration period is up to. And, um, you can actually, if you're using website, but you can actually ask for a longer exploration period.

Um, and the hub may, um, in the words of an NRF RFC, uh, honor that request and say, okay, you can have it for 30 days, so you can have it for 60 days. And the reason why they have this expiration period is obviously if you move RSS feeds, then, um, the web system helps you understand where the RSS feed has ended up moving to. Curious about all of this. I wish to spend more time, uh, chatting with Dave, uh, to understand a little bit more, um, about that, uh, that stuff.

I'm not saying that pod Pang is bad. I think the popping is very exciting. Um, every time I see the word blockchain, I do tend to, you know, run to the other side of the room. Um, and that's always a concern, but, uh, yeah, it, it, you know, so interesting to end up seeing that.

Uh, it's very tedious, right, Dell, and you'll find it in the show notes, but, uh, basically, uh, yes, I ended up having to do some work, which, uh, funnily enough has, um, has ended up breaking something. Uh, but there we are. Um, and at the moment I'm hoping to add lightning comments back in a little, in a couple of days, um, uh, but also to, um, but we're also permanent. Also using Twitter as well as a base commenting tool. Cause quite a lot of people are on Twitter. It turns out.

Um, but yeah, I don't, you know, I mean, at the end of the day, I just want something that works and something that is easy for the average coder to do and activity part of it is not easy for the average coder to do. And anything that requires you to spin up a server of your own. Is relatively insanity. And, um, it would be really good to stop inventing five different messaging systems.

And we're not Google nice to have one, but anyway, let's, uh, let's move on from that because otherwise I'll just get more shouting, but you know, if they want to shout at me, uh, send us a boost, uh, by holding the boost button down, then you can share it as much as.

Um, and it's brilliant to spend time at podcast movement and to see all of these, um, people who with. Talking about for the last year, last year and a half. Um, and, uh, it was also the first time that we actually met physically. It wasn't it. Uh, which was, uh, which was a

Uh, no, but that was a weird, old thing. I can say that I have been on the same stage as well, feral, but I never actually met. So he was, he was skulking around the back somewhere. Um, so I've been on the same stage, but not unfortunately at the same time. And Kyron from the mere mortals podcast has given us a USA boost, which is 8 72 on the keypad, apparently. Um, very clever. Uh, and he has said, how does that work? Eight, 17. That doesn't make. Oh, no, I suppose yes. If you're upside down.

Yeah. Okay. Anyway, he says, enjoy your trip and give us an update of how painful or painless the travel experience is. Nowadays are. Well, actually, uh, if you have a look at my Twitter recently, you will see that I have posted a. Um, uh, flights report, which I normally do just to keep myself sane. Uh, and, uh, my goodness, um, uh, part of the travel experience was completely painful. What I really liked is a brand new app, uh, Sam from the Australian government, uh, where I had to.

Um, take photographs of my Australian passport, then hold my Australian passport down so that the app could read the NFC in it. Then take a photograph of me and wave my head from side to side and everything else. They could really prove that it was me. And then I had. Scan all of my vaccination certificates given to me by the Australian government, into this Australian government app.

So already your, your seeing that there's a little bit of duplication going on here, uh, followed by, uh, another thing of scanning the COVID tests that I had had and everything else. And it was just the most irritating thing. And then nobody took the blind bit of notice of it anywhere, and I had to fill everything out ever again. Brilliant. Another triumph, Australian government.

Uh, I haven't got my sponsorship read in front of me. Um, but anyway, it use the code pod news and see if you can save some money, um, at the podcast show london.com and you can find out [email protected]. So, uh, Sam, your off calm dab license has arrived tax.

Um, so Virgin radio, his first song when that went live was, um, born to be wild, a, a rerecord of that, especially for Virgin radio by NXS. And so when I managed to do for Virgin radio classic rock, when it went on dab for the first time is we had the. Born to be wild because it kind of fitted that way. Um, so that worked, um, that works really well. My boss at the time, a lovely man, Paul Jackson, um, it was not that fast about what the first song was going to be.

I don't think he was as much of an anorak as I was. And I said, please, can we have just the original board to be wild by fit Lizzy and he's out. Okay. Then go on. Then it was by thin Lizzy. Wasn't it. Anyway.

Uh, and that's it for this week. Um, thank you so much to Christmas. Um, uh, for, uh, talking with Sam, uh, earlier on great, great interview. Uh, and if you've enjoyed the show or any of our previous shows, you can tell your friends on Twitter, LinkedIn, or tick tock, tick tock about Portland news, or just retweet one of our episode posts. Um, and we have an email address as well. Haven't we.