Well, it comes upon land. The last word in podcasting news. It's Thursday, the 28th of April, 2022. I am James Credlin the editor of pod news.net. And I am Sam set of the MD of river radio. Hi Neil Modi here, CEO, and one of the founders of headliner. I'll be on the show later to talk about all things, headliner, disco, and edit, edit, and I'm Tom Berenson and lecture. I'll be talking about the podcast show 2022 in London. They will Puntland is sponsored by Buzzsprout podcast.
Hosting made easy last week, 3,448. People started a podcast with Buzzsprout sprouts. You can [email protected] about a sprout, also supports chapters and transcripts. So we do two excellent. Now on this week's show James, I think we'll have to talk about a few things. Certainly Spotify is a new video. Uh, with anchor sub start getting into podcasting apple collections.
Now I I'm, I'm going to ask a lot of questions, their review and Twitters acquisition by himself, Elon Musk, but let's kick off with a Spotify snuck out, which I think is quite a big story. Really that anchor is now going to support video. What's your thoughts what's happening? Go and tell me all. Yes, they're kind of supporting video aren't they? It's, it's a proprietary video podcast.
It's anchor users in the us, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the UK five countries, which speak English with the exception of Canada who also speak French. Of course. Um, why aren't they in Ireland as well? You would ask it, but anyway, I thought you did actually was he went and created a video and you went and put one up. Now, the only thing is I had to log in because if you're not logged in, you don't see the video. What was your experience of creating and publishing that video?
It was quite, um, easy as anchor is anchors got very good user experience, so it's very good and very easy to understand how to do it. But yeah, so I made a 73 megabyte file in QuickTime on this Mac here, uploaded it onto anchor and, um, yeah. And it plays within the Spotify web player. As long as you are signed in, it seems to play in a web M format on Chrome. I went to have a quick look at the, uh, the details and, uh, yeah, and shrunk it down to about a two Meg of, of a file.
Um, and, um, you know, it all works perfectly happily and all appeared pretty fast. I thought it's web and relates to web P I mean, is that the equivalent? Is that the multimedia format, video format? Just as web piers for JPEGs. Yeah, absolutely. So where P is, is a picture for the web and web cam is a movie for the web. So, um, there, um, it's an open standard. I think Google has something to do with it.
I think it's basically Google, um, trying to get, um, into Apple's domain of, um, you know, Apple's doing HEVC and all kinds of weird and wonderful, uh, video codecs. And I think, uh, Google and dived into that. So web M is the format that it uses now. Um, safari doesn't support web M uh, nor does it support web P. So instead, um, I had to look at this on Spotify in the safari browser, and that played a different format, a video file.
It played an impact to, uh, file in, um, a number of different segments. So that works quite nicely. Um, but, um, and if you get the RSS feed, so if you're listening outside, Um, Spotify and you just get the normal anchor RSS feed. Then all you get to see in there is audio because the video is exclusive to Spotify. So that's very different from a typical video podcast. And I think that's the difference here. You know, you can get lots of different shows as video podcasts.
Um, this is not doing that. This isn't a video podcast is, is essentially a way to add an exclusive bit of video. Onto Spotify, but, you know, um, having said that it seems to work quite nicely. Now, Riverside announced that they'd done an integration with anchor, um, so that you could do one click publishing from Riverside, straight into anchor and supposedly therefore straight up onto Spotify. Um, did you try that? Um, I didn't try that.
Um, I'm sure that, uh, our friends at Riverside would have liked me to have had a play with that. I didn't actually give that a go. Although I did notice in Riverside when I was using that we're recording on squad cast today, but I did notice on Riverside that, um, it's plastered with, um, Spotify stuff in there now, um, saying how much you can do with them and Spotify. So, you know, good for them. And I hope that they enjoy spending their $35 million.
Uh, well, what are they going to spend that on? Who knows? Great. Wow. Um, but, uh, yeah, so I didn't, I didn't have a play with that, but I thought that was a very clever move from Spotify to basically go. This is the system that we've got, but also here's a tool that you can use to get the video in there. Um, so very clever, uh, thing.
I'm almost surprised why Spotify hasn't just gone and bought what maybe that's what the 35 million is for to increase the valuation of Riverside by the VCs before the acquisition by Spotify. That's often done in the VC. Okay. Oh, cool. So, you know, it's exciting, but it's just on Spotify. Spotify has about 25% market share. Um, also, um, so you won't see the video anywhere else. Um, and it only works if you're signed in.
The interesting thing is it does work, I believe on embedded players on Spotify. Uh, but you still need to be signed in, in order to actually see it. So it doesn't necessarily work too well. Yeah, I did try actually the Riverside. Um, the it's not quite as integrated as I hoped. So you have to export it, wait for a process video, then click on a link. Then it gives you the option after you've done that to, uh, publish it.
But also just to be, um, uh, something that I totally passed us by, but prior to Spotify, they'd already got a one-click publishing to transistor as well. Ah, okay. Yeah. Oh, that's that's interesting. Cause transistor is a podcast host that supports video. It was quite a lot of people do. And that of course means that you can get into every single podcast app that supports video like apple podcasts.
You may have heard of that one, all pocket casts or podcast addicts or lots of other ones, actually. I'm not sure the podcasts that it has power. I would imagine that they do. And there are quite a few people doing that it's expensive to serve. Um, and it's also quite difficult in, in, uh, you know, quite a few different ways, but, um, yeah.
You know, uh, I, I think, I think, you know, proper video podcasting, if you like, um, hasn't gone away what this is though, is this Spotify thing isn't proper video podcasting. It's just, um, it's just a proprietary thing, which is why I've used the proprietary word a lot in point of view, as we're talking about it. Cause it's kind of important that way. So a couple of weeks ago I was, uh, on Buzzcocks with.
Alban and Kevin and we were so amazing about, um, YouTube and adding video into YouTube. And I did ask them the question, you know, will Buzzsprout support video now? Well, now the anchor is supporting video, even if it is proprietary. Um, what does that mean for Buzzsprout Libsyn and, you know, captivate and all the other hosts? Are they going to have to support video now? Because otherwise will people just seem to go, well, if you don't support video, we're going to anchor.
Yeah. I mean, you can well see that this is going to be a marketing issue for them and they probably need to make it really clear that Spotify videos only work in Spotify, not in anywhere else. Um, you can actually go back in the spot in the. Um, UX, you can actually go back and replace audio with video, which is quite cool. Um, so you can end up doing a little bit of that. Obviously Buzzsprout, can't support Spotify video because it's a Spotify anchor exclusive thing.
So there's no opportunity there. Um, th the other thing just to sort of point out is that Spotify is making different versions of these video files for different platforms. So I mentioned WebEx, um, and the impact to thing that they've done for safari and presumably for that iOS app as well, because iOS, I don't believe supports webcam, uh, quite yet. So they are providing different versions of the video files, much like YouTube does. And that essentially means it's caching.
And the podcast industry has spent the last three years shouting at Spotify for caching audio and, you know, getting passed through and everything else for video, there are real benefits in transcoding video files in different ways. And obviously for video, the real benefits in having Spotify pay for the bandwidth, not your podcast host. Um, so it's kind of a little bit different, but it does sort of remind me that Buzzsprout is, is an interesting podcast house.
Cause it does transcode the audio. So if we wanted to, and, um, you know, I, I certainly have done this in the past. You can upload a web file to Buzzsprout and it won't give people the wildfire. Cause that would be silly. It transcodes it down to, in our case, 192 K stereo MP3 farm, which sounds. And that just means that nothing can go wrong. You can't upload the wrong type of audio file. It will automatically transcode it over. Buzzsprout is very good at doing that.
Actually quite a few other podcasts hosts don't because quite a few other podcasts hosts, somehow think that it's a good thing to leave the audio of the podcast at alone. And I'm not sure it is a good thing. And I think that there are quite a few good reasons why a podcast hosts should be taking audio from a podcaster and then, um, you know, packaging it up in the right codec for the right, um, individual, uh, platforms.
Um, so I think there's a big difference there between audio and what Spotify is doing with this video, because they're essentially making a bunch of different versions for different platforms as you would kind of expect, you know, YouTube, uh, doing and everything else. WhatsApp. We're going to do James in response this, now we know that the new media show, for example, Todd and Rob show are, is available on apple as a video. So you can see it as a separate feed.
Um, and so they already support it, but it's not something that people have done regularly. You don't go on to still apple podcasts and find hundreds of videos. Will they make it more prominent now in response to Spotify? Yeah. It's a really interesting question. Who knows? Um, they've not talked about it in the past, but there again, they've not talked about much of their advanced stuff in the past.
They only started talking about chapters in a amazing coincidence just before their ex boss started launching a thing. The used chapters, which was just an amazing, pure, pure coincidence. Um, but, uh, you know, so that's when they started talking about chapters, it wouldn't surprise me if there was something on the apple podcasts blog, which is, um, uh, quite active at the moment.
It wouldn't surprise me if there was something explaining how to use video and what their recommended video formats are for apple podcasts, um, because the app supports it very happily. Um, there's a really good podcast. I, by the way, I should recommend, which is only available in video. It's called media watch it's from the ABC here, here in Australia. If you like your media news, then you will love this it's, um, 15 minutes, uh, very well.
Together and worthwhile grabbing, but that works absolutely fine in apple podcasts and in pocket costs and in, you know, proper podcast apps. I think the only big podcast at where video doesn't work is Google podcasts. Um, and I think it just plays the audio. It doesn't quite know what to end up doing with that. Yeah. Now, one of the technologies that the podcast index have been talking about is this alternative enclosure tag, which was meant to allow in the RSS feed multiple different feeds.
So. Originally, when we talked about it a few months back, you were talking about, uh, different rates of, um, so 192 kilobits per second stereo, and there may be an, um, or, you know, a much less. Oh, so is it all this, the other former yeah. Opus Opus. Yeah, absolutely. So, uh, you know, the, the alternate enclosure tag to me seems to make much more sense. So what you're basically saying is here is this podcast it's available as audio as a, as a, uh, as a default.
Um, but it's also available in these other formats as well. And it's available in this video format it's available in this, uh, Opus format for very low bit rate. If he wants to download that one instead and save your data costs. Um, this is, I think one of the, uh, the best new tags that the podcast namespace has been working on is now alternate enclosure tag.
Um, and I think it's a real benefit if podcast apps were to support that, that essentially means that you don't have a new media show up and brackets, video, close brackets, as well as a new media show, which is the audio version. In, uh, you know, clogging up apple podcasts, um, you know, the use of the alternate enclosure tag is I think very clever.
Um, and it's probably something that is worthwhile, you know, um, having a bit more of a push about, I think, um, final sort of question with the spot. Potentially YouTube, maybe apple, um, video and audio options. Could you be watching a video version of a podcast, stick it in your pocket? And it goes to the audio. Is that going to ever happen all? Will it only play one stream? And, and then you have to start the other stream separately?
Well, if he used a YouTube music, then that already happens. So there's a little toggle switch that says video or audio, and you can listen to a song and you put your phone in your pocket and, uh, click the button that says audio and it just gets the audio, uh, feed. So it's already happening in YouTube music, which is interesting because it, it might mean that it, it could happen in a YouTube. Um, whatever they're doing in terms of podcasting, you can also do that by the way on Netflix as well.
Um, and I think you could only do that if you were using the alternate enclosure tag so that you could actually signal to the app, this is the same file, but it's available in a different format. Um, and I think that would work really well. Um, so yeah, I mean, you know, that would be the ideal rather than if you want to keep on listening to this show in audio, then you'll have to go and find it. I have different RSS feed that doesn't make an awful lot of sense.
Final question then on this, are, can you monetize these videos, James? Well, I think this is going to be a really interesting thing because I am convinced, I mean, all of the problems that Spotify has had recently with, um, moderation and making sure that podcasts contain, um, you know, that don't contain misinformation, whatever misinformation is.
I think it's going to be really interesting because yes, you can monetize videos and the people who monetize videos, mostly scantily clad, ladies who take off more of those clothes and charge men for the privilege, mostly men for the privilege of that. And I. Fascinated to learn how Spotify plans to, um, uh, you know, to make sure that essentially paid for anchor videos. Aren't essentially just used for porn in the future.
Yeah. You would kind of think that that's probably going to happen and they must have a plan. Um, I know that YouTube has, you know, obviously an incredible amount of plans there too. Um, so, uh, you know, they, they obviously understand how to, um, stop, uh, mostly how to stop the porn from appearing on YouTube. Um, so presumably Spotify have the same technology, do they? And what happens if you start charging people, would Spotify be very happy?
They're going to start charging by the way, next year, 5%, they're going to take a 5% fee. Um, will they be happy to take 5% from, you know, a young lady in Eastern Europe taking her clothes off, you know, for 20 bucks a month, James, I think for the sake of research, you should just wear a, mankini do a video and see what happens next. Nice. It might also, by the way, explain why the MP in the house of commons was watching Paul and it must've been a mistake.
He was probably trying to just watch a. Uh, I didn't think the MPS were allowed phones in, in the, in the house of commons. That's, that's the thing that I'm, I'm most confused about. It's not, it's not the fact that he was watching porn is the fact that he was playing with phones. I didn't think that they were allowed to, but anyway, he was playing with something right now. Um, any more news from the jungle drums about YouTube? It all seems to have gone quiet on that front.
It all seems to have gone very quiet. Um, uh, my contact at YouTube, um, is not responding to anything I'm sending him, um, which is interesting. He probably didn't realize page 85 gave all the details, but we have news. Um, because we will be going, we'll both be going to podcast to the podcast show 2022, which is in London, in mid may. And it turns out that YouTube is sponsoring attract their YouTube is one of the main sponsors.
Um, so I thought I would go and, uh, have a quick chat with Tom Bennington, who is the man who is organizing, uh, the podcast show, uh, 20, 22. And he's organizing all of the speakers. I thought that I would find out from him, firstly, What the show is, what it's all about, who the people behind the show are. But also, secondly, I thought I'd find out what YouTube were also doing as well. Um, so I talked to him about the podcast show, 2022, the podcast show 2022 in London.
It's a festival that is in the inaugural. Focused on what's next for the podcast and industry is coming together, the international podcasting community in London. Um, we've got a two day industry event at the business design center in his LinkedIn, uh, on the 25th and 26th of May and that's for the industry. So no matter what you do within the industry, whether you're a new creator, seasoned professional, working in advertising, Brandon, all the support teams, this is for you.
We're bringing it to the heart of London. Um, feels like there's good momentum around the show. We've got the big platforms like Spotify and YouTube and a cast, Amazon music, as well as, um, global players within the broadcasting industry, NPR, um, the BBC and global funnily enough, um, to learn more about. Yeah, podcast and do business as well. In addition, we've got a nighttime program for the funds.
So this is a week long celebration of, of live podcasts across these linter and running from the 23rd to the 29th of May as well. So you've got two days for the business and then a week long celebration for the funds. Yeah. Yeah, that's great.
So, um, some of the people doing some of those shows include a commode and Mayo doing their brand new show with, uh, Sony music, which should be really good, really good to, uh, to end up seeing them live, who else is going to be doing live live, live shows. So in the evening we've got British. Um, we've got feel better, live more with Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, happy place with phone cotton, comfort, eating with grace dent, the receipts podcast.
Red-handed Ellis James and John Robbins from, from the BBC as well. So there's a good mix, um, across the boredom and with those, um, we've taken over different venues within his Linton. So the union chapel, um, which is a beautiful 900 seater, um, our church. Yeah. And then his LinkedIn assembly hall as well. Um, and some within the business design center where the daytime programs taking place. So a mixture of venues, um, and live shows, which we're excited to be a part of the program.
And, and you say, you know, it's for anybody in the industry of podcasting, the daily events in terms of, you know, is it, is it for creators? Is it for people who are producing shows or is it more around the industry? Um, uh, who, who's the type of person that should end up going really fought for the data. And in particular, the, the three audience types that we're looking at looking at is the new, the creator. So that if you're, um, particularly on the newer end there's, um, there's area.
Outside of the program, things like the creator's corner that we've got created a on the shelf law, which will be an opportunity for people to network with the industry. So if you're, if you're just starting out and you want to get advice or mentorship, then the creators corners for you to have a network and opportunity, we also will be appealing and getting professionals down.
So there'll be networking opportunities after short drinks, a big part of what we want to do is have the opportunity to bring the industry together to network for the first time, you know, we've all been knocked down for a long time. So this feels like a moment of getting people together. Providing that platform build a new relationships. Hopefully business will be done as well.
That's a big part for the show and we in the journey that we've had developing the program brands and advertisers has been a big part of, um, an audience group that we want to bring in as well. So we've partnered with the IRB, um, to create sessions during the day, but also compare magazine are going to be sponsoring an area that we've got called Brum works. So that's um, is 70 seater theater on the shelf floor. When you walk into the business design center.
Specifically aimed at brands and those that have spent in the area or create a content and work with production houses, um, and those that are looking to get into the space as well. So that is an area that we really want to nurture. So the new creators established professionals and the brands as well, how many people are you expecting? So we've got capacity for 3000 per day at the businesses answer.
Um, and that's what we're aiming for really, it's an, it's an unknown because it's the first year that we've done it. So it's an interesting experiment to see how many people are in the podcast in industry, within the UK and internationally wanting to come over for the show. Um, but that's the end of 2000 today. And it's the first real podcast conference in the UK that there have been a few other much smaller things just for creators podcast. Day 24 was last in person a couple of years ago.
I'm looking forward to taking part in podcast day 24 here in Australia, late later on in the year. But this is the first really big event you're at podcast movement evolutions. I'm sure that you picked up a few, a few interesting tips there. What did you think of the podcast movement? Evolutions really enjoyed it. Loved it. And it was, again, you really. But my takeaway as well. Um, um, you realize how well connected the industry is on a global scale as well.
So, you know, the influx of the big players within the space, the likes of Spotify and, um, Amazon and YouTube now as well. And you see the key people, um, on the global stage and where we're hoping to bring, and we will be bringing those up. The podcast show in addition to that, which, which I thought, um, podcast movement evolutions did really well was the networking side of it as well.
And that was a big takeaway of how important that is for the community, um, to have that time to talk, to do business, to collaborate as well. I absolutely love that. I mean, we walked away with, you know, pocket falls of business cards and ideas of what we can do. Yeah. Podcast, movement, you know, really well-established brilliant event. Um, and the community that they've built around that show. Yeah. Fantastic. And we, you know, hope to replicate and that that's a big learning for us.
And so we've got, you know, after show party drinks during the day, having opportunities for people when they come together for the show for the two days, for the business of them to, to gather. To collaborate with each other. That's the big win for us, really?
You know, that if people walk away having dumped business and for me to meet for the first time, some of the, you know, the clients in the community, Potentially worked with before, or they've communicated in, you know, virtually, but not had that chance to meet. Then that's the platform we want to build. Really. And you say we, the podcast show 20, 22 in London seems to kind of have come from nowhere who's behind it. And has the, has the. Organized anything in the past.
Yeah. So it's, um, the, the two festival directors are Jason Carter and Tim at chills. Um, Jason Carter has had, um, a very established career at the BBC over 20 years at the live events, um, leading the live events department and they're across BBC radio, launching Charles like radio wants big weekend. Um, the six music festival, one extra alive, and the teen awards, many big shows. Um, and Tim at jewels has spent 30 years launching, um, business to business shows as well around the world.
So Tim's developed, um, top gear live and run that London fashion week, the BBC good food show as well. So if the, the parallels and a combination of those two in, you know, an event and a, an iMusic space with the business to business element of what Tim's bringing in as well, It feels like it's a good mix. And within the shell, you know, we think about this a lot.
There's the conference element and the business element, but creating the festival sort of feel, and the vibrancy of a music festival and bringing that into the space feels our unique play in something that we were putting a lot of effort into it as well. Um, and then my background is, is production and audio.
So I spent 13 years at the BBC working across radio, um, and running teams in specialist in daytime, uh, content, their radio on one extra and radio to, uh, amongst other places and launching podcasts and running events as well. So it feels like we've got a good core team and experience to move into the, into the space.
And it feels exciting, you know, with the growth of podcast in over of the past couple of years as well that we've seen launching this in London, um, it feels like a very timely event. Um, and we're looking forward to it, you know, bringing it around. Yeah, no, indeed. And a pond news uses a media partner and certainly all of the, um, you know, all of the chats that I've been having with the, with the team, you know, super impressive, the amount of organization which is going into this.
So massively looking forward to it. Um, two more questions, firstly, what are YouTube going to be announcing that? Yeah, well you buy a ticket. I mean, you're going to be there on the front row. I'm I'm sure. So YouTube is, it's a fantastic partnership that we've got there.
So they, um, Are, they got four content spaces and we're announcing the program, um, very soon of who will be there and what they will bring, but like the noise around, um, podcast, movement, evolutions, we will wait and see to see what they want to bring and, and see what they were announcing, what they will be talking about. I think it will be, yeah, it'll be fantastic to have them there. We're excited amongst all the other partners with, you know, that we've got on board as well.
Yeah. And I was going to ask you the other question, who are you most looking forward to? I'm sure you're looking forward to everything, but if you could, if you can, uh, stop worrying about running the entire conference and just go and see one thing, what would that be? I think there's the, it's a tough question that in there of one thing we've got over 150 panels of masterclasses during the day, I think to kick off on day one. We've got guest curators of my wrote upon our presenters.
Um, they are harnessed in a number of sessions throughout there. One the, the opening session on day one is Alice Levine and conversation with, um, Louis Theroux, um, and Emily Maitlis as well. That session title is interview the interviewer. So there's a lot to unpack in that session. Um, you know, with. Moving over from the BBC to global and launching the podcast there.
Um, Louie through him, moving into the podcasting space, um, throughout lockdown and his experience of, uh, what that means to him and what he's going to do moving forward as well. So if I was going to choose one, it would be that, but there's so much as well. That's cool. Now I'm, I'm really looking forward to it. So the podcast shows 2022 is in London on the 25th and the 26th of May.
And the podcast show live 2022, which is all of those live podcast shows that you can go and see are from the 23rd to the 29th of May. Uh, tickets are [email protected]. And if you use the promo code pod news, there may be some discount. Tickets left for you where you can save a bit of cash. And if you save a bit of cash, that means you have to buy me an ice pint of London pride, which I'm very much looking forward to having for the first time in two and a half year.
That'd be a fantastic thing, Tom, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. And I look forward to seeing you in London. Thank you, James. We can't wait to welcome you all there. It's going to be great, Tom Billington, not answering the question about what YouTube we're going to be saying. Although it didn't didn't sound as if he knew to be Frank. We are. Um, James for me once, and it's my fault for me twice. And it's your fault. Now you chew, please. Don't fool us twice.
Don't come to an event, say you're going to make some big announcements or everyone thinks you're going to make some big announcements and then need do a fluff puff piece on how great your platform is with one of your customers. Yeah. I'm not sure that they going to do that this time because I am not even sure that they're actually speaking. They are sponsoring a, uh, a particular track at the conference. And I think that makes perfect sense.
Um, in terms of, um, whether or not they'll be saying anything at the conference, um, we don't know, um, that they may be, they may not be so. Uh, it will be interesting to find out, but, uh, I hope that they've got some good announcements and I hope that the Spotify announcement this week has spurred them on to make an announcement, which is bigger and better than Spotify. That'll be a good thing. Now, one of the things you wrote about was the migration, uh, of podcasts from.
One platform to the other. And you seem to note that pod bean has seen a large number of migrations away from its service. And also a lot of them are moving to anchor. What else is going on in the world of podcast migration? Yeah, it's it's interesting. So this is a page on the pond news website, which is automatically watch. Podcasts when they change from one platform to another, uh, it runs on the sample of shows, which are in pod news.
And there have been a lot of migrations recently away from pod bean. For some reason, I don't know why a large amount of those making their way to anchor. It doesn't seem to be a large network or anything else, but, um, they appear to have, um, uh, they appear to have lost quite a few customers. And I'm not quite sure why that is. If anybody knows, uh, then please do let us know comments at Podland taught news.
Um, also spotting the AfterBuzz TV, which is a podcast network of sorts, uh, switched from anchor over to megaphone Spotify as anchor to Spotify as megaphone. Um, and, uh, I heart have been doing the, uh, not surprising at all thing of moving away from Spotify as megaphone to iHeart's Omni studio. Uh, over the last a couple of weeks as well.
Um, so yeah, there's just, there's just an awful lot of change at the moment happening, uh, in the world of, uh, podcast hosting, which is, um, yeah, just sort of a surprising amount of churn there. And I'll be interested in seeing if people move over because of anchor's video, because. Clearly that's what Spotify want people to do. And that's why they're keeping it proprietary within the Spotify wall gardens.
So, yeah, but all, but also interesting that, of course it's only anchor, it's not even Spotify is megaphone has access to the video, so I'm not quite sure what the, what the deal is there. And if I was a, you know, I don't know I was a Jordan harbinger or, uh, you know, who's producing videos as well as, uh, audio for some of my output, then, you know, I wouldn't be on anchor. I'd be on, on the megaphone platform.
So you would imagine that megaphone again, to be relatively quick in terms of the video and future. Well, maybe that'll come next. Now, uh, this week we also got to find out about Spotify as financial results. Uh, they just released them for Q1 2022. Uh, what was that long news James? Well, the headline news is more people using it. Is interesting. You remember that Netflix saw a decline in the amount of paid subscribers.
You remember also that the infinite dial reported a decline in the amount of podcast listeners, um, Spotify, um, and that everything's going great guns there. I mean, even, um, even music business weekly, which is a, normally a very critical, um, uh, website about, um, about, uh, Spotify, uh, ended up being quite, um, you know, happy with what they saw, uh, in terms of, um, podcasting directly.
They, um, are talking about the number of monthly active users going up, uh, in terms of those engaged with podcast content. Their definition of engaged is have listened to at least one millisecond of a podcast, by the way. Um, and podcast consumption rates grew in the double digits year on year. Um, does that mean it's up 10% or 80% who knows? And, um, and podcast share of overall consumption hours on our platform reached another all time high.
Uh, so everything's appears to be going very well for Spotify. I'm not necessarily sure that the stock market agrees. Um, but, um, but I think, you know, in terms of, um, in terms of their news, it all seemed to be pretty positive from my. Yeah, well, the Spotify stock, we use its lowest ever point. Um, so that's not good news. It's interesting. Like, uh, my daughter's doing her final dissertation and one of those is she's actually doing it on spot Spotify and podcasting.
Um, I wonder why she did that now. Um, who knows? Um, but what was interesting when I started to sit down with her and talk to her about actually some of the Spotify strategy does make a lot of sense. When you start to, um, strip back, you say what's their primary goal. What it's subscribers to? How are they doing that? Well, they had music. Then they add podcasts. Now they're going to add books. Then they're going to add live. Then they're going to add other things. Porn, porn.
Yes. You heard it here. Um, but it's all going towards one thing, which is to get more monthly active users and subscribers and the proprietary nature of it doesn't really worry them. And if I was them, it wouldn't worry me either, because fundamentally I don't really care about the industry. I care about one single metric that is number of subscribers to platform and the amount of time they stay on that platform.
And if it means that video is only available inside my platform, that's exactly what I would do. I wouldn't make it an open standard and I wouldn't, uh, support other platforms. Yeah, no, it's, it's very much, um, a, you know, a very proprietary move and you know, and that's absolutely right for the investors. It's not so good for the industry that it's absolutely right for, for their investors. So yeah, I think it makes a bunch of sense.
It is interesting though, seeing, you know, they're, they are driving down. Proprietary lane on the highway. Um, but they've also launched a fund in a blaze of press release. Oh, who've launched another fund. This one is going to support open source software. Apparently I'm looking forward to them supporting our friends at the podcast index, um, which I'm sure they're going to do. Um, uh, and, and also frankly, I'm looking forward to them actually paying something out of this fund.
The last fund that was launched, they didn't pay anything out of, at all made for a lovely press release. But that was about as far as we got. So I will be monitoring this one, like a Hawk to find out exactly whether they do end up spending some money on open source software and what open-source software are they going to be spending some money on? Who knows watch this space. He will be watching now. Um, Now, uh, moving on sub stack, we talked about last week was getting into podcasts.
And when it seems as more detailed about what they're doing, they've improved their podcast player. It's an iOS app, um, have updated. It has full-screen podcast players, speed controls, accessibility, playback options, and a customizable play next queue. Uh, all sounds very exciting. Will you be using the sub stack podcasts? James. Uh, I won't partially because I've got no idea what podcasts will be on there. They're just podcasts that are hosted on sub stack.
And I must say, by the way, if you are a company like sub stack and you are announcing accessible playback options as being a feature, then you should hang your head in shame. That should be a very basic to make sure that everybody could actually use your product BU sub stack. But anyway, there we are. Yes. iOS app, which now looks quite smart. An Android app is coming soon as all of the worst companies always end up saying, yeah, it's it's, it's what it says.
Keep betting one of these things it says on the, uh, on the thing it says, it says Android coming soon. They've actually announced that Android is coming soon. Whereas apple of course. Ha ha anything like that yet? Um, but yeah, so that's interesting. And you spotted a, uh, quite a smart thing about, uh, sub stack that they announced earlier on in the year, didn't you?
Yeah, it was just sort of reading the forums about, you know, what they're doing with sub stack and lo and behold, one of their project managers said, ah, yeah, video is in beta for sub stack and you can learn more about it at well, we'll put it in the show notes. It's on sub stack.com for slash P four slash one video on sub stack. So, and it's imminently due as well. So what are they going to do with video as well? It seems everyone's got video porn. That's what they're going to do.
Obviously I can see a title for this podcast forming don't do that. Don't do that. Nobody will ever be able to download the thing. Um, but yeah, I mean, yes, I mean, You know, paid for video, uh, you know, uh, paid for video that is, um, uh, user generated. It's going to be interesting, but, you know, sub stack, um, you know, appears to be doing pretty well in terms of paid for writing in terms of paid for audio, um, and, uh, potentially adding video as well has got, gotta be interesting.
Um, uh, you know, you own your own email lists, which is something that apple don't let you do. Um, I've forgotten quite what the percentage of, um, uh, what the percentage that subsect charge is. Um, but, um, you know, there may well be a, um, a sensible amount of, uh, of, uh, charge there. Apple of course, charge 30%, including the payment fee. Um, Spotify is going to charge 5% from next year. Plus the payment fees. That's about 10% overall, um, YouTube, by the way, turning on tipping.
Um, All eligible creators in 68 countries around the world, we'll be able to do tipping on that platform. Uh, YouTube will take a 30%. So that's nice. Um, so yeah, so I think there's, there's a lot of video, a lot of monetization going on and, um, yeah, it's going to be, it's going to be interesting. I think, yeah, a couple of the other things in sub stacks, FAQ that I noticed there is no way to edit your audio. Uh, they don't offer that service, um, and they don't believe in advertising.
Uh, so, uh, we believe writers should be rewarded directly by readers for the value of the writing they produce. We feel podcasts should be rewarded by listeners in their direct relationship via subscription with no intermediaries, advertising or algorithms. There you go. Fancy. Yeah. Interesting to watch what happens with a sub stack and indeed, you know, a medium is planning, which is very similar as planning, um, uh, audio in there as well and various other things.
So, um, yeah, I think it's an interesting time for creators who up until now, really the only option that they've had is to have, um, you know, ugly advertising on their pages and that does change the type of content that you end up writing. And I think it's really interesting now seeing a bunch of these tools, enabling you to avoid advertising and to focus on a different method of earning, earning money from your creativity. And I think that's a good thing.
Now, moving on apple collections, uh, apple is launched three new apple podcasts collections for listeners to discover new and popular podcasts covering true crime, which they've called dark side culture. To be TBH what's to stop me to be honest, grandad. Okay. LOLs for the people who are over 55. At entertainment, which they've called popped clearly. Uh, I'm not with it. Kids. The collections will be updated weekly and are available for listeners only in the U S and Canada.
Uh, and you can browse and search for them in the app. James, why are they doing this? Uh, F firstly, I can update you on only in the U S and Canada. I asked apple, why have you blocked these lists from other countries? Um, and quietly apple has unblocked them. Cause there's, cause there's no reason to want. How are you? I did a thing. Um, yeah. So you'll be able to follow those links now from anywhere in the world.
They'll obviously only promote them in the U S and Canada, because that's what they're for. Um, but if you find the link from, you know, pod news or from your favorite tech news website, uh, which covers everything that apple does with excitement, uh, then at least that link will now work for you, which is a good thing. Um, but, uh, yeah, it's, it's just a new method of discovery and helping people find new shows.
I think it's very canny clever of them to have put together, you know, his, um, lots of great, true crime podcasts. He has lots of great culture, podcasts and so on and so forth. So I think. Bright, uh, move. Um, and, uh, it's, uh, the latest in a list of things that, um, apple have done in terms of helping people find new shows. Well, they've also apple podcast has launched a new listening report for paid subscriptions. It's one of your criticisms James from the pod news report card.
Tell me more, uh, it's not necessarily one of my criticisms, but it's one of the criticisms that some people had, uh, which was that, um, they weren't getting enough. They weren't getting enough reports, um, from the paid subscription side of apple podcasts. And so, um, apple have added those, which is nice. Um, I mean, perhaps that's something else that we fixed. Uh, I don't know, but anyway, um, so, uh, yeah, so you can download all kinds of reports.
Now I've had a look at a few of them and they are, um, and they're quite nice and detailed, uh, which is nice. Um, and also, um, if you are selling your podcasts using paid subscriptions, coming up in a new version of iOS a little bit later on in the year, um, your subscribers will be able to buy a year's subscription upfront if you want to. And if you are a creator that is monetizing through apple podcasts, they're basically saying, go and add your annual plan now, because then it'll be over.
When the new version of iOS drops a little bit later on in the year. Um, so I'm going to add an annual plan now, and annual plans are great because it means you get the money up front. So you can actually do a little bit more with that cash. Um, so, um, you know, worthwhile turning that on. If you're earning money out of this stuff with your wielding power at apple, could you ask them to do one more thing for me please, James, which is an Android app?
Well, I don't think even you can make that happen, but other than that, When you have an apple channel with 25 podcasts or more in it, can they subscribe to the channel please rather than having to individually subscribe to the podcasts? That might be nice. Oh, I, I will, uh, I will pass that on to the eager young man or did, you can give them that, you know, the same, uh, and, uh, yes. And see what, see what happens then.
And now, uh, I, I didn't want to make it the big story of the week, but, but it seems to be the big story everywhere else for the week have been, obviously it's, uh, Twitter's acquisition by Elan, um, which he's tried to screw up, uh, with his tweets, but it's, I assume we'll go through, so, uh, yeah, he's bought it for $44 billion. That number keeps changing on different pages, but let's say $44 billion. Bizarre. I mean, he is the world's richest man.
He owns, I went to look him up on Wikipedia. I was surprised at how much he owns. He owns an addict, an electric car company, a space exploration and communications corporation, a tunnel construction company and artificial intelligence research laboratory, and a company making Silicon chips that can be implanted in your brain. But inexplicably, he doesn't appear in a list on Wikipedia of James Bond. Villains. I'm really surprised by that because frankly auntie's called Elan Musk for heaven sake.
It's ever been called that. But anyway, um, it's interesting. Uh, lots of people who are. Sticking with Twitter, lots of people who are saying that they might end up leaving. Yeah, let's be honest. They're not going to leave, but mark Asquith did a poll on Twitter and 95% are not leaving because of Ilan, but there are a one or two. Um, Tom Webster said, I hate that I have to give up Twitter, but I have to give up Twitter. Ilan is a blight on humanity.
Stick on that fence, Tom, don't say what you mean. He's let Ilan when that's what he's let so boom, um, uh, Butan Webster, you should still be on Twitter. It's an important thing. Um, but yeah, you know, loads of trenches, Dave Weiner, the co-inventor of podcasting says I'm addicted to Twitter. I could live without it. If I had something better and.
I've heard a bunch of people, um, moving to Mastodon, uh, which is a kind of federated, Twitter, um, equivalent, um, you know, there are, uh, people, people moving to LinkedIn. Can you just imagine, um, uh, so, you know, there's a, there's a lot of this stuff you love LinkedIn to, you know, I'm, I'm kind of reluctantly, uh, there occasionally I think love is a very strong word that is shamed. I'm reluctantly using it on the slate that Facebook's dead.
Instagram's awful because it's just a bolt-on of Snapchat. And really, I don't think tick-tock has the clientele that we're looking for. Yeah. Yes. Now it's not, uh, yeah, it's, it's, uh, it's, it's just a fascinating thing. Uh, where would you go? Uh, if you had to give up, uh, Twitter, um, I'm personally. Going to stay there until, you know, if it turns mad, uh, if one of the things that Ilan is talking about is both getting rid of all of the bots on Twitter.
Um, allowing, allowing everybody to see the algorithm and understand how that works and also getting rid of all moderation. You just end up, it's just going to be a free for all, it's going to be a dreadful place. Um, but in which case people will just leave. So, you know, what do you do? Yeah. I have this conversation with my wife. I was like, look, Elan clearly, isn't stupid. He's made all this money. So he knows what he's doing.
Um, he may well bring back, uh, Trump, you know, that's going to be the make or break decision, I suppose. Um, but the far right, uh, You know, in America are piling on, I mean, Marjorie Taylor green, the absolute Nutter that she is gained 90,000 followers. Um, that's just mad. Um, I just think, you know, we've gotta be careful what we wish for, but Elan has got the money to go and do what he wants and he's gone to buy a new toy and he's gonna play with it.
He, but he won't, I don't believe he won't destroy $44 billion of value. That would be crazy. I mean, that's the thing I, I hold on. It would be, but, you know, you can't be a free speech absolutist and also, um, uh, retain the value of, of Twitter. That those two are incompatible side that I don't understand what he's going to do, to be honest. Um, you know, and, uh, and of course, you know, uh, many Twitter staff will just get the hell out. Um, cause they don't want that.
They've had, they've had a bad enough, 10 years with some pretty dreadful management and it's just going to get worse. Uh, so, um, many Twitter employees, we'll just, we'll just leave. Um, so, uh, yeah, it's, it's gotta be fascinating to watch. Uh, I think of course, if you were Todd Cochran, you would be saying, go and build your castle on rented land. Get your own.com take control.
It's lucky was in the room and tell it would be absolutely true, you know, absolutely build your own brand on your own.com, but don't forget that. Um, you still need people to find that.com, uh, and that's where things like Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook, um, come into it because otherwise you're not meeting new people. You're only preaching to your converted choir already.
Um, but you know, Todd has also been saying on Facebook that a. You know, nobody cares too much when Jeff bees off sports, the Washington post and isn't this the same. I'm not sure it is the same, but I think, uh, you know, there is a, there is a point there, um, that, uh, perhaps this is a bit more of a political thing, um, than what we actually see, but, uh, yeah, who knows? So they did do an all hands at Twitter with the staff and of course, all of that has been leaked out.
So CAO Pirog Agra while, um, he said he tells staff that their jobs were safe for the moment. Uh, in saying there would be no layoffs until Musk took over great in six months, uh, and reassuring them their stock options and better. But when he was asked about Donald Trump coming back on the platform, he dodged it like a Gooden. Cause he said that that's a decision for Elon Musk. So yeah. Well done the CEO, not going to answer that one with my new boss over my shoulder.
Um, he's not going to be there for long as he no, no, no, no. He's cashing out. Um, he's going to, he's going to be out the door. Um, but the other one that I thought, um, you know, you talked about Ilan saying he wants to get rid of the boss. No. Okay. I get that. And part of the free speech stuff is like his view is that Russia, China, Saudi are putting bots up, so let's get rid of them.
And I, on that point I agree, but the one that I disagree with him on and he wants to authenticate all humans. And of course, things like the. Uh, Arab spring or the Egypt spring, um, and other countries where Twitter allows somebody to remain anonymous, but a post, uh, an alternative opinion to the government. Uh, while if you have to authenticate everybody, then those people will be identifiable and they won't be on Twitter as well.
Yes. And I wonder whether or not he's talking about, um, you know, people that want the blue tick can all get the blue tick if they've been authenticated, but they may well be people who don't want the blue tick, but, you know, I mean, at the end of the day, you know, who, what on earth is going to happen? Probably good news for crypto though. Um, particularly, um, uh, doge coin, um, which I'm sure will do very well. Uh, Elon Musk likes that he likes a Bitcoin. He like, he likes other stuff.
So, um, perhaps that'll be interesting. Yeah. One, one note of caution. I did speak to a friend as well about it, and she said the only thing that is slightly questionable is that Ilan must try to pay off a 19 year old boy in February, 2022, who was tracking and publicly posting his flights on Twitter. Uh, I absolutely appreciate Elan's need for privacy. Eh, maybe that was too intrusive, but having the power to pay, to delete and control who or what is shown on Twitter is a concern.
Um, you know, again, this is a case of a rich person being able to control anything that opposes him. Uh, maybe that's why he's doing it for absolutely. And of course, free speech as well. You know, you can't have free speech and then all of a sudden say, oh yeah, no. Apart from that, apart from the freely available information about my, um, my airplane.
Yes. Um, you know, I mean, you know, similarly in the news today, ESPN anchor Sage Steele has sued ESPN and Walt Disney after the company suspended her for questioning ESPN COVID 19 vaccination mandate on a podcast, uh, she's claiming a violation of freedom of speech. Um, I'm claiming that, um, it was probably a silly thing to criticize your employer on a podcast.
Um, but nevertheless, you know, she's, she's now suing ESPN, so that'll go well, but it's, it's all of these kinds of, you know, freedom of speech people. Don't, you know, people with their different views of what freedom of speech really is. Uh, so it'll be interesting to end up seeing how that works. No, it's going to say one person who's very happy is Jack Dorsey. Of course. Cause he still owns a 2% stake in a Twitter. Yes. So yes, he's, he's going to make a little penny.
Uh, just before we get onto the next story, James, the one thing I did know there was a, a tweet, um, series of tweets that came out from blue sky, which used to be Twitter blue. And I hadn't realized, but they've now formed a separate company, so it's no longer part of Twitter. Um, and Jack's put 13 million into that company to create a new fundamentally decentralized protocol. Twitter application.
Um, and maybe that's where we're all gonna end up on a new Twitter platform, um, that Jack's funding having left Twitter. Well, maybe. Yeah. Uh, or maybe we'll just still all be on, on Twitter. I mean, Twitter in 2016, it was a pretty unpleasant place. Twitter in 2022 is significantly better for a lot of people. They put a lot of controls in there, a lot of, um, blocking capabilities for you to control what you see.
And, uh, hopefully we'll continue to see that as we move forward right now, moving on. Triton. Digital's been, uh, putting out some reports. It's released its inaugural Canada podcast report and it also released the us podcast report. James what's been going on with Triton. Yeah. So in Canada, uh, the first, uh, Canadian podcast report ever, uh, which is exciting, it's measuring 13, participating publishers.
They're not measuring, uh, everybody, um, at all, but nevertheless, um, really interesting seeing the number one show is Dateline NBC. So it's not even a show from Canada, but the number one Canadian podcast in English is the current from CBC radio, CBC run 28 of the top 30 Canadian.
Podcasts in English. So CBC are doing some really good work there, radio Canada, which is the other half of the CBC, but for the French speakers, um, they're only running 14 at the top 30, but still that's still 50% or near enough. And they have , which is the number one. Um, they're so great to see that, um, detail coming out. Similarly. Um, the U S podcast report for March from Triton digital, um, is also out S XM media, which is a Sirius XM remaining.
Number one for podcasts ahead of MPR who move up to number two in there. I find it interesting that the ranker measures participating publishers only and iHeart media owned Triton digital doesn't measure iHeart media, which I always liked mentioning because it kind of does lead you to question whether or not if they were to measure iHeart media, would I heart media be number one or number two? And I have a suspicion. It would be number two. Cause that's what Edison research says to.
Okay. Now, uh, at the end of last week's show, we touched on it briefly, but of course it all came out of calm here in the UK, who is the regulator for media. It has published the results of its UK podcast survey. Um, Um, one of the highlights was 25% of Brits listened to podcasts each week, which is the same figure as reported in the Edison research, infinite dial UK report. So that seems a pretty even Steven.
Um, one of the other things that came out of it was the most popular reason to stop listening to a podcast is I can't find any thing that interests me with, I don't have enough time being close. Second. It seems odd when you've got 4.3 million podcasts that you can't find anything that interests you. Yeah. I th I think that's interesting. I also think that the, I don't have enough time is an issue of the fact that quite a lot of podcasts are too long. Stop now. Stop. That's it.
See you next week. I think in the fullness of time in over the next couple of years, I think unless podcasting is quite careful about this, um, then I think podcasting will get a bad rap for just being a bit too long and a bit too flabby. And I think if there's one thing that radio has understood is getting rid of the chaff and really focusing on the, uh, on the. Uh, really focusing on the important things.
Um, the other, uh, bits of information, uh, out of that was that Spotify is the clear leader in the UK for apps and websites used to listen to podcasts. 41% of people use it. BBC sounds and YouTube are number two. And number three, apple podcast. Number four with 23% of people using that, which is interesting too, as an alternative, uh, last week sounds profitable, wrote a really interesting report by kind of them on why do people listen to podcasts?
I have to say it was a really good in-depth report. Um, and clearly it highlighted a number of reasons why we all do listen. So. Do you have a read of that? I'll put it in the show notes indeed. And you should be subscribing. It sounds profitable.com uh, lots of, um, uh, winners of awards going on. The New York festivals were announced, uh, the New York festival radio awards. I should give them their proper name, which also contains recognition for podcasts. They announced their winners.
This week. Good news. Sam more awards were won by UK companies than those in the us, which possibly says a lot about us radio, but still there we go. Uh, the winners of the Webby awards were also announced 83 winners in the podcast category. WowWee, uh, song Exploder got lots of awards, well done, song Exploder.
Uh, the corporate content awards, um, gave a podcast award to business unusual, which is a branded podcast produced for Vodafone business buy, listen, um, and, uh, you know, a ton of other big numbers coming as well. Yeah. Now in other news, pod chaser, uh, has now 60 million credits in their database. Is I, I don't use pod chasers. So what is a credit in the term of a pod chaser? Janie?
So you are listed on the pod tracer page four pod land as the host of this show as am I. And, uh, ignite, jingles get, uh, mentioned, uh, uh, in terms of music or other Chris Stevens, the composer. Um, and so it's all of those. So essentially poncho is the am of podcasting, except it's not owned by Amazon. Um, and, um, and that's basically where the, yeah, indeed yet you can probably see where that's going. Um, but, uh, yeah, it's a great. Uh, tool.
It's not perfect, but it's certainly got an awful lot of useful things in there. One of the other things that they have been very much behind is the podcast taxonomy, which is a list of basically, you know, what does a producer do? What does an executive producer do? What's the difference? Um, and working on harmonizing those roles and credits version 1.1 of the podcast, taxonomy is now out and pod jobs.
We'll use those new categories as soon as we've, um, as soon as the boring Jason file that we use has been updated. Um, so that's all pretty good. So, um, yeah, so that's a good piece of work that pod chaser and a bunch of other people have been working on. Now, a couple of other quick ones, advertisers are flocking to influence a lead podcast, says the morning brew. So. Agencies waking up to the value of podcasts. Is that what they're saying?
Yes. I think I'm a particularly waking up to the value of podcasts, which are being hosted by, um, big influencers rather than Hollywood stars or TV stars. Um, they're being hosted by, you know, YouTube influencers and that sort of thing. Um, so they've done a good, um, uh, so, you know, advertisers beginning to really understand this world, uh, which is nice.
Great, um, in-depth thing from morning brew, morning bird knocking it out of the park in terms of the coverage that they're giving podcasting at the moment, which is really good, particularly good since quite a lot of Bloomberg's coverage is quite difficult to read because it's normally hidden behind a very fierce paywall, which makes it quite hard to end up seeing. So. Good to see morning brew, um, doing some good work there. Um, and what else is there in terms of the little bits of news hemp?
The other one was a Rhodes new headphones, which I bought a couple of weeks back. Well, it seems that stuff, which is a, a tech magazine here in the UK, uh, is basically said that perfect. Knocked it out. Excellent building quality. Um, by the way, I have to say, I agree. So let's move on to tech corner. Um, a number of different things going on in terms of tech, the most important one is fountain. Um, our favorite new podcast app, which is giving away free money.
So if you've wanted to play around with his SATs thing and you haven't got any stats and you're not quite sure how to get them or anything else, just go and download fountain. It's a smart little podcast app. You'll find [email protected]. And they will give you 1000 sets, which is about 20 cents, but it's still 1000 sets, which you could. Get, and then press the boost button and give to us. That will be nice.
Um, but, um, but it's a really good on-ramp into understanding how SATs work and understanding how value for value works. So, uh, good on a Oscar Mary friend of the show, uh, for ending up, uh, doing that, which is cool. Uh, other news is that cast upon eSports Spanish, which is nice and pod in, uh, is an AI power transcription service. Yes, it's another one of those, but actually this one's pretty good.
It's just added an import function directly from your RSS feed and, um, seems to do, uh, well in terms of, um, you know, all kinds of accents and everything else. So worth a peak at a pod in a, if you're looking for transport well to hear of AI power transcription services and. Putting things out.
We also caught up with Neil Modi this week, uh, to talk about headliner, uh, talk about his YouTube integration and also talk about his new transcription service headliners, basically the best way to promote your podcast across the internet. At this point, we like to say our goal is spreading the magic, the spoken word, audio out into the world. And so we build tools that try to make that happen.
As I often say, in order to be heard, you have to be seen first on the internet, internet is super visual and in, or bring people into your audio. You need to be seen first. And so we focus in on trying to make sure we help people get to the amazing audio that, uh, audio creators are making. Yeah. I came across headliner about three, four years ago and I saw a friend of mine using it and she. Yeah, up until then, people were trying to upload MP3 files to social media.
And of course all the social media platforms don't allow MP3 files for some reason. So I was like, how are you doing this Tara? This is Tara hunt over in Canada. And I said, I told him how you doing this? She said, oh, I'm using this great product called headliner. And it gives you the capability to not only put your graphic up of your podcast, cover art, but also to create this way for, and color-code it to your brand. I thought, wow, I've got to try this.
So I went in and it was super simple and I created my first few and now everything we do for pod land and everything I did for Sam Talks, Technology uses. And, and you'll see that across LinkedIn and Twitter, but it's evolved quite a lot since then. You've got full episodes that you do as well as audio grams. But what is the goal? Where are you taking headliner was the evolution. Yeah, no great question. And thanks for being a loyal user for so long, a hundred percent, right.
We try to help people just get their audio out as easy as possible. And so one of the big evolutionary steps was automation in the past year, and we just augment that by, uh, connecting with you. So as you YouTube, actively getting into podcasting and a lot of podcasters have had tremendous success getting their podcast out onto YouTube, just because of the vast audience there and just use the algorithms to their advantage.
So we've been really focused in on this problem of once you create audio, how do you get it out? Right back to what I was saying before around, how do you spread this amazing content out to the internet and social media and YouTube are some of the biggest platforms across the internet, right? I like to say usually that the, this is how I tell people. So the Internet's approaching 5 billion users and podcasting still only about 10%.
And so if you think about that, how do you get to this other 90%? How do you get to the four and a half billion other things. And we believe the answer to that is getting to those users where they are, which is platforms like YouTube, social media, et cetera, as a starting point for awareness. And so headliners evolved over time to focus in on automation to make that easier and publishing to other platforms.
And now we're just releasing some other products and a product called disco, which is focusing in on yet. Another place people really are, which is on publisher kind of pages. So think of it as you're reading an article, we recommend the best podcasts episode to consume there. Again, trying to just hit those four and a half billion people that still aren't listening to podcasting and meeting them where they are, wherever it might be. Yeah. I like disco I've I've played with that a little bit.
And again, it's a great form of discovery. We've seen it on other sites where you've gone on to that website and they've recommended other blog posts. This is other podcasts, right? That's a really good product. Now where in the cyclists, I knew it was in beaters is out of beta now. Yeah, I guess we're not good at naming and graduating out, but I guess it is actually because it's getting used by some really big name publishers.
I don't know if I'm allowed to say their names yet, but, but I'll do the CEO. No, not on my side, on their side agreements, but uh, but look, it's live on the internet on several sites. I'll send you some links, which I'm allowed to do for sure. But you'll find recommended podcasts across articles, you're reading. And we think a evolutionary step beyond the manual embeds that you've had before. Mostly because these images.
I go back to what I was trying to say before is in order to be heard, you must be seen. So we've got this technology that you commented on around bringing in imagery, wave form, et cetera. So we're using all that kind of knowledge and technology to really package up the podcast into a soundbite that hopefully draws, um, the reader into a listener longterm, right?
And all of a sudden you're getting access to billions more users because some of these mega sites, publisher sites on the internet are doing billions of readers a month and all showcasing your podcasts in a, in a very easy, good way for them is what we think the industry needs. And so far the data is looking really good. Now, how would I get hold of disco? Where do I go? Well, right now we're really focused in, on a kind of larger.
Publishers like all the big media companies, but just go to headliner.app/disco. It's actually on our main website, you can just click through to that and there should be a form there, but yeah, you can find it and you can email me as well. Anytime Neil had headliner dot out. Brilliant. Now you've also got another product in the stable called Eddy what's that we've been looking at this space a lot.
So in order, so as you headliner focuses in on trying to get a short clips out to social media, And automation, which I touched on before tries to figure out the best parts of a podcast to promote. And it does that by getting transcripts. So this is kind of a long, long answer to your question, but we've been looking at transcripts for a long time and using them to drive automation and also just make them available to our users.
And so now a lot of our users were asking for, Hey, can I get these downloaded? Can I get them edited, et cetera. So edit Eddie really wants to be that place. You can do a lightweight, quick edit of your audio via transcript, download the transcript as well and fix it. And we think it has a place in the ecosystem for really, I think what the average to novice podcaster might want to use to get out there.
I think there's a bunch of really pro high-end expensive tools for this purpose, but the novice to medium podcasts there is under serviced in this capacity. I be able to take Eddie and use some of that to convert into captions and out them to headliners audio grounds. Yes. So there's already an integration from edited at. To headliner. So you can take a piece of audio, get the transcript, clean it up.
If you'd like, you don't have to, you can highlight from there and go straight over to headliner through the APIs we have right now. And so we see it as a evolutionary step in workflow about helping people quickly create these. We're trying to figure out how much it fits within headliner over time, or whether it sits as a separate standalone product. So that's to be determined. So our thinking is as a company, But we really want to help you get audio out there on the world.
And what we heard is two big hangups for that, right? One is it's really hard to promote out there. Again, the internet is very visual. Audio is not, we're probably the leading company of that. At this point in the ecosystem, our estimates have a said over a hundred million users see headliner content. And the second biggest place where people are frustrated as audio creators is in the editing and getting a episode ready for publishing.
And we think some of our knowledge and expertise around transcripts and finding the best parts of podcasts episodes by analyzing the audio and looking at the texts can be useful via edit Eddie. So we think the hardest problems with audio. Yeah. One of the things I quite like about using headline or the other part is the project's part, which allows me to put in my RSS feed in automatically, and then get a notification by email of the AI driven audio gram that you've created for me.
Now, your background, you're a serial entrepreneur, having sold a company successfully that was out of automation. So automation is in your DNA. You may have seen Riverside did an integration recently, relying current anchor of course have added video. To Spotify. And of course we talked about YouTube having video.
So video looks like even if people don't want it AC coming on to the podcasting platform, whether that makes it good or just bad podcasting, where you have two heads like us now talking, nobody really needs to see my client wants to see me, not even my wife and kids. So yeah, yeah. Face for radio. But the point about it, it is coming and there are good versions of podcasts that are video casts or whatnot, whatever horrible term we are going to come up with.
So now that you're doing audio to YouTube, are you going to start to look at doing audio? Into other integrations. That's my first question, like Spotify and an anchor. And are you going to start to do video automation? So are you going to take video? You say audio is not very visual, but clearly video is very visual. Do you have any plans to move into video grams with headliner and video automation? Yes. Hotly debated internally, right? For sure. But the short answer is yes.
You'll probably be seeing us do more with video. He's smiling a lot less than that. I think it looks like you, uh, noted this kind of divide between audio and video is no longer there and it's blurring and we're looking at each other, even while we're recording this audio and the platform or doing this on Ken publish this straight video, like you were saying, our goal is. Try to figure out the best way to get audio out there in the world.
And sometimes that is video and the headliner is a quintessential example of that, right? So the best way to get audio on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and anywhere else has been video via headliner. And so now if you're capturing video is the best way to get out there. Some other tool, from what we've heard in the industry, it's really a patchwork of different tools.
Some of these creative platforms are starting to build their thing, but we think we have some amazing advantages there, both between analysis that we're doing via automation and then just the platform of users. So we probably have over a hundred thousand active podcasters on her platform on a monthly basis, probably the largest kind of independent company servicing podcasters on a monthly basis. And we make 10 to 20,000 videos a day. So all that data is hopefully funneling into.
Something for video. Interesting. But I would like to say that just adding on video, isn't as straightforward as it sounds, a video is a different media. We know that because we generate tons of it every day and it's a beast of just file sizes. We're all familiar with, but just rendering and what you can pick up from. From video and using those signals are important to our automation.
And so we're trying to be smart about what we do with video and not just try to throw some small offering out there, but I think you'll see it this year.
Cool. There are a couple of interest in companies doing, obviously your integration with YouTube certainly gets a lot of attention, but at Dory labs here at podcast movement are demoing quite often, how they're adding AI capability to audio, to create video slideshows, fundamentally clever FM, another company that I think have done a good job, but they take the audio and they use AI in the background to go and find the links to the transcripts.
So someone was talking about, I don't know, a particular product and they'll put a smart card related to that product that you can link through. And you talked about Eddie and the transcript. I think there's a great opportunity to them also within the transcript and make the transcript more than just a plain text file, but it's making it a hypertext.
Maybe use HTML in you as a hyperlink within the transcript suddenly because the AI is intelligent enough to work out that the transcript, the reference that you've just made is actually to a external link. Those are the sorts of things you can do. I think, to enhance where transcript value is just not the hard of hearing people can read the transcript.
So I think we're going to see quite an evolution in the way that I think transcripts use, but also the way that AI is used to use that, to make it much more intelligent. Yeah, I think you're right. We're at the early kind of innings of this stuff, right? Because transcript quality has really improved over the last few years. So when we looked at this stuff in 2019, I think headliner V1 came out in early 2018.
So when we were looking at transcripts back then there was a lot of open questions around, is this good enough to even put in front of people because you knew the error rate. We're up in the 20, 30%. So you get about 70% quality, but we've seen that move into the eighties. And with good audio, you can get low nineties at this point. So you're getting very good transcription. And now the question is, okay, so if you take out, if you have that building block, what more do you build off of it?
And to your point, that's why we started experimenting in and via edit Eddie as well. This post-production process with audio everyone's complained about, I think that's why you get a lot of people who prod fade as they say, right? Like the work to produce a, an episode is actually more than recording the episode. It's a, post-production that's painful. So I would say it's three X, three X, the time you record. And so how, what are the tools that will speed that up?
And like you're saying augmented to be more value down to. And then the big risks there and why I think Spotify is probably experimenting also with video is you can't just be beholden to the biggest one and only kind of video platform of YouTube, right? Because at some point they're only going to accept an MP4 file or something, or you'll have to build into YouTube set of consumption possibilities and where all this will flow from creation.
To editing to augmentation, to consumption, I think, in the next decade or so, hopefully not that long five years or so could shift dramatically. And it comes down to which companies are going to lead that and which companies are going to make the tools to make that possible. We hope to be a big player in that whole spectrum with the stuff we're building. Neil, thank you so much quickly remind everyone where they can go to get headliner and where they can go to find. Sure, sure. Thank you.
Thanks for the time a headliner is actually headliner.app. You can go to our website there and follow to use traditional headlines. Probably the best tool on the internet for promoting your podcast, make videos to get out to everywhere else. And then for disco recommending podcasts for bigger media companies, there's a link right there on our site and then edit Eddie. Actually, it's just gone into MVP. So we actually don't have a link on our website, but it's E D I T E D y.com.
So edit Eddie, uh, EDD y.com, but we'll get a link up on our site. And then for me, yeah, it's just Neil, any [email protected]. Brilliant. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks for the time. Neil Modi from headliner. Uh, really good to hear here, man. Now it's time for boost to Graham corner. Go podcast. Yeah, I suppose to Graham corner. Um, and, uh, let me read the first one. It's from Dave Jones. Who's given us a big rush boost of 21, 1 1 2 cents.
And he says, I never heard the term watch before watch, but I like it. I can hear David Attenborough describing a wodge of emperor penguins, huddled and crunching their eggs in the naked and howling Arctic landscape. Can you Dave? That's that's good. I happened on a very funny video, uh, where somebody has managed to get a voice print of David Attenborough and ends up making him say ridiculous things, uh, which is good. Um, we should, uh, you should take a, um, a look for that in a YouTube.
Here's a little clip of it. An hour can turn its head more than 360 degree. But then it falls off this accounts for 64% of our deaths. It's very good and very funny. So anyway, Dave, thank you so much for that. Uh, much appreciated. And before we move on James, just equivalent day. Hope your son's okay. Oh yes. Uh, and that he's getting. Yeah. Or our thoughts from both James and I indeed. Now someone's thankfully sent me a Sam boost a 726 PSATs.
Thank you so much for interviewing the team at headliner, hoping they add functionality to automatically add a video to a specific playlist on YouTube so that you don't have to go back in and edit it every day. Overall, I'm appreciating their product. Justin, thank you so much from the optimal living daily podcast network. While Justin, if you listened to the interview this week, you'll probably find a few other things that they're doing as well with headline. Yeah. Which is really good.
And this time, last week we were talking about, uh, bus sprouts, uh, job running their YouTube channel, and we were laughing. Laughing at the incredibly generous 15 days of, of holiday. And this is clearly, this is clearly got both Alvin and Kevin A. Little bit, worked up a thousand sets from Alvin. Thank you. Thank you for talking about our YouTube job. I was cracking up listening to you, roasting us labor policies and practices. Yes, absolutely. That's exactly what we were doing.
Kevin says 15 days of personal time off, plus 10 holidays. Americans get into trouble. If we take more than that. Thanks for the shout-out. Well, what we get in Europe, let me tell you Kevin, 25 days plus eight public holidays. So more than you guys. And in fact, here in Queensland in Australia, we get nine public holidays a year. No James correction, we get nine.
Now the, the Queens S platinum Jubilee looks like they're going to add another bank holiday and that's going to be permanently on the record permanently on the record. Wow. Boris Johnson, best, best prime minister. So what's happening for you this week in Portland? Uh, very quickly, James strangely. I've got my hands on a red double Decker, open top bus for all my festival season. So river radio has now a red double Decker bus downstairs will be a mobile studio and upstairs is a drinking bar.
Excellent use of the double-decker bus, I think. Oh, I love that. It's just like, so you've now got a bus. You've got a barge. Your beer barge, the crafty tug. Yes. Yes. You, you, it's just, it's just nonstop, nonstop acquisitions for the same Sepi. Yeah, it's incredible tax. Write-offs. Wow. We are you meeting, meeting up with anybody exciting? Well, only for people of our age who might know everyone else is going to be going, who?
But our meeting, Bruno Brooks for breakfast this morning, straight after this podcast. Ready? One's stereo, top 40. You got the look gets the highest climber at 19. Here's a new entry for five-star number 18. Um, and last night I was kindly invited on to Harry Durand's podcasts as well. So that will be coming out shortly as well. Excellent. Well, I'm looking forward to Harry gerans podcast and also Bruno Brooks to pass on my regards.
He's a top man as a new entry, the high-tech free featuring Yankee K spin that wheel. Go straight to that. I have been learning what I'm doing at the podcast show 2022 in London, which is good. And, uh, previous to that, I will be in Sweden, in Sweden and Denmark, not Sweden in Denmark. They're two separate countries, James, um, for radio days, Europe looking forward to that as well.
And I've been busy trying to work out whether or not I need any COVID tests or anything before I fly in the answer seems to be no. So that's good. Um, one word that you need to learn, James, if you're going to Denmark is early attack. Oh, what's that beer please? Oh, beer. Ooh. Yes, of course. Yes. Excellent. That's all you need to know is a relevant and also I've been promised.
Um, because I will be at, uh, I will be in Sweden, uh, when the Australians go to vote and this is the first general election in Australia. It's the federal election, but it's the first federal election that I will ever be able to vote in, in Australia since I'm now in Australia. And so now I don't know whether you can see this Sam, but, um, uh, I've got here, uh, my postal votes. So this is my postal vote, my tiny little hat. How big is this? Uh, not it's an a five, I'd say yeah, five ish.
Uh, so that's, that's for my federal MP. And then I've got, um, this voting form, which is for my, for the member, for my member in the Senate. How big is this? Well, so far, I think it could go across a high street banner. I mean, it's just massive. It's more than a meter long this thing, which has a number of feet for the Americans listening. Uh, yeah. So, um, yeah, quite quite a thing. So I'm looking forward to voting over the next couple of days and then putting it in.
Uh, in an envelope and seeing what happens. But anyway, that's it for this week. If you like pod land, tell others to visit and tell your friends on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, or a Mastodon or wherever, you can also email us at comments at Podland dot news. You'll also find all of our previous shows and interviews at Podland. If you want daily news, you should get pod news. The newsletter is [email protected].
The podcasts can be found in your podcast app and all the stories we've discussed on Podland today, or in the show notes, we use chapters and transcripts. Um, music is from ignite jingles, and we're hosted and sponsored by a good friends of Buzzsprout. And if you've got to the end of this podcast, we will be announcing next week where we are having our secret drinks in London, just before the London podcast show. Excellent. Looking forward to that and keep listening.