Eric Nuzum's Lisbon masterclass

• Radiodays Europe is on in Lisbon, Portugal - it’s the largest radio conference in the world. Tomas Coppens from VRT shared podcast consumption data from the Flemish-speaking part of Belgium. Eric Nuzum and Hiwote Getaneh from Magnificent Noise did a masterclass about setting your podcast up for success.

• Data: Research company Ipsos has released the third edition of their Italian study into digital audio. 31% of Italian adults listen to podcasts every month, says the data.

• YouTube Music is to make background listening available for free, starting with Canada. ChromeUnboxed suggests the app is to merge with Google Podcasts. The company is also rolling out live translations and a better subtitle editor.

• Clever․fm calls itself “The YouTube of Podcasting”, claims to be “creating the most interactive podcast experience on the market”, and say they solve “the podcasting platform problem” forever. It offers proprietary commenting features.

• Remote recording tool Zencastr now automatically generates transcriptions.

  
  Sep 7 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• San Francisco’s KQED has posted upcoming events for their PRX Podcast Garage.

In the US, it’s Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Podnews isn’t based in the US, but we’ll take this as an opportunity to acknowledge and respect the traditional custodians of the land where we live and work: the Turrbal and Jagera people, in Brisbane, Australia.

Moves and hires

• Chris Bannon has been hired as Head of Global Audio for Condé Nast. He was CCO at Stitcher.

This link is no longer available, as at Sep 7 2023
• Karina Farias has joined Edison Research as Project Coordinator. She was PD and morning host at KUFX-FM in San Jose CA, USA.

This link is no longer available, as at Sep 7 2023

The Tech Stuff - with RSS․com

• The expiration of an old root certificate for Let’s Encrypt continues to cause problems with some podcast platforms. NPR, RadioPublic and TuneIn are no longer updating any RSS feeds from Anchor or Feedpress, and others secured with Let’s Encrypt. NPR, RadioPublic and TuneIn need to fix their servers to remove the old Let’s Encrypt root cert: this fix helped us last week when we had a similar issue.

• The open list of podcast hosts, containing details of patterns to look for in RSS feeds and audio URLs, has been significantly updated by John Spurlock to include many more hosts. From the data, here’s a list of podcast hosts.

• There are now 2,209 podcasts that are value4value enabled.

• The Fountain app has been updated. It supports episode-level value splits (so you can share sats with your guests) and now supports serialised shows. It does value4value and RSS chapter points (among many other things).

• Libsyn Pro appears to have migrated many of its shows over to Libsyn RSS feeds, according to our podcast hosts tracker (we list the two as separate). Otherwise, our sample suggests Megaphone gained 27 shows overall, while Libsyn lost 25 overall.

• Good Apple: Now that recent versions of Apple Podcasts use one central RSS scraper, instead of every single phone calling on RSS feeds every time, this has resulted in significant bandwidth savings for podcast hosts. Compare: Friday May 7 (2,947 hits) with Friday Oct 8 (just 216 from the scraper; a further 395 from old iPhones).

• Bad Apple: The Apple Podcasts app has now had 1,100 ratings on the Apple App Store, and has a score of just 1.8.

Tips and tricks

• How to create a podcast transcript - Podcastpage also highlights the benefits of doing so.

• Why you need to define your podcast concept - Rachel Corbett says that the more specific it is, the better.

• Want to squoosh your podcast artwork down to the 500KB that Apple requires? We heartily recommend Squoosh: we use it every day.

• Boostagrams this week from Gary Arndt, sending 1776 sats through Fountain and saying “This show is my primary way of keeping abreast with what is happening in the podcast industry”. Sir Peet, using Fountain, sends 5,000 sats and says “more drinks, cheers!” And, someone anonymous sends 2112 sats from Breez, pointing out that “Ozy Media is a very strange company”. You’re right. We made 22,815 sats last week, about US $12.50 (much from streaming, not boosts). Here’s how to enable your podcast for value4value - and if you’re not seeing a boost button in your podcast app, find a better one.

Podcast News

Shehroze Chaudhry has admitted in court that his stories, which made up a large part of the New York Times’s podcast Caliphate, were entirely made up. He’s never even been to Syria. He’s been fined US $8,000, and - horror - sentenced to a year of living with his parents in Ontario, Canada.

In Podcasting 2.0, Adam Curry and Dave Jones chat with Brian of London, talking about Hive.

It’s National Coming Out Day in Australia: the ABC has launched Innies + Outies, with fascinating stories from diverse LGBTQIA+ Australians about coming out or staying in.