Apple to reveal where your podcast data goes

• Apple’s WWDC event announced new privacy features, which could impact podcast publishers in future. The App Privacy Report will allow users to see what domains have been requested by apps, which may be useful for seeing if data from your podcast app is shared with others. A “Private Relay” will be available for all iCloud+ paid customers. It appears to be a combination of a secure DNS service and a VPN. It’s only available when browsing with Safari at present; if extended out to the rest of the OS, it could give some challenges to podcast measurement and dynamic audio insertion. Apple has a video podcast of the full event.

• Apple’s Facetime is coming to the web, including Android phones, in September. We were expecting an announcement about Apple Podcasts coming to Android, but that hasn’t happened: they’ve got things to fix first, we guess.

• Triton Digital’s programmatic audio marketplace has integrated with PayTunes, an Indian audio ad platform.

• Linktree, a service many podcasters use for links to their show, has added Commerce Links to help collect payments using Square.

• Libsyn completed its acquisition of AdvertiseCast for $30m. It also completed $25m of equity financing, including $8m from Libsyn Director Eric Shahinian’s Camac Partners - Camac now owns 12.2% - and $1m from Chairman Bradley Tirpak. They’ve also agreed a new bank loan agreement. The company is currently without a CFO, after it was found to have underpaid $3.2 million in taxes over the past five years.

  
  This link is no longer available, as at Sep 4 2023

• Clubhouse “is dying”, says a Forbes contributor. The writer suggests it’s been replaced by meeting with real people.

• A podcast about the murder of Vincent Chin in 1982, Hold Still Vincent, has been taken offline after it emerged that his family had not been contacted during the making of the part-fictionalised podcast.

• Les Hollander has been promoted to CEO at DAX in North America.

• Erik Diehn has left Stitcher. “Now it’s time for me to take a break, work on some fun projects and figure out what’s next.”

• SiriusXM is to distribute and represent five Sawdust Podcast Network shows.

• The Guardian claim that “podcasters have replaced our real friends”.

• UK radio station Absolute Radio is to launch a new “digital-first documentary series”, called Tales from the Cloakroom. It is an exclusive show in the station’s app.

The Tech Stuff - with RSS․com

• PodLP, a KaiOS app used in many developing countries, now supports the Person, Location and Funding tags.
• Adam Curry is on the front cover of radio industry trade RadioINK this month, focusing on Podcasting 2.0.

Sep 4 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.
• The alternateEnclosure tag is being formalised today. The tag offers a variety of opportunities for podcasters: low-bitrate or video versions of shows in the same feed, alternate mixes, or longer versions of interviews. Podnews intends to offer a low-bitrate version of our show.
• The licence tag is now formalised, allowing podcasters to mark shows or episodes with a specific licence, like creative commons or similar.
• There’s a proposal to indicate that a podcast is using podping: to allow a podcast directory to know when they can stop polling an RSS feed for new episodes.

Hints and tips

• Steve Goldstein notes that Wheel of Fortune, a US TV game show, starts playing the game in just 45 seconds from the start of the show: and that podcast intros are way too long.

  
  Sep 4 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• Spotify has published a set of data from its music service - though there’s plenty of ideas for podcasters, too.

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