A magic way to remember stuff from podcasts

• A new tool called Podcast Magic has been launched. It lets you capture ideas or moments from podcasts right in your email - just by emailing them a screenshot of your podcast player. The tool automatically sends a clip and transcript back to you - no app, or login, required. You can test it for free; it’s a one-off $20 for unlimited insights.

• The way podcasts are being measured in France has changed, reports La Lettre Pro. Shows previously measured directly by Médiamétrie are now being measured by ACPM, in data that is apparently “compliant with IAB Tech Lab standards” (though ACPM isn’t certified). Médiamétrie used to use a redirect system (like Podtrac or OP3); this new system, coined “EAR > Podcast”, uses logfile analysis (like Triton’s rankers). The #1 show in the September EAR > Podcast ranker is RTL’s Les Grosses Têtes; Médiamétrie’s clients are mostly radio companies, and this ranker measures participating publishers only. ACPM’s own ranker continues; #1 in that is Acast’s HugoDécrypte.

• PodChapters is a new tool that produces AI-enhanced podcast chapters for your episodes. Chapter placement can be done manually, suggested by AI, or using automatic conversion of an outline into chapters.

• We quit our jobs and turned our obsession with true crime into a hit podcast - Business Insider covers The Murder Sheet.

The Tech Stuff - with RSS.com

• Zeno Media has deployed HLS for podcasting, the company has announced. HLS support is available and live now.

• RSS feeds for podcast apps that use streaming payments should change to use lnaddress rather than nodes (i.e. use things that look like email addresses rather than 66-character hex IDs) as soon as possible, according to a discussion in the Podcasting 2.0 podcast this week. The focus, it was decided, should be enabling simple streaming Bitcoin payments again as soon as possible, and to backfill any messages metadata later. (The Strike app, which accepts payments via lnaddress like jamescridland@strike.me, shows boost messages anyway from some apps).

  • The Podnews Daily podcast’s RSS feed currently has a mix of both lnaddress and nodes - we should run some data to see how many payments come to one but not the other.

• There were 1.5mn new podcast episodes in October. In terms of podcast hosts by episode share, 29.5% of them were hosted with Spotify; Spreaker is at #2 with 18.5%; and Buzzsprout is at #3 with 10%. In the top ten, heritage brands Podbean (#4) and Libsyn (now #9) posted their lowest-ever numbers for the fifth month in a row. Transistor overtook Libsyn to a record high; RSS.com (who overtook Libsyn last month) and Simplecast are also on record highs.

• Even AWS melting during October didn’t stop the company increasing its share of podcast hosting. The company now hosts more than 65% of new episodes.

• Buzzsprout’s global statistics for October show more web browsers than ever (13% of downloads); the same goes for Transistor’s global stats (15%).

• XSLT - the technology that can make podcast RSS feeds look like a decent webpage instead of random code - will be removed from Chrome, for security reason. Mozilla’s Firefox team agrees with the removal. XSLT will stop being supported, in Chrome, in mid-November next year.

People news

• Avaryl Halley, the producer for How Did This Get Made and host of YouTube’s MovieBitches, died of breast cancer on Thursday. “She wasn’t in pain and she was surrounded by love, family, and friends”.

Tips and tricks

• How detailed should your podcast script be? Rachel Corbett suggests “only working off light notes so you can stay in the moment while still directing the episode where it needs to go”.

Podcast News

Celebrating its fifteenth anniversary today, Rádio Defusão is a podcast about music made by music lovers. It might be the longest-running independent podcast in Portugal; and it released a special episode today looking back at the last fifteen years. (You can also enjoy a number of live performances from the show on YouTube).

The newest season of Crown and Controversy will focus on Prince Andrew, or rather - as he is now - the decidedly less excitingly titled “Andrew Mountbatten Windsor”. Andrew lost his titles and his house, following months of pressure over his ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Andrew has always denied wrongdoing. If only there were some files or something we could read.

Aircheck: Radio Stories is back for a fifth season, with new guests and a new cohost. Rich DeSisto is joined by new cohost Steve Raymond, with all kinds of voices from the radio industry.