Podnews Weekly Review - Apple Podcasts new video, and AI in podcasting from Snipd and Podhome

The last word in podcasting news, this is the Pod News Weekly Review, with James Krutland

and Sam Sethi.

I'm James Krutland, the editor of Pod News, and I'm Sam Sethi, the CEO of Tree Fans.

We always keep innovating, especially when customers ask us for features that's mostly

what's happening now.

Barry, from Pod Home, on the AI-powered podcast host, it will find the best moments in the

episode and it will guide you through them.

Kevin Smith, from Snipped, on the AI-powered podcast app, and Apple Podcasts launch his

video to everyone.

This podcast is sponsored by Buzzsprout, with the tools, supports and community to ensure

you keep podcasting, start podcasting, keep podcasting with buzzsprout.com.

From your daily newsletter, the Pod News Weekly Review.

James, let's start off with, hey, look, it's not an Apple story for the first story of

the week, but it might be in there somewhere, don't leave them out, you know.

But Spotify, let's start with them then.

I'm surprised that Apple isn't the number one story, I'll tell you that.

Okay.

Yes, anyway, go on then.

Spotify.

The producer.

Mr. Producers.

Spotify.

As she comes from Bloomberg, is reporting that Spotify's laid 3% of its podcast team

off.

That's about 15 people doing.

What are they doing over there?

Well, who knows what they're doing over there, because Spotify won't tell us, but it does

look as if there are cuts in the ringer cuts in Spotify studios.

They may be the same thing these days, I really don't know.

There's a special projects lead, whatever that does, and there's a writer who we know has

gone, there's a show which has also been cancelled as well called New York, New York.

I am hearing all kinds of stories about Spotify changes.

Bell the tea.

Go on, spin it.

And every time I go to Spotify and I say, oh, okay, this is what I'm hearing, and they

just reply and say, that's very much not true.

There was another story that I heard, and I asked for comment on that, and they gave

a comment that was basically, we have nothing to say at this time.

But I didn't say it wasn't true.

So there are things going on at Spotify, and I'm not quite sure what those things are,

to be honest.

My suspicion is that there's sort of other things going on at Spotify, maybe quite a lot

of big changes in terms of how video works, perhaps in the future.

I mean, certainly, if they're looking at the standard way of doing video, then there's

probably going to have to be quite some change, given that Apple has totally upended the fruit

cart or whatever it is that they're updating.

So I'm just curious as to what alls are in G.C.

Exactly.

Whatever you like.

Exactly.

So I'm just sort of curious in terms of all of that.

But yeah, no, it's interesting times at Spotify, they've been launching a few other things

haven't they?

They have.

So one of the things they've launched is a new tool for testing AI Slop, or to stop AI Slop.

They're doing it through music first, so they're allowing you to put in your artist profile

as something called artist profile protection, which basically says, is this your track?

And the artist has to go, yes or no, basically.

I wonder whether they'll extend that to podcasting, I suppose.

Well, yes, that would certainly be a thing, that would certainly be a thing.

No, very interesting, they've also Apple Music, if we're talking about music services, Apple

Music has also launched a integration with a concept provider, I think it's Ticketmaster.

It is indeed, yeah.

So you can instantly buy tickets through there as well.

So again, more of these integrations coming, which is interesting.

Now, OK, Apple launched iOS 26.4 with it, came at the new video experience.

Have you got it?

Yes, I do.

I have the brand new iOS 26.4, I mean, I've been running the developer beta for a while.

They snuck out a couple more podcast hosting companies who are supporting HLS video,

pod space, riverside, OSHA, and first story, I've heard of at least two of those.

And I think that's really interesting, isn't it?

We're now at a stage where we are welcoming pod space, which is a small company based in

the Nordic countries.

And I'll be frank with you, I do not know who first story are.

So we're welcoming those types of companies into Apple Podcasts video, what we're not

seeing is people like Spotify's megaphone.

Buzz Brat aren't there yet.

Both of whom I'm sure are very keen to get in, and it's interesting times.

It's interesting times.

And I wonder as people upgrade to the new version of iOS 26.4, whether or not normal listeners

will see the type of shows that they are expecting.

So probably no Joe Rogan, well, I mean, definitely no Joe Rogan for now.

No titles from the ringer, but plenty more because Spotify's megaphone isn't part of

it.

So Apple saying that more content will roll out throughout the year because of course

they would.

But I think it's going to be very interesting to watch and see what normies think about

this.

There aren't too many shows available in video right now.

Yeah, but it's the old adages, isn't it?

Build it and they will come, well, in this case, build it and they might not come, right?

Well, yes, I mean, or indeed build it in secret until a couple of months ago and then ask

people to come.

That's the other sort of side of it.

Yeah.

But apparently 48 shows are in the Apple Podcasts directory now with video.

The majority of those with ACASTs, so ACAST appears to have done all of its tech.

19 have 10 of those and then there's one or two for companies like Omni, Transistor and

so on.

So, yeah, I think that probably tells you that not everybody is up to speed in terms of

video in Apple Podcasts.

Well, I think if your companies like Buzzsprout, you know, you now got to get your HLS story

in place, so now you've got to decide how you're going to reencode all the video, then

you've got to look, actually, is there demand from your customer base to get into Apple

Podcasts?

Because, again, a lot of people, we've always said that, you know, the long tail is probably

not going to be involved in this at all.

I mean, most podcasts don't want to do video and most of the big 10, as you said, Joe

Rogum's called her daddy might not do it, not at least not to begin with.

Yes.

John Spurlup, friend of the show, has also given us a hat tip.

He's said that Apple have updated the web app, but they haven't updated the Mac OS on

the desktop and they haven't updated the TV OS either.

Oh, that's interesting.

That's interesting.

Yes.

Apple TV does not have video podcasts, which makes very little sense, but yes, you would

expect that there would be access to it on the Mac OS app, but, yeah, if he's saying

that it's not there, to be honest, I've not actually had a look at that, but that's interesting.

But of course, that does mean that if you have Apple podcasts installed as a PWA on Android,

that means that you will see video, which is going to be curious.

So yeah.

Given that the worldwide developer conference was just announced, it's going to be on

June 8th to June 12th.

You assume they're going to announce something to do with, in you, Apple TV being upgraded

to support this.

What else do you think might be there, James?

Yes.

We've been wanting a new Apple TV for some time, haven't personally, but, yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, I would assume that it's when we finally see the iPhone foldable iPhone thing.

There's been a number of stories recently about Apple podcasts, really changing how the

iPhone is working and changing the design of all of that.

I mean, I think that they've basically just changed the design.

So I'm not so sure about that, but certainly adding a foldable phone seems to make sense.

The new Siri seems to make sense in there as well.

I'm not sure necessarily that we will see too much more other than Siri actually being intelligent

and the foldable iPhone.

Are you officially intelligent?

Yes.

Yes.

Well, yes indeed.

Indeed.

But yeah, interesting times for Apple, it is of note that when you are told to upgrade,

then Apple podcasts with video is not one of the reasons.

So the screen that comes on talks about other things.

So I'm not sure necessarily that Apple will be really shouting about Apple podcasts with

video until they've got enough content in there to actually make it worthwhile.

I also heard another interesting thing.

You can probably tell that I'm not normally at home.

I'm in Riga in Latvia this fine morning.

And I heard another interesting thing from the conference that I've been at of somebody

saying that Apple podcasts is still very popular, but it's not getting new listeners.

So the new listeners are going to YouTube, the new listeners are going to Spotify.

Apple podcasts is still very popular because of habit because people have used it in the

past and those people continue to use it.

But it's not replenishing its audience with newer users.

And I thought that that was a really interesting way of thinking about it.

And there might be a bit of truth there that actually, you know, people who've grown

up with podcasting are using Apple podcasts, but people who haven't have never gone into

the Apple podcasts.

Well, I had a similar conversation with a friend in the industry who was talking about

gateway drugs in effect YouTube kids bringing people into the YouTube environment and Spotify

targeting for music.

You know, you talked about your own daughter who's in teenager or is about to be a teenager.

You know, all of her friends are on Spotify, therefore the cool thing to be is on Spotify.

And it's, I always think Apple, I don't know, Apple music is just something I never use.

I don't go to it.

I, you know, all that, Apple won, you know, the radio station and never listen to it.

And also just because they're all disparate parts with Apple as opposed to an integrated

solution, I wonder whether that's a trick they're missing.

Yeah.

Well, you know, we will find out, I mean, you know, arguably they would say, no, it's

all part of one solution.

It's called the iPhone.

And if Apple wouldn't say that because you don't put the word the in front of iPhone.

So they would say it's all part of iPhone.

And there may be something to be said for that.

But yes, I mean, it's going to be very odd on the Apple TV for you to be going into the

Apple Podcasts app to watch podcasts in there, but then going into the Netflix app to

watch podcasts in there.

I mean, you were kind of expect podcasts on the Apple TV to be an Apple TV.

So I don't know.

But anyway, all fascinating, all fascinating things to have a look.

Moving on, James, goal hanger, the big UK production company that's going gangbusters has

released something called the accelerator, which is aimed at content creators.

It's a fund.

Oh, goody.

What have they done?

I always look at these things and, you know, I don't want to be rude about goal hanger,

although that company has changed very much in the last six months from being a...

They've changed.

From being a very, you know, polite, hungry company to a company with a bit of an attitude.

So I'm not 100% over the moon with what goal hanger are doing anyway.

These sorts of things, to me, it's their content creator fund.

It's called the accelerator.

They will support high potential digital creators.

They will give them up to £10,000 in content investment, which is around just...

So not money, not money.

Ah, yes, I hadn't even spotted that.

Yes, £10,000 worth of...

Exactly.

...production and experimentation.

Yes, well, I hadn't even noticed that because I was there thinking, well, this is just a

cheap way of getting more people into the goal hanger as cheap as that.

But it's cheaper now because it's not even real money.

Yes, I mean, it does seem a relatively transparent way of essentially looking for pitches for additional content

and doing it in a way where you don't have to work too hard because people come to you.

And, yeah, it's not, you know, it's a sort of lazy way of growing your network, I suppose.

But, yeah, but, you know, I mean, it looks all fun.

The folks at goal hanger know what they're doing.

You certainly can't argue with that.

And, I mean, you know, each creator will receive up to £10,000 in content investment to elevate production standards.

I don't know if you've listened to any goal hanger shows recently, but they're all filmed for TV.

They sound pretty bad.

They've lost most of the audio-specific production that goal hanger shows have.

So, I'm not even sure that I would take, you know, information from goal hanger in terms of how to make a good show, to be honest with you.

But maybe I'm just being a bit grumpy.

I'm still enjoying their shows.

The rest of the entertainment is very good when Marina can get a word in Edgeways.

The rest of the politics is very good when Rory can get a word in Edgeways, so I think it's all fine.

Don't mention the war is too soon for the Alistair Campbell. Too soon.

If you want to find out more, of course, you can go to goahanger.com slash of the accelerator.

And, again, look, on playing Devils Advocate, the other side of the fence,

they're trying to encourage young people to come into the environment,

come into the industry, and maybe this is their way of doing it.

So, look, good luck with it.

It's another initiative that we should really applaud, whatever.

Yeah, I think so.

I would just point out that there isn't a apply now button on their website.

And next to that apply now button is a big thing, saying terms and conditions.

By applying, you agree to the accelerated terms and conditions I bet you do.

Those would be interesting to read.

So, yes, maybe there's a thing there.

Moving on, James, overcast, they are bringing transcripts, it seems, to overcast,

but not just one or two. They're bringing it for everybody, and even better.

It will be free for everybody, says Marco Armond.

Yes, I think it looks very good.

It doesn't yet use creator-produced transcripts.

So, it's not yet using the careful one, for example, that I do on the pod news daily,

where I do go through and change people's spelling to make sure that everything's correct.

It's not yet using that. Apparently, that is coming, though, which is good news.

My understanding is that the transcripts are mostly being done by a rack of Mac minis that...

Yes, I thought that story was fascinating.

Yeah, that Marco Armond has bought.

So, this story hasn't got into pod news yet, but I think that's a fascinating thing.

So, yeah, I'd love to learn a little bit more about that, but absolutely rightly,

he turned around, and he said, this is an accessibility feature,

and nobody should ever be charging for accessibility features, and he's absolutely correct.

So, so, hurrah for him.

Overcast is a pretty big deal, because it is, in many cases, the number three or the

number four podcast app, it was always bigger than things like Google podcasts.

So, for overcast to be getting transcripts, is I think a pretty big deal?

I'm not sure. I agree with him about the accessibility part,

but when you start to have things like timed links and other feature and function on top

of the transcript, then is that accessibility or is that feature and function?

No, I think that is feature and function, but I think certainly accessibility,

adding transcripts, I think that makes perfect sense to keep that free,

and it's exactly the right sort of thing.

So, are we setting the bar now for all apps to have to provide transcripts?

I mean, I would hope so.

That, to me, would be the sensible opportunity, and arguably,

the apps that don't provide transcripts are operating outside of the law.

Now, you can argue that you can get transcripts from iOS and from Android,

so you can actually do that on a entire device level, so they may be able to,

you know, fall back to that and say, oh, well, that's really how that works.

But I do think that transcripts are something that everybody should have in there.

Now, the question is really transcripts for everything, as Marco is doing,

or transcripts for any podcast, which is providing them as we do.

So, I don't know what the answer to that is,

but I would personally like to see as many transcripts as possible.

OK, I'm going to just persist on this for a second.

Should it be the host that provides the transcript or the app?

Because let me just play devil's advocate for a second.

Is it the case, like with Buzzsprout, our sponsors, where we go in,

and they have an AI capability that gives us the transcript,

speaker labels, and, you know, again, chapter titles,

or should it be the app, you know, that then says, no,

there isn't a transcript with this podcast, we will provide it.

Because Adam and Dave on the podcasting to the O show this week,

we're like, well, hang on a minute.

Why are you providing something?

Why are you changing my podcast that I haven't requested?

I think, yeah, you know, you can look at that both sides

and respecting the creator is what any good podcast app should do.

But covering for a creator that can't be bothered to provide accessibility

is another side of looking at that.

So I think from my point of view, it's really easy.

If you don't want people to be making automated transcripts for you,

then make your own transcript.

That's the bottom line.

If you are, and this is why I get annoyed at Spotify

who don't use the creator-produced transcripts.

Frankly, annoyed at overcast right now,

who aren't using creator-produced transcripts and just making their own.

I think that that's bad.

But I think as long as they are taking a creator-produced transcript,

if one exists and then showing that,

I think that that's absolutely fine.

If you as a podcaster can't be bothered to make a transcript,

then on your own head be it.

And ideally, the app should be making a transcript or not.

But I do think, at the end of the day, transcripts should be available.

Ideally, the podcaster should be making those.

And if the podcaster isn't making those, it's open season.

If you as an app want to make a transcript,

as long as it's in the control of the podcaster, I think that that's fine.

Okay. Let's move on, James.

Now, one of the apps I do like a lot is an app called Snipped.

It's out of Switzerland.

The co-founder and CEO is a guy called Kevin Smith,

a seasoned AI person.

He's done 10 plus years of AI,

and he was a very smart man, by the way.

He came out of Swiss Banking,

where he was involved heavily in creating trading systems.

So now, a few weeks ago,

you and I were talking about the use of AI within hosts.

And I said, I would love to, for my own company, TrueFans,

create a AI agent called Kevin and Kelly.

And that's my goal.

But I did mention that Snipped had been working on AI interfaces

for their app for a number of years.

Now, last year, we interviewed Kevin,

and he was talking about the ability to tap your headphones

when you found an interesting part of the audio.

You were listening to how it would create a clip using AI.

Well, this week, they've extended their AI.

They've now added a new feature,

which allows you to chat with any podcast you've listened to.

You can automatically, again,

remember certain parts of the podcast.

They've created something called AIDJ.

I'm sure you're very excited, James, to be hearing this.

But the thing about AIDJ,

it does allow you to speak to the podcast, as I said.

Paul's play and seek content within your own player.

Now, I was very excited about this, because, again, as I said,

for my own app, this is a goal that I'm trying to achieve.

So I thought I'd reach out to Kevin Smith,

and I started off by asking him,

remind me, what is Snipped?

Yes, Snipped is an AI-powered podcast app

for anyone who listens to a lot of knowledge podcasts.

So the typical diary of the CEO,

listener, modern wisdom,

Huberman Lab would be some of the classics, I would say.

And the feature that we're most known for,

also where our name comes from, is the so-called snipping.

What that allows you to do is, whenever he an amazing moment,

some insight that you want to remember,

or maybe share with someone,

you can just tap your headphones,

and our AI will save the moment that you've just heard,

and summarize the insight for you.

And this results in what we call a SNIP.

And the SNIP now lives in your knowledge library,

you can automatically sync it to your notes app,

so if you use notion or obsidian or an app like read-wise,

and, of course, you can share it with a friend or your team at work.

Yeah, this is really where we started.

From there, we've, over the years,

added more and more AI features,

always focused on the listener.

How can we enrich the experience of the listener?

How can we help them get more out of their listening?

And always in mind, with this focus of,

yeah, people who listen to knowledge rich podcasts.

Like, we actually see podcasts as one of the largest

knowledge libraries in the world.

And we still think, even though podcasts are exploding,

we still think it's so heavily underutilized.

Now, you've come out with a new update to SNIP.

Tell me more what we announced.

Yes, it's just yesterday,

we launched the first version of our AIDJ, as we call it.

Before I tell you what it is,

I'd love to start from where this internally started from.

So we basically have two starting points.

And I think, you know, you're one of the people

who actually also knows a lot about this.

AI agents are taking over the world.

And we actually think there's a lot of value

that can be created for podcast listeners by using AI.

But it's also at the same time so easy to get lost

in all of these possibilities and, like, to forget

what does the listener actually want to do

and be much more guided in, oh, this technology is so cool.

Look what I can do here.

Look what I can do there.

And forgetting like, okay, what's actually

the problems that users have.

So for our first version of this AIDJ,

we really wanted to nail down one very particular pain point

for users and bring this out as the first version.

So what we ended up now solving is,

I don't know about you, but for me, like,

obviously I love podcasts,

but I just can't keep up anymore.

There's just so much amazing content out there.

I have an episode queue of more than 400 episodes deep.

And I just know I will never get around to listening to these.

And every single one is an episode I manually selected.

I saw it. I thought, this is amazing.

I want to listen to this.

So I can't keep up.

And there's almost two categories of podcasts.

There's like the podcasts that are 100%

where listen to or listen to the entire thing.

And then there's the other episodes where

I am actually interested in it,

but maybe I'm not yet so familiar with the show.

I don't know the guest yet.

Maybe it's a bit like a topic that's a little bit on the side.

For example, in our announcement yesterday,

I used an example about longevity

on the diary of a CEO podcast.

Sound super interesting to me.

But given that I have these 400 and odd other episodes,

I just know I will now queue this up

and I will not get around to listening to it.

So what we released yesterday is hopefully the solution

to this problem.

Okay, tell me more.

So what the AI DJ does is when you're listening to an episode,

you can activate the AI DJ.

What it will do for you, it will find the best moments

in the episode and it will guide you through them.

So that way you can listen to get the best moments

in one quarter of a time and have the AI DJ help you maintain the context

of what's going on when you jump from one moment to the next moment.

And yeah, with this basically,

I can listen to four times as many episodes

and in particular, all of these episodes where I was a bit,

you know, it's not the one that I'm 100% going to listen to definitely

but I still want to experience a bit of it.

And yeah, this is basically in a nutshell.

Okay, I've got several questions there

because in an episode that's a long form,

let's take the diary of a CEO, as you mentioned,

you're using your AI DJ to find the best bits.

How does it know what the best bits are?

Yeah, so I can tell you two things here,

like what we're doing today and what we have planned for the future

because I think this is one of the areas

that are super exciting to work on.

So today, how it works, it's really the AI

having access to the entire episode

and really guided by what are the core moments

given the overall topic.

As you know, in a typical episode,

they drift off into some anecdotes from the private life

or some other topics on the side.

The diary of a CEO always at the end of a show

has this question that was prepared by the previous guest

without knowing who the next guest is.

So all of these sort of deviate from the overall topic

of like the longevity, the core message.

So it really tries to stick to the core message

and pick out the moments that you need to know

to understand the storyline of the core message

and then guide you through these moments.

Okay, so is it five or six different elements

of the single podcast?

Because James and I had a review of a product

called Pod Shrink a couple of weeks back

and Pod Shrink took the whole two hours

of Pod News Weekly review

and a bit like Notebook LM,

it shrunk it down to a one minute synopsis

of the whole episode.

So what I'm trying to understand is

is the snipped DJ shrinking the episode

and then regurgitating back.

So hey, by the way, Sam, you want to listen to this episode

because it's so cool and there's the bits that you want to listen to.

Or is it skipping to the sections

of the individual parts of the podcast and say,

this bit's really interesting.

Now listen, now let me tell you to another bit.

Now let me tell you to other bit.

Which way is it doing it?

It's the latter.

So basically the way to think about it.

So we're not taking any content from anyone.

The only thing that this AI DJ actually does

is we've given the AI DJ control of your player.

So the AI DJ can do four things.

It can hit the play button, the pause button,

the seeking and it can talk to you.

And those are the only things that it does.

So we're not taking content.

We're not summarizing content.

The AI DJ is only controlling the player

to jump to those moments.

And with speaking to you,

it's not about giving you a summary.

It's just to help you follow along.

Because if you skip a couple of minutes,

it's very easy to lose context.

Remember, people are not watching.

At least in our app, we're audio first.

It's so easy to lose context.

And then suddenly there's a new voice that comes on

and it's like, oh, who's this now?

What are they talking about?

So it's more the AI DJ acts like a moderator in this moment.

And maybe one more comment here,

the whole topic of summaries.

One thing that is one of them clear to me

is that summaries cannot replace the original podcast episode.

And this is independent of whether the summary is made by AI

or by humans.

It's just in the nature of it.

You just lose so much of what makes the podcast

special.

So summaries have their place.

I think they're amazing to help you choose what to listen to.

I think a lot of podcasts has already

do that themselves.

And the show notes to give like,

hey, here are like a couple of the key takeaways

that you're going to learn about in this episode.

But you're just not going to replace listening

to the real voices and the real person

telling their own story.

But one of the things you talked about,

the original version of SNAP was tapping your headphones

create a SNAP.

Can the AI DJ now do that for me?

So can I say what I'm listening?

Hey, DJ, just take a clip from here.

But you can still do that.

The way that you would do that is by tapping your headphone

not by speaking to it.

I just wondered whether the DJ now had a control mechanism.

Because one of the things I really would like an AI

assistant to do when I'm co-listening, let's say.

Let's call it that.

It is, oh, you mentioned the word regurgitated.

I don't know what that means.

Click.

DJ, what's regurgitated mean?

Oh, it means this sound.

Oh, lovely.

Move on, right?

Blah, blah, blah.

So if I'm listening to a podcast that's

got some very, let's say, terms that I'm not aware of

or a concept or knowledge that I just want

to understand before I move forward with the podcast,

I would love the assistant, the co-listening AI,

to be able to pause the audio, tell me what it is,

and then let me remove on.

Or just I get to a point.

Oh, yeah, OK.

Take a clip from here, please.

Save that for me later, right?

I don't want to be touching my ears or doing something.

Because again, that opens me up the possibility

that I'm in the car listening.

And I don't have my headphones in.

And I just want to just have a voice

interfaced in my car to say, take a clip here.

So that's what I was just wondering

when you're going with it.

Yeah.

So you mentioned a couple of really interesting examples.

Some of them we actually already have.

So you mentioned the car.

So you're actually already able to take a

snip in the car.

But you just tap the button on your steering wheel

instead of your headphones.

OK.

So it's actually linked to the skip back button

that almost all modern cars that have on the steering wheel.

The another aspect that I wanted to mention

is we do actually have something that, currently,

we're not calling AI DJ, but we're calling auto-snipping,

where you can let the AI choose to take

notes for you automatically.

This is one of these features that either you love it

or you hate it.

So our users are like, there's really

a 50-50 split on that feature.

But basically, if you do not want to be actively choosing,

oh, this is the moment that I want to save.

And just want to make sure that you have,

at the end of an episode, the most important insights

taken as notes, you can turn that on.

Now, the voice interface.

Now, that is something that's super interesting.

And I think that brings us to where

do we see the AI DJ heading into the future?

Yeah, where is it going?

So one way and how to look at the revolution

that's happened with AI is that we've

gained the ability to talk to machines.

And this opens up the possibility of all of these apps

that we're using, all of the entertainment or media apps,

that so far it's mainly been a one-way communication stream.

I'm on YouTube and YouTube pushes stuff to me.

And in the other direction, you only

get very little information back.

YouTube gets some click data where I hover on a bit longer

and the same Spotify, the same for us,

the same for TrueFans.

Now, you can actually have two-way communication

between the user and the application.

And you can start to build recommendation experiences

that are not just based on some proxy metric,

like click data or the whole optimizing for time on sites

that was made famous by Facebook.

So you can actually let the user communicate what

is important to them.

So this is something that I'm in general

very excited about, not just in podcast,

but I think it's a mechanism that, as long as

media platforms implement this, and we

want to do this for SNEP, it actually

gives a lot of power back to the user

for them to decide what their experience should be like.

And basically, having an algorithm that works for them

instead of an algorithm that only works for the platform

to optimize some, I don't know, how can I show more ads?

So yeah, so this was a little bit of a meta level,

but this is basically a meta level on top of AIDJ,

how I think about it.

So what I want AIDJ to become is your personalized,

customizable AID agent that finds and creates

the best content for you.

And you decide how you want to have that,

what content is important to you, what not,

and also how you want to listen to that.

You, for example, mentioned, hey,

I would love to jump in and ask a question.

That should be possible for you to do.

Other use cases that we heard from users

is some say, hey, every time there's

a big claim being made, I would

love to have some kind of fact checking.

Because it's so easy to listen to these podcast

and everything sounds so credible.

And then afterwards, you find out, well, actually,

there was nothing behind that claim.

Another thing that someone told me, one of our users,

he would love to hear opposing views.

Something comes out, a new topic.

For me, the example that I always use here

is universal basic income.

There are so many different takes on this,

especially now in the context of AI.

And I'd love to hear a different side of this story.

So if this comes out, can you please, my AIDJ,

can you please go out there and find maybe someone who

sees this in the other direction?

So all of these are different ways of consuming

the best spoken audio content.

But it's up to you.

These are now just examples that I've heard.

I don't want to put this on you that you have to do it like that.

But how I see the future is you should be able to choose.

If that is how you want to consume it,

then tell your AIDJ and it will prepare

the experience for you in that way.

Look, I've always said podcasting is predominantly

an audio medium and we have a text-based interface to it.

Let me type out a comment.

Let me search using my keyboard for whatever it may be.

And why don't we have a voice-based interface

into our favorite podcast apps?

As we say, most people are on a train,

or maybe they're going to work in the car,

or walking the dog, the phones in the pocket,

they don't want to keep getting it out.

So I think voice interfaces are the way forward.

I've got two quick questions for you.

First of all, what's your background in AI?

Where did you get all your AI street cred from?

So I started with AI now more than 10 years ago.

So the back story is actually that I studied

quant finance.

Basically, I studied mathematics and economics.

A lot of working with data, a lot of working

with numerical programming to basically come up

with all of these mathematical models

to do quantitative trading or to analyze risk

in the stock market, asset pricing, derivative pricing,

all of these kind of things.

And it was just at the end of my studies,

I was actually already working for the biggest bank here

in Switzerland.

The friend of mine took this course called Machine Learning.

And he comes to me and says,

Oh, Kevin, you really have to take this class.

Like you will absolutely love it.

And I remember my first thought was like,

what kind of weird name is that machine learning?

Like, what is that?

That doesn't sound like anything I'd be interested in.

But I had a look at the slides and within a weekend,

I was in love, you could say, I'm not kidding.

It had all of the great things that I loved

about what I was studying with quant finance.

Like all of this, the mathematical part of it,

the deciphering data into something useful.

And it didn't have the stuff that I was less interested in,

like the whole banking aspect of it.

And so long story short, I ended up quitting my job

at the big bank, such that I could do Machine Learning 24-7.

And I ended up joining an early stage startup here in Zurich

where I built up the AI team over five years.

And that startup got acquired at some point.

And yeah, after five years,

I also then decided to go in a new direction.

And I started to nip.

Amazing.

Kevin, congratulations on the launch of DJ.

If I want to find out more about Snipdown,

I want to find more about AI DJ, where do I go?

So the best is to open up your phone,

go to the App Store or Play Store and type in Snipt.

It's spelled SNIPD.

And you will find our app, download our app and have fun.

Great.

Can we see you in London for the podcast show?

Definitely, definitely.

Tickets are booked.

Flight's not yet.

You need to do that.

No, I will definitely be there.

We don't have a stand or anything,

but I will be there if you want to hit me up,

contact me on LinkedIn or on X.

So yeah, hit me up.

I will be there.

Happy to always happy to talk to other people

in the podcast industry.

Amazing.

Kevin, thanks so much.

See you soon, mate.

Thank you.

Thank you, Sam.

See you soon.

Kevin Smith from Snipt, talking about AI

within the podcast app.

I think we should have more AI, Sam.

You don't mean that, James.

I know you well.

But, well, I did think that there's

some interesting things going on.

And one of those interesting things is going on at pod home.

Barry Lubrex, who is based in Holland,

started, well, last year, adding some AI smarts

to the pod home platform.

And he's now starting to add more and more,

using things like Claude and Claude Pro

and various other tools.

They did have before integration

through webhooks and Zapier integration.

But now they've taken it one step further

and you can now use pod home AI to generate transcripts,

chapters, clips.

And also, I thought, I'd find out what else

he's been doing with it.

So I asked Barry, remind me again,

tell me what it's pod home.

So pod home is podcast hosting platform.

It's now about three years old.

We're very much on the podcasting 2.0 features.

So we do all sorts of things like live podcasting,

chapters, transcripts.

We have a little pod home AI helper

that helps you to create all those things,

including titles, descriptions.

It does it all automatically.

And one of our big points is that you can do unlimited shows

and episodes and all of that for a very reasonable price.

At least we think.

And so we always keep innovating,

especially when customers ask us for features.

That's mostly what's happening now.

People want to automate things.

For instance, so we built lots of stuff for that.

So for instance, for automation,

what we started building was an API

that is like an endpoint that people can call,

that they have a key, it's all secure and such.

And then you can use that within your own programs.

So you can program against it

and you can get your episodes, create new episodes,

create a show, get your analytics,

even all sorts of stuff that you can do with that.

Basically, almost anything that you can do

through the pod home UI.

So if you go to the actual app on your browser,

you can also do through the API.

And customers are building quite amazing things with that.

For instance, one of our users has a website

where he says, if you donate this amount,

then we publish the next episode earlier automatically,

for instance, which you can do with the API.

That's very cool.

But that's obviously advanced, right?

You need to program against them

and actually make something yourself.

We also have more, let's say, low code options.

So if you're using Zapier or a program like that,

that is basically a, when this happens,

then I want that to happen, kind of workflow.

We have a plugin for that.

That also uses that API in the background.

And there you can say, well, for instance,

when a new episode publishes off my show,

because you can schedule those,

then I want to do XYZ, like put a post on social media

on Instagram, for instance, with the episode title,

description, and all that type of metadata

that you get from the Zapier integration.

And there are more things like that,

including create an episode, for instance,

when I have a new file in my Dropbox,

that is an MP3 file automatically create a new episode for me,

and then do a whole workflow with that, for instance,

which makes it super easy to just click together

a workflow to automate your podcasting thing.

And now that type of stuff is already pretty exciting.

But then nowadays, I don't know about you,

but I'm talking to my AI all day,

to just make it do stuff, to code, for instance, to do whatever.

I don't even Google anymore, I just ask my AI,

which might not be the best thing.

But that's the reality where I find myself in,

just talking to my eyes all day.

And so as I'm in that interface,

like in chat GPT or Claude or Gemini, what have you,

I thought, wouldn't it be cool if we can also just,

now say, hey, create a new episode in pod home,

upload to this file that I have here, or there,

or whatever, and publish it and do all the things

that I want to do with it.

And so we enable that, which turns out,

it's pretty easy to make, actually, with AI, as well.

So what that is, is an MCP server,

model context protocol, that is kind of how

AI's talked to APIs, so to other platforms,

like my platform, or, for instance, to true fans.

And then it understands what it can do with that.

So an MCP server is basically a layer around the API

that we built, and that exposes it,

so that AI's can talk to it.

So we enable that, it's pretty easy to just set that up,

for instance, your Claude.

And then you can just say to Claude, hey,

how many downloads did I get today, for instance,

for a show XYZ, and then it shows me.

And then you can ask follow-up questions,

like drill down which countries, which apps,

what was it the last 30 days,

how does it compare to this show, blah, blah.

And with the power of those AI's,

and that those now have access to pod home,

that creates this very interesting use cases.

And basically, you don't have to leave your AI anymore.

You can just say, all right, cool, now create this episode

with this thing and this artwork and this description,

or create a description for me.

Listen to the episode and make it for me.

And so now you can just do that.

We just enable that, and that's included,

like always, with all the other options as well,

in your regular subscription.

And so users are now testing it.

It seems to be working well.

We will be expanding it, we're needed, changing it,

we're needed, and you can use it with almost all your favorite

AI's, not everybody works perfectly with MCP yet,

like chat GPT, for instance, they have a different standard,

but they can work with the API, if you just give it that,

that also works.

But the rest basically works,

because MCP is kind of becoming a standard for AI's.

And I say becoming because it's so early,

they still write all this stuff is pretty new still.

But it works, and it's very cool.

When you first started building it,

was there a challenge around getting this,

understanding to the user?

You're comfortable all day talking to AI's.

Did you find that the user was comfortable,

suddenly talking to the AI?

Yes, because this is a much more natural use case,

than for instance, using JPEAR,

where you still, you need a bit of technical knowledge,

and you need to log in to all your connectors

and make sure that all works.

Because now users just use natural language,

like you just ask it what you wanted to do,

and then it just does it.

So there's not really a user manual.

The most difficult thing is to set it up,

and that just works by you feed it a URL.

And then when you ask something about pod home,

hey, list all my shows, for instance,

then it will automatically pop up a window

where you just log in with your normal credentials.

And that's it.

So it's super easy.

And that actually uses OAuth,

which is an art education protocol.

And so where do you see it evolving

until I mean, have you got a roadmap of ideas

and features that you want to continue to evolve this?

Yeah, definitely.

So as users are using it more,

that's also kind of good for our servers,

because they don't use the web app as much anymore.

But I can see much more use cases here, for instance,

recording your podcast with AI,

where we can have like an interface in the AI,

because you can do that as well.

I have little pop-ups and custom UIs

that the thing shows to you.

So that can be an interface for people also to just record

and automatically upload your episode,

so that you don't need any third party things

like the script or other recording software.

So that's one use.

Yeah, the possibilities are endless, really.

We're following the users, what they are doing,

and what they want next.

Yeah, but the elder expression,

if you ask your users, they'll ask for faster horses,

not a car, just be careful.

Now, when we last spoke, obviously,

you talked about it earlier today as well.

You talked about live podcasting,

that's a feature that a pod home has.

And I remember you said,

well, as part of live podcasting,

we have to record the live show

in order to turn it into an episode.

And then you said,

well, we're going to also do remote recording.

So have you got the remote recording service working as well now?

Not yet, we are still working on it,

because it turns out that's actually a difficult problem.

Oh, it's cold.

I'm sure I'll just knock it out for you.

Yeah, but still, you know, latency and echo,

and all sorts of weird things that happen

when people connect.

You'd think in 2026, this is a solved problem,

and people are just talking over the internet,

but you want very decent audio,

and perhaps also very decent video as well.

Like we discussed in the previous talk that we did

where we said, you know, video, not really our thing,

but now, you know, it's also easier.

So we do, for instance, now also support the alternate enclosure

where actually a lot of users are using that

to upload their video versions.

And so supported platforms that support it,

like true fans, for instance,

if people then go to an episode there,

they can just switch to the video

and back to the audio or whatever the user wants.

So have you been watching the Apple announcement?

I'm sure you have.

What are your thoughts?

I think that's very interesting

because that means that a lot more users

will consume podcasts as a video, perhaps.

All right, so they now have the choice

like they already did in Spotify,

although that's a closed system,

where you can just switch to the video and back again.

If the podcaster chooses to upload the video there as well,

but now it's kind of more of an open standard, more ish

because it is restricted to hosting partners

that have access to the API to do that with Apple for now.

But it's very interesting.

First of all, I find the technology very interesting,

HLS, which means that you don't just download

a huge video file on your local device

because the real use cases people are using this on their phones

may be out and about overcellular.

You don't want a two gig video going down there

that that's unworkable.

So HLS streams it in the tiny your packages

so that works much better.

And then also you could theoretically see where people are,

how much they listened or watched of the episode.

So yeah, we're watching it very closely.

Also for audio, perhaps with HLS,

we'll see what happens there.

But I think it's a very promising format

and also promising move.

Yeah, HLS master playlists can contain multiple video

and equally audio file formats.

And I think the Apple requirement is

that you do have an audio format within that list.

I worry that it's not delivered through RSS.

It's not delivered through the alternative enclosure.

It's not in the primary enclosure.

It's a bit of a walled garden that only works with Apple.

So again, you know, as you said,

Spotify is a closed wall garden.

YouTube is a closed wall garden.

It is a bit worrying when the likes of you and I

and many others within our community support open standards

and we're trying to make it a open ecosystem

that the bigger players as usual are going closed.

We've seen this story before with internet browsers

with Microsoft being a very proprietary closed browser

and then you had Netscape as the open browser

and the yin and yang fight started and long term open wins

but been the short term closed often win.

So it's that race, I guess.

With the other thing that you mentioned a little while,

I just wanted to get an update.

How are you doing with the app?

The app is actually doing fine.

It needs some love as it's been a while

since we've done an update there, but it works.

Yeah, I usually less mind daily driver, of course,

because that was kind of the primary use case.

So around dog food, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

So sometimes there are some unfortunate entities

like with offline, for instance, in weird scenarios

where the internet pops back up or something like that.

But it works very well.

I think we'll also add video support soon

because that is relatively easy to do.

Just detect what it is and then just actually show that

in a good way, of course.

Yeah, we do have a lot of users actually

that are using this daily.

I can see that in the back end,

although we do not gather any personal data,

just analytics to see what's going on there.

So that is very promising.

What we do not have yet, and I don't think that's coming,

is V4V payment system in there with a wallet that you have

so that you can send sito sheets or later on other stuff,

maybe two podcasts as we don't have that,

because that might make it very difficult

with laws and regulations here in the Netherlands

to actually do that.

Yeah, I look, we've had this conversation ongoing

and I think you've had a very sensible view of it,

which is, yes, I'll jump on board

when I think there's a market adoption.

I don't think you're going to be the person

who drives the market.

I think you've said, look, I think, you know,

there may be in the future.

I think we're beginning to see it, you know,

stablecoin now has become much more adopted

by MasterCard Visa, Stripe, PayPal.

And fundamentally, if you ask me,

I think that in 2026 is where we will switch,

I think the micropayment model,

the concept of paying small amounts of money

from a fan to a creator, that works.

The value for value of ethos is irrelevant

of the underlying mechanism for payment.

But where I think the Bitcoin Lightning network

has struggled, it's in two parts.

One is Bitcoin is seen as a value of store of, you know,

people that are becoming less and less interested

in trading Bitcoin and keeping it

because of the incremental value increase.

It's more like gold, digital gold,

and it is a transparent transaction.

And I think when you start to seal,

everything has a lag, but I think these are a MasterCard,

if big ifs, they add the capability on your credit card

to just do the payment in the stablecoin

and not have the massive fees

that are associated with normal transactions.

Then yeah, you might just say, right,

I go onto pod home, I put in my MasterCard

and it's got stablecoin on there as well as via transactions.

And I say, yeah, I want to pay a small amount of money

from A to B using my stablecoin.

That may be where we go,

where the big payment providers don't take a fee

and they support a micropayment currency.

Yeah, maybe, yeah, I think, yeah, I'm probably,

I'm not a big fan of the stablecoins,

but they will probably enable you to send fractions

of your fiat's, like a 10th of a euro.

We're asking for, really, to begin with.

That's all, exactly.

So we do have like a workaround,

so we have support pages,

so if you host your podcast, you can just click that on

and boom, you have a support page,

and then your listeners can go there,

and then they can donate one time or recurring

and they'd use a stripe,

so listeners can donate with credit card to whatever.

Yes, stripe supports there, Apple Pay,

so that does make it easy, but it's not in the app.

So is that the funding tag that you're using there?

Correct, okay, so we do, you know,

stripe back in, I think, so a wonderful back end.

It does a lot of really cool stuff in that.

Again, I think they have just bought,

or they bought six months ago,

a company called Bridge,

which was a stablecoin provider,

so nothing to write about right now,

but I think the arrow direction may be going that way.

I'm curious, why don't you like stablecoin?

I mean, you're a hard man to please.

Well, I think, you know, once we have that,

it might be the replacement for our fiat.

One, two, three, four, seven, you know,

normal bank accounts,

and then we have our, let's,

it's called the digital wallet,

and that might be the end all of everything

and can control everything.

So then the stablecoin providers

or whoever provides that wallet can see what you spend it on,

can also control what you spend it on,

and maybe can control, you know,

how long stablecoins last,

maybe you cannot save them for a couple of years.

You have to spend them, they expire, stuff like that.

So although the technology is very promising,

I'm curious to see how it's going to be used,

because there's a lot of potential for evil.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, no, I mean, one scenario was put out that your boss

basically looks at the fact that you're buying alcohol

on the Sunday, but you need to be on a top presentation

on the Monday.

So you go through the alcohol and you can't buy it

because your boss has blocked it.

I mean, these are very dystopian thoughts,

but, you know, Black Mirror, you know, it may well happen.

Moving forward, last question, Tim, really.

With live, I mean, I'm equally curious, with live.

One is the adoption, because live as in the lit tag

has not really set fire.

I mean, you're one of the only hosts, I think,

that really provides the end-to-end capability

to provide the server and the function.

RSS.com went about 80% of the way down the road.

They provided all the lit tag functionality,

but they didn't actually provide a server.

And we haven't really seen any of the other

big hosts do it.

So what is the uptake and what are the downsides for you

in terms of, is it an extremely expensive model

or is it an application that was quick to do

and it's easy to implement?

Yeah, so like you said, we supported and provided

everything that you need.

So you just click it, you say, I want to use a board home

server and it just works.

You can also use your own server if you have one,

but we want to make this type of stuff,

which is pretty advanced, very easy.

And then you just go do it.

And the hardest part is to set up a connection

to the server from your local machine.

And we explain that with, but for instance,

which is an application you can install.

Broadcast, you use this thing.

Yes.

That's what it stands for.

That's what it stands for.

Yeah.

And that works well.

Adoption amongst our users is pretty high.

We have all sorts of people go in life.

There's one show that goes live six days a week.

For instance, for three hours long, like a real radio

or show, there's others as well that do that almost daily,

weekly, definitely.

Yeah, we have lots of life going on, which is good.

And you ask, you know, is that complicated,

expensive to run for us?

Not really.

So we have these ice cast servers that act as a live server.

We just run a couple of those load balance

and making sure that they, if one fails,

you still have something that runs.

And they're pretty cheap.

Actually, it's run.

They don't need a lot of resources to run

and then to support lots of users checking in.

So no, not really.

It all fits within our 15, 99 a month model.

Yeah, nice.

I mean, I had a radio station.

We did live broadcasting over the web as well as the AB.

And yeah, we use Butt from our studio and then.

Yeah, yeah, it was, this is, we're talking six years ago,

seven years ago, COVID timeframe, whatever that may be.

And you know, once you work out how to do it,

it's pretty simple.

Click this, do that, go live, right?

And it's the configuration of the ice cast server

that just takes a little bit of time.

I've always wondered though, why can't we integrate

all of that Butt capability within, you know,

when you go to StreamYard,

I don't think about Butt.

I don't have that issue.

I have a button and I say, I want LinkedIn and I want Twitter

and I want this and I click a button

and it says go live and it works.

So how can we as a podcast industry

make live broadcasting as simple as the way that StreamYard did?

We can, we just need to, to do it.

So, all right, earlier we were talking about a live

or a recording capability that we're working on.

It should just be in there as well.

That can just connect to the ice cast server and do that.

And obviously that's, it's difficult to do it well

and with good audio quality and make sure

that it works even if your internet is not super fast

and all those types of restrictions.

But that's kind of the thing we are also working towards

because like you said, that's the biggest hurdle

because not everything is contained within our platform.

You do need to set up a little application on your own device

and have a little configuration there

and that's often the most questions that we get.

Yeah, now I just think, I mean, again,

I haven't gone down the road yet,

but we are looking at true fans.

I should say we, when I talk about pod news as well,

I'm not talking about we as in CEO of TrueFans.

We are looking at long live and yeah,

these are the challenges.

I think complexity is fail simplicity

and I think if you can hide the complexity,

you have the opportunity to bring on what I'd call normies

because if you're having to get someone to set up button,

talk about ports and talk about ice cast URLs,

I think 90% of people are lost.

Yeah, maybe not 90%, maybe that's too high,

but I think, again, if we can make it as simple as possible,

maybe we'll get wider adoption.

Now, 2026, what's it looking like for pod home?

What's the other plans that you've got in mind?

Oh, so many things that we want to do.

Always small improvements, you know,

make things faster, cheaper to run.

That's the type of thing that's always going on.

So perhaps more automation use cases.

We already heard, for instance, Z peer.

Now, there's a couple of things,

but we also want to make that do everything

that you can do in the app.

And then also create connect tours for make.com,

which is kind of also like Z peer,

but just a slightly different format.

We'll probably expand the API

and also the MCP capabilities a bit more

based on feedback also and what we see happening there.

And we'll continue work on our recording feature.

So that we just want everything to be in the platform

that you just have a button and boom,

you have a podcast, that's kind of the dream.

And we're working towards that.

Do you see AI chatbot type interfaces

in the app side of the equation?

You're talking about using it on the hosting side

of the equation.

What are your thoughts on using it on the app side?

Yeah, I don't know.

I don't really see the use case yet.

So for instance, I could,

what we do in pod home, we have pod home AI,

for instance, and that does transcripts, chapters,

description, identifies people, all the type stuff for you.

It would be very cool if something like that

would be on your device in your podcast player app,

like the pod home player app or on the true friends app,

for instance, and you just say,

oh, this episode does not have chapters.

Would be cool if it did have chapters.

Boom, let's express it.

And now I have chapters and I can see what it's actually about.

That would be a cool use case.

But also I don't really want to mess with content

that chose not to have chapters

because they are augmenting things

that you don't really have the permissions to.

So that's a bit of a slippery slope.

But something like that, so summary episodes,

for instance, if I have a Lex Friedman episode of eight hours,

I don't want to listen to the whole thing,

just give me 20 minutes of it.

Just pick the best things of that.

Something like that would be very cool,

but it would have to be on device, I think,

because if you have to do an API call to OpenAI

or a cloud or something, it's going to be very expensive.

And then you have to charge users

or minimize the experience that I don't like that.

I think that is coming like smaller models

that will run locally on device on your iPhone, for instance,

maybe later on, that can be contained within an app.

So there are use cases, definitely.

But by then, perhaps maybe even Apple

has an AI assistant that might just be able to do that

for you right there in the US.

Yeah, I think Apple may well go down that.

Although, I don't think it'll be called Siri.

You never know, Siri might find a brand.

Gemini, right?

Yeah, licensed spy Apple one more time.

Yeah, no, I think there are companies

that have been doing some interesting work in this space,

snipped out of Switzerland,

done some really clever work with Kevin.

James and I were talking about a company called PodShrink,

which was a good example of shrinking down a large podcast episode

down into one minute, two minutes,

and using like notebook LM type functionality.

I do think there are interfaces like Spotify,

have DJX, I find, it's very limited,

but I think it's an interesting arrow of direction,

where I'm in the car, I'm hands free,

and I'm getting input, and I'm giving input back.

So play me X, go to that playlist, whatever, whatever.

I do think there are AI interfaces to apps

that will come, and I think it'll be interesting.

Because again, look, if you put your phone in your pocket

and you've got your AirPods on,

can I just use an AI interface, right?

You know, find me that episode from Barry

where he mentioned X, whatever, right?

Boom, there it is, there's a transcript,

there's a section, play it back to me, right?

I think there are ways that we can use a voice interface

with AI in a voice medium, which is what podcasting is.

Yeah, but I think the OS's will have that at some point.

This was supposed to be Siri 10 years ago already, right?

That'll work, but at some point it will work.

Yeah.

Barry, thank you so much.

Congratulations on all your AI work.

It sounds very exciting.

Where can people go find out more about pod home?

It's very simple, you just go to podhome.fm,

and you can see everything there,

and you can also start a 30-day free trial right there.

Surely you've got to rename it to podhome.ai now.

Nah.

No.

Barry, will we see you in London this year?

Now, the London podcast show.

This year? No.

My father was already, it was already.

No, this year?

No.

Maybe next year.

No, not going to be able to have a beer with you.

What can I say?

Barry, take care, my friend.

Speak to you soon.

Thank you.

Barry from podhome, and if the idea of AI helping you

with your podcast sounds an exciting thing,

then you should take a look at Buzzsprout, our sponsor.

They have a thing called cohost.

Cohost is very clever.

It does automated transcripts for you.

It will produce for you automated show notes

and all of that sort of thing.

It will produce a title if you can't think of a good title

for that.

You can give you clips and things like that

as well, buzzsprout.com to learn more.

James, if a podcast is published

and no one hears it, does it count?

Now, this is about a story that we covered

earlier on in the week about competition in podcasting.

And I've heard these numbers before,

but it's always nice to see updated numbers.

So the total number of new podcasts

or rather the total number of new podcast feeds

because let's be careful on what we're talking about.

Last year, 207,000.

So if you're there thinking,

there's a lot of competition in podcasting,

well, 207,000 is quite a lot of new shows.

But then go to the bookstore

because just in the US, new figures say that

there were more than four million new books

published last year, more than four million.

So if we think that we've got too much competition

and it's all very, very difficult with podcasting,

my goodness, you should be selling a book.

But I thought that was a fascinating stat

from the ever-intelligent Tom Webster

and worthwhile sharing.

Oh, and how many of those books were actually read, James?

Well, I would totally agree.

I mean, how many of the books that I've bought

are entirely read as well is certainly a question.

Right, let's go around the world.

Australia is doing some work on the future of measurement,

which sounds very exciting.

That's the IB in Australia doing that sort of thing.

Weird stuff going on with CNN.

They are making some of their shows look like podcasts.

They're putting great big microphones in shot.

They're sort of kind of recording.

I mean, Jake Tappers show appeared to come from his office

and there was a cheap sofa in there

and there were things on the wall and everything else,

it's all a bit weird.

So I'm not really sure what CNN is playing at,

but there again, I mean, you know,

for CNN, they can just play around at the moment

because who knows what their new owner

is going to be playing around with?

Well, I was going to say, I mean,

I thought Larry Ellison was going to make cuts

when he got the company, not before he got the company.

Yes, exactly.

I mean, none of that, none of the whole thing,

I mean, it's all very sort of all.

Let's make this look really cool

and we'll fill our desks full of junk

and put these massive, great big microphones there

and really, is that really what you want to do?

But I suppose that there is a visual language

around podcasting and what that's potentially saying

is that lots of people love podcasts

and so therefore CNN wants to look as if it's

like a big podcast, very weird, very strange.

So I think if you can't beat them, join them.

Maybe that's well, yes.

But what was even funnier though, James,

was Fox News hosts were all laughing about it

and then I think in a couple of weeks' time,

if they have to do it as well,

I think there won't be laughing anymore.

I don't know, it's very weird.

No, it is very strange.

Now zipping over to Africa, James,

what's going on over there?

Yeah, there's a radio broadcaster's convention happening

in Joeburg at the venue in Green Park

and yes, lots of broadcasters, content creators

but talking about podcasting,

talking about unlocking the podcasting economy strategies

for production, distribution and monetization.

There's a lot going on in South Africa right now

in terms of podcasting,

an awful lot going on in South Africa

and actually here in Riga, in Latvia,

where I've been talking with a lot of different people

from radio around the world.

I ended up bumping into somebody else

from South Africa talking about what the future

of podcasting is down there.

His name is François Routiff

and he sounds nothing like that

but he's working for IONO.FM

and he was saying just how much podcasting has changed

quite recently in South Africa

so probably we should get him on at some point

but yeah, really, really interesting, really interesting.

People and jobs, moving people are doing things.

So John Ternas, who's John Ternas Sam?

Well, it's a name that you shouldn't get to know, I believe.

The bookies, I assume, it seems to be the pop favorite.

Hot favorite, hasn't been mentioned by Trump this week though

but the hot favorite for the Apple CEO job,

that's what, he's a senior vice president

for Hardware and Engineering.

They are saying that they will only promote from within,

so yeah.

No, and it makes perfect sense to promote from within for Apple,

I think, interesting to see Hardware,

which is the bit of Apple,

which is very successful,

essentially running the whole thing.

The software design is quite a lot of people are saying

less than nice things about that.

So here's hoping that if John ends up...

In the middle of the glass, big glass.

And all of these curved corners.

So hopefully we will...

Cutting corners, I think, a lot more about that.

The BBC is to get a new director general

in case you don't know what a director general is.

I don't blame you.

It's the CEO, basically.

Matt Britain is tips to get the job.

Britain for the BBC, I see what they've done there.

He was head of Google for Europe, the Middle East,

and Africa for more than 10 years.

So he has no media background.

Hopefully he will get a deputy, if he's clever,

he'll get a deputy with that media background

because he will definitely need that.

But what he does have a good background is,

it is being part of a very large organisation,

being able to steer change within that,

and being able to get people to at least understand

what their mission is.

So it should be interesting to see Matt Britain,

head of the BBC, who's head of CrossWires,

the podcast festival in Sheffield in the UK.

Nobody knows because they have been advertising that,

managing director job going for CrossWires in Sheffield,

that should be very exciting.

Downside, you have to live in Sheffield.

No, I don't believe that that's the case, actually.

Oh, I'm down, I have the pay you do.

I'm not sure.

It's a nice place, Sheffield.

It's a nice place.

I used to work there, yeah, it's a nice place.

I haven't been north of Watford for years.

So that's good.

And changes at Global Studios as well.

Craig Hunter is joining Global Studios as Managing Director.

Now he comes from STV, I believe.

So it's an interesting...

It's spoke to the wife about him.

Oh, right, yes, it's an interesting move for Global

to have a big name, Managing Director of that particular company.

But yes, that should be a good thing to watch.

So he ends up, it says here,

we'll work closely with Global's Group CEO, Simon Pitts,

and Chief Broadcast and Content Officer James Rhea.

James is a very bright chap.

So, yeah, it's going to be interesting.

You know, a proper executive in terms of that.

And in awards news, there's a new podcast awards, brilliant.

Hooray.

This one's called the MPN Awards.

It's run by the Marketing Podcast Network.

They're open to any space on your shelf.

Because here's a new award.

Any podcast in the marketing podcast world?

I did take a cursory look through their website

to try and understand what a marketing podcast was.

And I don't really know.

So, there we are.

But anyway, if you are running a marketing podcast,

maybe a marketing podcast is one that you,

you know, if you don't know what a marketing podcast is,

then you're not in the target market.

But however it works,

nominations close at the end of April

and these signal awards are now officially open

for entries as well.

The tech stuff, tech stuff, on the partners weekly review.

Yes, it's the stuff you'll find every Monday

in the pod news newsletter.

Here's where Sam talks technology.

Well, we talked about the iOS 26.4, which is live,

so that's great.

Now, Sam, have you four true fans?

Did you get a hundred million dollars

in a funding round last year

and just not tell anybody about it?

Yes, yes, completely.

A hundred percent, I'm not Pinocchio.

No, we didn't, sadly, not that much.

No, not that much.

But it looks like Blue Sky have.

Yes.

Blue Sky have, which is weird.

What a weird thing to do.

An entire company, which is based on trust,

and they've hidden the fact that they've been

sitting on a hundred million dollars.

And it's Bane as well, which is Bane is one of those.

Interesting venture capital companies

that is leading the charge for inshitification,

if you ask me.

You look at what they invest in

and you look at what they do to those companies.

It's not a good thing.

Interestingly, Bane is the current owners

of the Virgin Australia airline,

which I've not been on for a long, long time.

So, yeah, so inshiticate those.

They come down as well, so.

So, there's a new Interim CEO at Blue Sky.

Jay Gruber, no longer at CEO,

perhaps that's got something to do with this, who knows?

But, yes.

So, interesting times for Blue Sky.

Interesting times for Master Don as well.

I did see some figures recently,

which said that Master Don had loads and loads of users,

but most of those users have now gone away.

So, Master Don is much, much smaller than it used to be.

So, I don't know the truth to some of that,

but yeah, you can probably understand

that the excitement of Master Don

for many people has gone away.

But, yeah, what are No Mono doing?

No Mono, the Swedish company with a production inner box.

They've added new stellar mics.

They've also increased their video production as well.

So, they're very excited that they've now

sport both audio and video

and have some new mics that work with iPhones.

Yeah, I think what they're doing,

if I've read the press release correctly,

I think what you do is you record the audio

with your No Mono magic box.

You record the video with whatever it is

that you want to record the video with,

and then magically through the power of AI,

it syncs the audio that you've recorded on one device

with the video that you've recorded on a different device.

I think that's what it's doing.

Okay.

Which sounds very interesting.

I'm sure they do.

It does sound like a bit of a one trick pony,

but it does sound interesting, so yeah.

They'll be at the London podcast show.

We're going to have a look.

They will, they will indeed.

British Airways, how exciting you can now listen

to audible podcasts on British Airways,

more than 250 hours of podcasts

and audio books will be available for free.

If you travel long haul with BA,

if you travel short haul then tough,

you're not even getting a tele in front of you.

But if you travel long haul then you get

chapter one with you on the short haul.

You get access.

Pointless.

Well, I'll be in chapter four, I don't know.

We'll come back.

Don't know, we'll come back to that.

Now, Cafe Pacific, who I was on last week,

don't have any podcasts in their system at all,

which I thought was interesting.

Not a single podcast.

So yeah, it's differences for horses and courses there.

I was trying to remember where the fin air had any.

I'm not even sure that fin air had any as well.

So yeah, anyway, if you want to go back,

you will find an earlier pod news weekly review

where we interview the people from one of these companies

that actually does all of the hard work

with getting podcasts into Inflight Entertainment.

It's a company called Sparfax.

And you can go back and find that in this very feed.

Quick note, Amazon celebrated 20 years

of Amazon S3 and AWS.

How does that make me feel?

Yes, 20 years of Amazon S3 and they still have

many easy to use.

All cheap.

And finally, I only mentioned this.

The only fan CEO has passed away at the age of 43.

I mentioned it because several people in my village

still think that I am the CEO of OnlyFans

because they come out.

Oh, I've heard, I've heard you are the CEO of OnlyFans.

No, nothing to do with it.

Can you give me a discount, Sam?

Yeah, exactly.

Boost your grand, boost your grand.

Super comments.

Saps.

Fan mail.

Super chats and email.

Our favorite time of the week,

it's the pod news weekly review inbox.

So many different ways to get in touch with this fan

mail by using the link in our show notes.

Boosts or email.

We share any money that we make as well between us.

Thank you to Bruce, the ugly, quacking duck,

who has sent two rows of duck, who sent,

yes, a row of ducks twice.

Yeah, that's what I'm trying to say.

4,444 sets.

Excellent.

He says, enjoy the episode.

Our governor here has passed a bill

where taxes still come out of our tips.

Boo.

Oh.

Ah, well, there you go.

That's the downside of a federated system.

So there's a thing.

Ralph, E. Owens, Jr.

Now Ralph ended up joining us as a power supporter last week,

which was excellent.

And I said, I would love to know more about Ralph.

I really should get in touch, promptly

forgot, because I've been busy.

So thank heavens that he has got in touch with us

through fan mail, which is another thing

that our sponsor Buzzsprout offers.

And it says here, hello, guys.

This is Ralph, E. Owens, Jr.

calling in from Houston, Texas.

Just wanted to take some time.

Oh, it's Houston, Texas.

I just wanted to take some time to show my appreciation

for all the value that you give to the podcast community.

I was so surprised to hear my name called

on the podcast News Weekly Review.

My wife really got a kick out of it.

Thank you so much for the shout out.

Not just about that, he was paying.

And they just like, what?

What?

What?

You're paying for what now?

What are you doing now?

It's free.

And he says, again, I've been podcasting since 2024.

So roughly two years immediately,

once I got into podcasting,

I started looking for resources to follow.

Stephen Robles suggested that I follow you guys.

Thank you, Stephen.

And it's been an absolute delight listening

to you daily and weekly.

My name is Ralph E.

As in Edward Owens, Jr.

I thought it was E for excellent Ralph.

And then I'm my podcast.

Ah, it's called The Leadership Sovereignty Podcast

where we help every day working individuals

to use leadership principles

in order to advance and promote their careers.

You could do some of that, Sam.

So if the same thing I can do,

I've got no idea why I say that.

So if there's anything I can ever do to support you guys,

please do not hesitate to let me know.

Thank you so much, cheers.

Thank you so much, Ralph.

That's very kind.

There's something my mother would accept to me.

Have you thought of any leadership principles?

So I have to say, now I've got a story.

Right.

So I started off having a part-time DJ job

and my dad said it wasn't a sensible career.

So I ended up being an Army officer.

My mother was super proud

because being a typical Indian mother,

she could boast and tell everyone,

my son's in the Army, he's my son.

My son's a part-time teacher.

Of course, when I left the Army.

Yeah, yeah, didn't work.

That didn't work.

Right, so I left the Army and I came out

and worked in Microsoft.

That was fine for a while and all those things.

And then when I started getting into entrepreneurship,

A, she couldn't say the word,

B, she didn't know how to tell her friends.

So she just didn't tell them anything

of what I was up to anymore.

So yes, I was an entrepreneur.

I don't know what that means.

What do you do?

And no idea what I told her.

Well, we've got some messages from true fans as well, haven't we?

We have indeed.

Not only fans, I should, again, point out.

Yes, but true fans.

I've been that account.

Right, so let's go.

Seth Goldstein said,

congrats to true fans FM and Sam.

Yes, that's what you do with our video hosting

launching last week.

So thank you very much, Seth.

And yes, and he also says,

a terabyte is quite a bit.

Yes.

No, it's more than a bit.

It's a bit.

It's a terabyte.

It's a bit.

Yes.

And then yes, I did slip up by saying it was a download,

just a download in my humble opinion as dead.

It's a stream now.

And Silas drops us a message saying,

glad to any plans for Pocka Show London.

Are you going to do drinks night again?

For me to awkwardly sit at silently

or another attempt at pod camp?

Well, they're probably not pod camp,

but Pocka Show London drinks.

Are there discussions ongoing, aren't they Sam?

There are.

Yes, I'll be sliding into people's DMs later in the month,

as I say.

Great.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes, there are plans.

Yes, excellent.

Yes, no, it should be fun.

Yes, it might be the biggest event that we have done,

which is difficult, because all of the other events

are quite small.

Or it might not.

Yeah, it just depends on the social weather.

Yes, it depends as to whether, yes.

And Neil Velio dropped his message,

so potential bought the IP from Voxalize.

No, I don't think so.

This is a whole different thing

way Kingsley from Potential is actually here as well.

But yes, no, it's not any IP from anybody else.

So there we go.

Anyway, Neil, thank you for that.

Thank you also to the excellent 24 supporters

who have gone to wikly.podnews.net,

and they're giving us real money, which is a very kind

Ralph East Act junior, for example, John Spurlock,

I've heard of him, Miss Eileen Smith, David Marshall,

Rachel Corbett, and Dave Jackson to name,

but some, we super appreciate that.

That actually really helps us with the drinks and things

like that.

So thank you so much for doing that.

So what's been happening for you this week, Sam?

You've been doing a video streaming now.

Has it all fallen apart?

Or is it all working beautifully?

No, it's fallen apart now, I'm talking.

That's working beautifully.

It's one of those things that, again,

we're onboarding the first few testing testing,

but it's looking good so far.

We've added a watchtelling metric.

It's as long alongside our listen time metrics.

So yes, because we stream the MP4, we don't download.

It means that we can measure how long you've watched as well.

And what's cool is if you switch a bit like the Apple switching,

if you switch between watching the video and then go to the audio,

we then automatically start calculating your listen time.

So you'll get what the listen time

is for the audio section and you'll get the watch time

for the video section.

Very nice.

Are you going to be at some point being

one of these Apple podcast partners and doing all of that stuff?

Yeah, if you can't beat them, yeah, if you can't beat them.

Yeah, we have been given kindly.

Thank you to Apple access to their secret API key

and we are now testing the final part.

So I think we'll get their approval.

But yes, HLS delivery through the API.

We also do HLS delivery, which is quite nice because we were doing it

before the Apple announcement.

So it hasn't required as much work as some other hosts possibly.

So we've sported it in the old turn to the enclosure,

but also through this API key as well.

Very nice too.

And the last one, James, you'll be very happy to know.

We refactored all of the old BAPI payments

and we are now doing comments as well.

So next week, hopefully, you'll start to see comments appearing in your,

what's it your, your runway app as well as have you updated the?

Yes, yes.

Well, that all sounds exciting, doesn't it?

Yes, yes, I'm not using a, I'm not using a, a note of my own now.

So everything is going into the strike app.

And so yes, if you're supporting that, then that's excellent news.

Let's, let's wait and see what we get.

Indeed.

Yes.

Yes.

Holds his breath.

Counts down 100.

And hopes.

Yes.

No, indeed.

James, someone's been happening for you.

Well, so I have been on a number of long flights.

And I'm currently in Riga in Latvia.

The first time I've ever been to Latvia.

I had a day off a couple of days ago.

And one of the places that I walked to,

it's got a very small town centre.

It's got a nice, you know, old town in the middle of it.

And during Soviet times, Riga was going

to be the financial capital of the Soviet Union.

So quite a lot of the buildings here are quite grand.

And quite a lot of the roads are quite wide and all of that,

which is, you know, it's a fascinating place to wander around.

But anyway, I just sort of had a wander round

and walked to the Russian Embassy.

And you might be thinking, James, why did you walk to the Russian Embassy?

Because what happened here when Russia invaded Ukraine

is that the first things that the Latvians did,

given that we've got a border to Russia right here,

the first things that the Latvians did is that they changed the name of the road

outside of the Russian Embassy to be called independent Ukraine road, basically.

So the address of the Russian Embassy is the Russian Embassy

independent Ukraine road, Riga, which I just think is brilliant.

And they've also put a massive, great big portrait of Putin

but looking like a death mask,

staring at the embassy from the building on the other side of the street,

which happens to be a state museum.

So yeah, I mean, they're not messing around, the Latvians, I'll tell you.

But it's been really nice. It's been a fun place to be.

I caught up with a number of Latvian podcasters,

both at the conference, but also just in the pub and all of that.

So yeah, that was really good. I was very jet lagged,

but that was great fun. So I've really enjoyed it.

I'd like to add jet lag to the end of that sentence.

Yes. Oh, yes.

But no, it's been a fun time.

So later on today, heading all the way back again,

the delay in publishing the Pond News Weekly Review last week

was that my hard drive had filled up on my Macbook, unbeknown to me.

And so what the Mac does is it goes,

oh, it doesn't look as if you've got an awful lot of space.

I will just put all of this stuff in the cloud.

And then you don't really notice that it's doing that.

It just takes slightly longer to open a file

because it has to go and grab it from the cloud.

Except you do notice that when you're on a plane

and the internet is very, very slow

and you realize that all of the audio from last week was in the cloud.

So that was annoying and meant that I couldn't edit it

the time that I had thought that I was going to edit it.

So anyway, I've made some space now.

So that is all good.

Anyway, that's it for this week.

All of our podcast stories taken from the Pond News Daily newsletter

of PondNews.net.

You can support this show by streaming stats.

You can give us feedback using the Buzzsprout fan mail link

in our show notes and you can send us a boost

or become a power supporter even better.

Like the 23 power supporters at weekly.podnews.net.

Our music from TM Studios, our voiceover Sheila D.

Our audio is recorded using clean feed

and we edit with Hindenburg.

And we're hosted and sponsored by Buzzsprout.

Start podcasting, keep podcasting.

Get updated every day.

Subscribe to our newsletter at podnews.net.

Tell your friends and grow the show in support us.