Podcast Market Chaos and Confusion over Video

Well, welcome to Podcast Tips. My name is Rob Greenlee. Thank you for being here tonight in episode 60 of this podcast, and I'm going to focus tonight on talking about some some of the maybe lesser seen externally kind of market confusion that's coming out of the podcast industry, the kind of the feeling of a little bit of discombobulation, and that is really kind of a form of chaos that's driven by this kind of massive change that seems to be reflected in some of the research that's been announced here recently. The the Edison research, the Infinite Dial, and some other research that's been, you know, it's been building out there for a few years now, this feeling that the industry is moving more towards video. And I know I spend a lot of time talking about video, and I'll be honest with you, it's a longtime passion of mine on the video side. I don't know that I'm the best video creator in the world by any stretch of the imagination, It is an area that I've seen and I've worked in quite a bit from the very early days of podcasting. As we're starting to see in the research that audio is mostly flat right now. And so, you know, if we're seeing where the trends are moving us, then that's an important factor that causes people to go, hmm, what's going on here? You know, and what do I need to do to kind of move with the flow or move with the wave and get on the wave and ride that wave to stay at the cutting edge of what's happening with the media landscape. So the podcast industry is really, I think, at a very deep level right now experiencing unprecedented that I've seen in the 20 years that I've been involved in podcasting. Turmoil around the entry and the success somewhat of YouTube and coming in and somewhat disrupting this perfect RSS-based audio platform called podcasting. And then you have to factor in the influence of what we're seeing with Spotify in this and the combination of the two of them is really pushing us into a track of acceleration into the world that used to exist back in the early days of podcasting, of video podcasting. Now it's being done in quite a bit different way and in a different focus than what we've seen in the early days of podcasting when bandwidth was really more limited. And the, the reason we had downloads was to cater to the limited bandwidth, because back in the early days of podcasting, a lot of people were still on dial-up connections. And so then we started moving into a little faster connections. And, and, but one of the reasons that we had, um, this download and the success of podcasting was the, the concept of a, of a download, right? And so people could download the episodes from the RSS feed and then And then in the morning they had software, or during the night they had software that would automatically transfer that media file over to a portable media player like an MP3 player or an iPod. So through iTunes at the time and through Windows Media Player also on the Windows side in the early days of podcasting too. So So the reasons that we had downloading were, that really come out of a different era. And most people now don't really realize that when they click play on a podcast, they're actually initiating a download, even though it comes across to them as they're clicking that play button that it appears to be streaming to them. But the audience really doesn't care, right? Doesn't really care about the backend, doesn't really care about the technology that the industry uses to deliver the media file. So when I talk about this concept, it's really talking about, you know, really the industry side and what's best for the industry and what's best also what could create the best experience for users. So obviously, as you can see in this episode tonight, I'm tackling head-on the confusion and the chaos that's reshaping, I believe, very fundamentally right now, the podcast landscape. And I think that a lot of these changes are something that have been a long time coming. Really very little in the online media, alternative media market, the new media market, whatever you want to call it, has really been shifting this way for a while. YouTube has been a part of podcasting since YouTube launched, and because YouTube launched fairly soon around the time that podcasting launched, within a year or two or so, and then Google acquired it, and then we saw additional investment going into the YouTube platform by Google in the early days of podcasting. And then, you know, but podcasting started, and I think I mentioned it in last week's episode too, you know, video was a big part of podcasting in the early years. And what's fascinating about what I've seen happen just over the last couple days is some of the early video podcast series that were successful back in the early era of video podcasting are starting to pop up again. I don't know if you You all noticed that the Dig Nation show or the Dig Nation podcast has relaunched, uh, with Kevin Rhode and Alex Albright were the hosts of the Dig Nation video podcast in the early years of podcasting. That just relaunched. Now I'm not saying that that's a, that's really a huge indication, but I did notice that the Ask a Ninja guys, which posted, you you know, a ninja-related comedy video series, has started to post on social media again. So we've seen kind of a recognition that maybe we are heading into a little bit of a different era compared to what we just went through with thinking of ourselves as audio only. So, and I think that's at the core of the chaos that's happening. Because a lot of the investment in the podcast industry, you know, some people don't like it when I use that term to describe the podcast space, have invested heavily in audio only. And I think there was good reason for that. And I think that, you know, coming out of, you know, like 10 years ago or something like that, back when like Serial and and true crime podcasts became popular. The early years of the comedians out of LA were jumping all in on audio podcasting and it just drove a lot of attention. That was in the same timeframe. And I'm talking about like 2009, 2010 is when Adam Carolla got involved in audio podcasting and you saw Joe Rogan got involved in audio podcasting. Many of the big podcasts of today really kind of started in that timeframe. You know, Marc Maron is another one of them that built, you know, with the WTF podcast, built a lot of early popularity based on audio. And so we kind of jumped in. You know, a lot of the public radio folks also got involved in podcasting. In the early years. And, you know, I think we generally perceive National Public Radio and, you know, PRX and PRI, these public radio networks and platforms, really come out of radio, right? Just public radio. So that drove us into an era of audio only. And it was easier, I have to say, It was also easier for the podcast hosting platforms to make money and make revenue from it because over a period of years, the cost of hosting audio started to kind of go down because bandwidth costs started to go down. People had ubiquitous internet access. People were less concerned about storage too. So people could start upgrading the, the bitrate of the content that they were putting out. And so, you know, I think that there was a general elevation to a higher level of quality. But I think what we've seen here over the last couple of years, and I saw it a few years ago when I was in London at the podcast show where I saw, and that was the first podcast show that was held. You know, granted, they went through the pandemic era where they just didn't hold many conferences in, in London, um, and because they couldn't because of the lockdowns and stuff. But when they did come back, I got a chance to go over there and, and go to that. And I saw that YouTube— this is back in, I think, 2022, uh, YouTube was a major sponsor of the podcast show. And that was kind of in the timeframe where it was kind of a little bit of a glimpse that maybe YouTube was going to really take a serious entrance into the podcast market. And I saw it as a little bit of a rough kind of road for them on that. Though, I think, you know, podcasters have always used YouTube. Right. But when they thought of, when creators thought of podcasting, they typically think of publishing audio into an RSS feed. And that was just not something that was natively supported by YouTube. So naturally when YouTube decided that they were going to aggressively use their platform, their video side and enable a playlist within their YouTube video channels platform, that, that was a, that was a big signal to the market that, you know, YouTube is gonna recognize podcasting and try and attract as many content creators, audio content creators. And then they announced that they, they were gonna add RSS ingestion into their platform. So that created kind of like a, like a double attraction, right? It was like, well, send us your audio. And I think YouTube had the idea that if content creators on the podcasting side were gonna submit their audio, there was a good chance that they would say, well, let me just create a video so I have a video companion to my audio podcast that's in the platform. And because YouTube has always looked at podcasting, I worked with YouTube when I worked for PodcastOne down in Los Angeles. And YouTube was like right down the street from my office down there and had contact with the YouTube team. This was back in 2014, and they, they were all in on podcasts. They, they saw it as a source of content. They saw it as a, as a source for content creators. At the time, there was a, a lot of what I would call pirating of content that was going on, um, in the YouTube platform of podcaster content. So they would basically take content that was published, sometimes oftentimes in audio, and they would push it over to YouTube to try and make money from it. So like the big name podcasters, there were people that would basically clip the content from very, very popular podcasts and put it into YouTube and try and make money off of it. Right? So there, there was a lot of, you know, pirating that was going on between podcasting and, and YouTube, um, back in that 2014. And I think it went back even further and continued for a while. I, I think eventually YouTube cracked down on that kind of stuff. But their, their recent push over the last couple years into doing this, uh, has really kind of created the industry to to really think more about this. And also creators are getting excited because what they see is kind of like a challenge around this concept of innovation. So podcasting in YouTube feels like something new, right? It feels like something that people might want to get involved in. Right. So why not just create a video? We just came out of COVID right, where everybody upgraded their, their home studios like I did, because I, I did that. I added all these lights and the background and all that stuff back when I was working for Lipson and, and, you know, trying to upgrade my, you know, my Zoom call experience. Right. But at the time, a lot of the major media personalities, right, were being forced to do their shows from home. So if they had a big show on cable television or on cable news or whatever, they were doing it from home. And I thought it was really humorous in the early days that these big name media creators were becoming podcasters. So they started building out their home studios and eventually after they got embarrassed because their lighting was terrible, their microphones were bad, even Even Howard Stern messed up on this in the early days. And a lot of the, you know, the Anderson Coopers from CNN and Chris Cuomo and stuff tried, started to do their shows from their home. And they just didn't have it together. And so eventually what happened, to tell this story, is that they wound up tapping their team that they worked with at the cable channels to help them equip their home studios. So I think that was a significant moment for the mainstream media to really start to embrace this concept of podcasting. Right. And so, and as we've seen over the last couple of years, this prominence of audio and video podcasting We just went through with the presidential election and just the prominence of that. I mean, even if you go back to the early days, even back in the 2014 timeframe and earlier, you know, presidents went on podcasts. I remember when Barack Obama was in Marc Maron's garage in LA doing an episode, right? So, and then George W. Bush had a podcast. Many, many, many years ago. So we've seen kind of mainstream kind of adoption where some of these folks who traditionally just did mainstream media were starting to shift over to doing more content on the digital side. So this has been a long time coming and I've been seeing it for a long time and wondering, you know, when is the cutover gonna happen? When is the crisis gonna happen with um, with mainstream media. And I think we, we are in that era right now. And I think, um, you know, and what, what I want to talk about next is, well, what's our reaction? And should we be all freaked out about this change, or should we embrace it and move forward with it and treat it as an opportunity to kind of innovate with podcasting? And what we've thought of as podcasting. And I do think the instant reaction in the industry is to kind of fight it a little bit and say, no, we wanna be audio only. That's the strength of podcasting. Well, I can't argue with that. Audio is a strength of podcasting, but I think that there's another potential here. And I talked about it last week, talking about trying to shift podcasting over to doing more streaming. HLS streaming. I didn't want to make this whole episode about HLS, but that is part of this innovation layer, I guess, what I'm talking about. The Podcasting 2.0 Initiative has been kind of encouraging this live HLS-based streaming in their protocols to be added to RSS for a few years now. And I've been in I've been involved in those conversations off and on for, for, for the whole time since that Podcasting 2 initiative started. And I, I appreciate all the efforts of Dave Jones and Adam Carolla, or Adam Curry, and, and what, what they've put into that and to actually, um, make it what it is. But it's been slowly adopted, but it has been adopted. I have to give credit where credit is due, is that it's, it's being adopted. So what we have to do now is see, well, this is what we're seeing in the research, and as an industry we have to decide, are we going to let YouTube kind of capture video and control it as we look to the future? Because if we don't respond and we don't try and retain the opportunity to deliver content via RSS, in competition with— and I'm going to talk about Spotify next. Spotify shifting over to this too, and Spotify would love to disrupt RSS. Since the early years, they have wanted to, to not support RSS. I mean, well, I shouldn't put it that way. What they wanted to do was use RSS to get a copy of the media file, a clean copy without advertising, that they can insert advertising, which is somewhat exactly what we're seeing YouTube do right now. So all Spotify is doing, to shift over into talking about Spotify more, they want to disrupt RSS. They want to say, well, if you're gonna give us RSS then, and you wanna have video, then if you upload your video, then there's no reason for us to have your RSS-based audio in the platform. We'll just use the audio from your video. Which basically cuts out the audio version coming out of your hosting platform, which disrupts the business models. And that's only possible based on the fact that we are a download medium, right? They can easily just download that file, store it on their own servers, and redistribute it, which Spotify has always wanted to do. Just like YouTube. That's all YouTube does is capture files that are directly uploaded to them and then redistribute them, 'cause that's how their infrastructure is built. And it's primarily built around video. So, you know, what's different about Spotify is that their platform has been historically pretty much an audio-only platform. You know, with music and audio podcasts and, and audiobooks and those kind of things. But they announced many years ago now that they wanted to get into video. It's been a very bumpy ride for Spotify to get involved in video. I remember that they announced that they were going to support podcasting many years ago, and it took them 2 years actually to get it done after they said they were going to do it. There was a changeover in staff and things like that, and, and once they did decide, they were working with all the hosts to directly contact all of the podcast hosts and get people to submit their RSS feeds. And then the hosts had to submit those RSS feeds via a spreadsheet to Spotify to add to their collection. And so that's how the early years, how podcasts got into Spotify until they had built their infrastructure to ingest RSS feeds RSS externally or via an API sharing that was done through the podcast hosting platforms. But those agreements for pass-through on Spotify were done individually to each of the podcast hosting platforms. And so I'm trying to give you a little bit of a historical background to what actually happened with all this. And because Spotify's inclination was that just give us the files and we'll take care of them, we'll deliver them. It's the same thing that happened with Pandora, same thing that happened with Facebook with their entrance into podcasting too. And I'm just being fair about it and just telling you the facts of what actually happened is that they wanted to own the distribution. Of your show and they wanted a copy of your show without any advertising in it so they could insert the advertising or they could be in charge of the advertising. So that's the tension that the medium has had for many years. And so as we've seen video become a higher priority, I think Spotify is not supporting video in the right way and that kind of explains why you know, some of their biggest creators don't really publish video into Spotify. And I've looked at their interface that they have in the Spotify interface to surface content, and they don't do a very good job of surfacing audio and video in a particular show, right? It's either video or it's audio. So I like, I go to the Joe Rogan podcast in there and really the only thing I can find in there is the video version. Um, I may not be looking in the right space, but they don't have a, like a toggle in Spotify that can say, well, you know, locate all the, you know, all the videos, all the video shows, and then a toggle that says, well, just give me all the audio shows. Apple used to support that. So to talk a little about RSS in video, in the earlier years, Apple had a little toggle at the very top of their podcast app that would allow you to click a little button that would say, show me all the video shows, and then click on the other side of the button and say, show me all the audio shows. And, but Apple decided to take that out of their interface. And that's why we have what we have today. If you wanna find video in the Apple Podcasts ecosystem, you go into the search box and you type in video. And you know what? The only thing that shows up are videos, are video shows that have in the title metadata, the word video. So it's not searching or looking for content based on the media file type, as far as I can tell. And it's only finding— and sometimes it won't find the video RSS feeds, um, that are in their catalog because there's no discovery pathway for people to discover. So myself and others have been encouraging the Apple team for a few years now to say, well, I think it's time for you to bring back that toggle between audio and video so people can easily find the video, and that will spark renewed interest in creating video via RSS, right? So that's where this really at the core, that's where this conversation comes from around How do we better support video in RSS to keep RSS relevant? Because I think RSS is under threat right now. Many people don't see that, but I believe it's under threat right now at the biggest platforms. I'm talking about YouTube and Spotify. I don't think that they have the intention to or wanting to continue to support a download version and have creators be treated fairly about it. And I don't, you know, that's a subjective view to some degree. You know, what one person sees as taking advantage of creators is also seen as, well, I'm in that huge platform and I'm gonna be discovered. And that's what these platforms have always traded on is, you know, you give us free content and we give you, the opportunity to reach an audience. And that's, to many, that's been seen as a fair exchange. Even Spotify has taken that view too. So they can run ads, they can monetize access to your content without sharing any revenue with you. So that's been their business model for years. Whether we like it or not, we are trading on our ability to reach an audience because of the market power of these big platforms. So, you know, so as we fast forward to today, you know, and where the audience and creator confusion is, as a lot of creators now feel pressured, and I think that's justified right now, to pivot. And pivot to becoming an audio and video creator? Because the research is starting to show that increasing numbers of people would like a podcast to have an audio or video option, right? So some situations, some consumption situations, it makes sense to just consume the audio. But there's other situations that we're seeing grow, where the listener or the viewer wants to consume it on their big screen television in their living room. So, you know, we as creators have to decide, well, do we just want to limit the ability of our audience to get access to, to our content based on our personal preference to just being an audio creator, but are we potentially shortchanging ourselves in getting access to what the audience wants. And now obviously some genres of content don't lend themselves to video production as good as some genres of content that lend themselves to creating either a video-first strategy or an audio-first strategy. But I think we're gonna see, and I think we're seeing the early stages of this, where creators are going to do an audio-video strategy. It's not gonna be leaning one way or the other. It's gonna be, well, I wanna be everywhere that I can be. Because I feel like based on my genre or the topics that I talk about, it's gonna be relevant to audio consumers and it's gonna be relevant to video consumers. And I think that's really the way to start thinking about this as we look to the future. And I think that there is a little bit of concern the audio will take a little bit of a backseat to video as we look to the future. And I think we're seeing a little bit of a clue on that right now that that could be happening. And I think as we saw in the Edison research, the Infinite Dial, there wasn't much growth that was happening across most of the genres of audience out there in the audio side. It was still, it was kind of like flatlined from 2024 to 2025 around growth. Now granted, that level of consumption is still significant. I'm not saying that audio podcast consumption is dropping. I think what's happening is audiences are shifting to consuming shows also in video if they're made available in video. So it does raise the question in my mind, is the growth in podcast consumption gonna be more around the growth on the video side? As we look to the future. And I think that is causing some consternation and concern and worry in the audio podcast market that maybe we've peaked out on audio-only podcasts. I don't know that that's realistically true, but I think that the current data that we're seeing right now is basically inconclusive on that. I think what we need to see is like next year's data, that there's growth in the audio side at the same time that there's growth in the video side. And I think as more shows potentially do audio and video versions, that we may see that resume again. Because I think shows that are embracing video and doing a good job with video. And I think the other consternation and chaos part is just the expectations of doing video, just like I'm doing here with this show. I mean, not every podcaster is going to be okay to do something like I'm doing tonight, but I also think that not everybody has to do a show live either. So, so I think that there is a certain kind of confusion in the market as we discuss about video, oftentimes it gets lumped into talking about live video as opposed to on-demand video. Now granted, live is an important piece, but I, you know, the live part has always been a smaller subset of the creator market. I've been doing a live show. I do a live show with Todd Cochran called The New Media Show. Doing that for like 13 or 14 years every week. And for a year or two, we did that show twice a week. But that show has always had a distribution that was like 20% consumption on the video side and 80% consumption on the audio side. So, you know, so that's a clue about what could happen to some creators. And then there's gonna be other creators that are gonna have a heavier audience on the video side because maybe they've done a more compelling production that's more compelling than maybe this show, right? I'm just a talking head here. There's not a lot of exchange with other people, or I'm not bringing up on the screen. Now granted, on the on-demand or the video podcasting side of this show that I publish into an RSS feed, there is things that I overlay that are in addition to what I have on this, this platform. This StreamYard platform is a little cumbersome to use with, you know, kind of random overlay kind of experiences on the screen. So that's something I'm going to have to play around with, but it is going to require a lot of kind of management of the software while I'm trying to do a show and that's something I can more easily add in post-production. So you have the potential of creating your master recording in the video format and then going into a video editor and adding elements and adding transitions and adding other visuals on the screen to make the video version of your podcast better. And then take that audio out of the video and do additional things with that. You know, you can have maybe slightly different introduction music, have it transition into a different kind of a flow, but you've captured the episode in one recording that gives you the audio and the video. So, you know, what you do it in post-production before you put it out as an HLS stream, potentially on-demand stream, and if you do it live into these platforms like YouTube or LinkedIn or X or any of these platforms like I'm doing tonight, you know, once it's done, it's done on those platforms. I can't really, I can't really get in and edit this version of this show on LinkedIn. Maybe at some point I, I will be able to, to do that. I'll be able to pull it up in LinkedIn and upload a new version or something like that that has these elements in it. So there's, there's technology layers that we can, you improve on this stuff to make things better. But I think we have a ways to go here. But I thought it was really interesting in the research that the fastest-growing segment of podcasting, as far as on the audience side, I don't know if you, all you folks saw this, but the 55+ age group saw the most growth in consumption. And that's watching video as well as listening. All the other age demos, the younger age demo, like the 18 to 24 and the 34 to, I think, 49, were pretty much flat. The only growth that any of those groups saw based on the Edison research was they watched some video. So, If we want to grow, that's what's causing this, is this confusion and chaos in the market is everybody wants to grow. But what are we going to have to do to support that better instead of, you know, looking at YouTube and saying, well, that's the future of podcasting is growing on YouTube. How do we grow with video outside of these big platforms, outside of Spotify, outside of YouTube, and also to enable other apps a chance to grow their consumption. Maybe it enables folks to stream into private communities too. Now granted, it's technically possible to do all this stuff today, you know, with, You know, there's, there's platforms that you can publish video into and just have it available in those platforms. You know, I know of a couple that I, I'm currently playing around with, but those aren't based on RSS, um, publishing into. And I mean, I could see in like Podpage, they could support a live stream, or they could support an HLS stream in their platform. They're currently embracing displaying YouTube videos in there, but I would rather, as part of my podcast website, I would rather want to support my own HLS stream instead of driving all of the traffic to YouTube. So I guess at the end of the day, and this also involves monetization too, if we just give our media files to all these big platforms, they're going to make money on it, But how much are they gonna share it with us? We're the creators of this. You know, the monetization program on Spotify is a, that's a big milestone to hit to be able to even get qualified to make a revenue share. Now YouTube is better. They have a much lower threshold that you have to achieve to achieve some level of monetization. But it, you know, YouTube is making the vast majority of the revenue here. Let's be honest about it. So, you know, it's those big platforms are the ones that typically win. It's kind of like going to Las Vegas, right? And thinking that if you have $1,000 in your pocket, that there's odds that you're going to be able to put it on the craps table and double your money. Well, maybe, but what are the odds? And that's kind of what we're doing by publishing our content into platforms like YouTube and Spotify. We are playing with their desire. They have shareholders, they have expectations of revenue and profits, and they have share price that they have to worry about. Each one of us could be just a tool to help them achieve that. And that's the exchange that we all make with these platforms. So monetization is an important part of this too, as we shift into another era of podcasting, which is publishing content into private communities, private paid communities, which we're seeing a lot of growth, like at a platform like a, like a uscreen.com or a school.com. There's increasingly other platforms that podcasters are working with, and to some degree, like a Patreon, that type of a model, like a freemium model where people are publishing some free content over in this public platform, like an Apple Podcasts, and that begs the question, what's Apple gonna do here to respond to this video? I did mention that earlier. That's a huge platform that really has most of the audio podcast consumption, right? The per user of the Apple Podcast platform typically has more audio consumption than Spotify does on a per user basis. That's always been the case. And Android, from Android to iOS, iOS users typically consume a lot more content. You know, in the podcast area, it's been mostly audio podcasts. But I think, you know, if Apple did a better job of embracing video in their podcast app, they would probably see a big lift in video consumption too. That would make them competitive in the market. Now, the big question is, is Apple willing to embrace getting HLS streams from RSS to play in their platform? Will Apple embrace live streaming in their platform? These are all questions that could come from the content creator utilizing the Podcasting 2.0 Lit tag and alternative enclosure tags. It's really a matter of the podcast hosting platforms deciding that they're going to embrace HLS streaming, and that has some inherent advantages like a variable bitrate playback that's adaptive to the internet connection and the device, you know, and it enables the central hosting platforms to monetize video as well as audio. So this kind of expands the opportunity for the independent podcaster market. Right. And it also gives control back to us as creators to say, well, you know, I don't want to give my content to Spotify unless I get a deal from them. So, and as an industry, we demanded pass-through on the audio side. I think it's possible for the industry to demand support for HLS streams. Is the next thing. And if they don't do that, they don't get our content. And we work with other apps to distribute our HLS streams of our content. These can be either live or they can be on demand. It can create the same playback experience as we have right now with the download. But what it does is it gives us the ability to take back control. Streaming gives us control better access to metrics, a variable bitrate playback, because right now podcasting is a fixed bitrate playback. So it's not as innovative, it's not as advanced. So I think we have advantages that we need to take advantage of to actually innovate and grow. And I think the Podcasting 2.0 project is a good foundation for us to build upon that's already started, that we can, we can kind of coalesce around and support as an industry before we let it get controlled and disrupted by these big media platforms. I'm talking about YouTube and Spotify. And hopefully, you know, Apple will come along and embrace what the industry is trying to do here. So monetization is an important part of this. 'Cause if we want central monetization, that would be monetization that's controlled by the central podcast host provider, then embracing this is a good path forward. Also, these big platforms are gonna say, well, you know, if you wanna submit your show to our platform, you gotta strip out all the ads. Sorry, buddy. You know, is that what we want? With the growth of programmatic advertising, with the, with the obvious success of host reads. And in some ways, if we keep going down this path, the only real path forward is using baked-in host reads again, which I know a lot of, a lot of the advertising industry kind of likes that, at least on the brand side and the buying side. I don't know that the podcasters like that or the ad sales folks like the fact that we may be heading back to another era of, um, of host-read baked-in advertising, because that's the path we're on right now, I believe. So, so I don't want to make this episode too long and too much of a rant, um, but, but I do think that our RSS is under at least on the audio side, is under a threat of disruption. And unless we adapt to a competitive strategy to what we're seeing in these big platforms, RSS may lose its power in the market. Because right now we have a lot of power in the market, but if we let this go on too long and these platforms really become dominant, it may be too late. On the YouTube side to turn this around. So, you know, we're seeing— I wanted to bring this up on the screen and show you too that this is, this is a new platform that's kind of rolling out in alpha right now, and it's called, um, it's called, uh, Flightcast. So let me scroll this, and this is This is basically a platform that enables the publishing of video as a podcast, as the, as a hosting platform. So you can kind of see what's happening here. You know, I mean, a lot, there's 3 podcast hosts that embrace video today in RSS. But there's only, uh, those three are, uh, Podbean, Lipson, and Blueberry. And I believe Hubhopper out of, out of the huge country of India is also putting out some support for this. But this is the kind of thing that's coming. And so the podcast hosts need to realize that there is some disruption coming. And I do know that there's maybe interest in trying to pursue some streaming, but this is really, really based on publishing directly to these big platforms via an API. Maybe some relation to RSS on the audio side here, but really this is a push to give the big platforms what they're looking for. And I can, I can fully appreciate the, the interest of a, of a developer and someone that wants to take advantage of the trends in the market today to actually move that direction. And because they're seeing the possibility of disrupting the market, you know, The founder of this company posted on, I believe it was LinkedIn, here the last couple days and said, who wants to, who wants to join this effort of this Flightcast? And he's got thousands of people saying, sign me up, I'm in, you know. So that, that's kind of a glimpse of that there's a pent-up demand for what that site is presenting, and that's a video hosting solution that encapsulates audio and video podcasting. So, um, that's, that's my message tonight. So I, I definitely appreciate you being here for my second, you know, episode where I'm just ranting about, about the future of podcasting. But I can say that there's a lot of folks inside the industry that talk on private, you, you know, kind of like talk channels and threads and things like that on like WhatsApp and other Discord and other ones that are— they're all paying attention here. They're all seeing what I'm talking about tonight. And the, the, the problem is, is that there isn't a lot of, a lot of visibility to this except for if you go look at the Edison research, which you can go over there and, and do. And I think if you're going to Podcast Movement, there is going to be a lot of talk. This is the Podcast Movement that's coming up next week in Chicago. Uh, YouTube, I believe, is sponsoring an entire track at the Podcast Movement conference. Um, so this is coming, folks. It's not, uh, I wouldn't be raising this alarm if I didn't see an opportunity for the industry and then also a threat to the industry. I've been involved in this industry for over 20 years, and so I've seen these trends come and go, and I can see, I can feel what's going on because I'm actually living it myself. I'm doing, doing a show here that's audio and video podcasts, and I'm doing it on YouTube. I'm doing it on all of these big platforms. I'm doing other content on YouTube as well. Trying to learn and trying to understand what's going on here and watch content on my big screen television. I got a 58-inch big screen television in my, my living room, and I watch YouTube videos all the time over there so I can see what's going on. But I also have access to other, other streaming content on there too. So I, you know, and we saw in the Edison research was I believe a 3% increase in the number of smart TVs. And I know YouTube put out research saying that they're— they've never seen so many people consuming YouTube content on smart TVs. It's like 75% or something like that, and it's up like 3%. So people are buying smart TVs increasingly. And the older generation, the 55+, which tends to consume a lot of cable television, right? That's the age demo that big cable TV consumers and network TV cable channels and stuff, that's the age group that primarily consumes that today. Those people are cutting the cable. So, you know, this shift is real, folks. And I wouldn't, I wouldn't discount it, but I think we all have to decide how we respond. And some of us will say, it's, you know, I'm gonna just stay audio only. And I'll just say that's perfectly fine. There's nothing wrong with staying audio only if that fits your market and that fits your audience and what your audience expects. But maybe there's shows out there that have a genre that could benefit from a little bit of video. And I don't think you have to jump in with both feet at the beginning. You know, maybe, maybe start out with some videos that you record as Shorts or something like that and put those out on, on YouTube and Instagram and Facebook and, and see if it helps your, your, your numbers. And then hopefully the industry will, will embrace this in a, in an innovative way. It's probably going to take a few years. For the industry to adopt this. We're already seeing live HLS streams in like the Fountain app and some of the Podcasting 2.0 supportive new apps out there. And so there is movement in this. It's not like it's a starting from scratch type of a situation. So I think I think the opportunity is there, and I think it's, it's bright for the industry if we want to support this. It could really accelerate the ad revenue that this industry needs. It's been pretty flatlined over the last couple years to give better metrics and data to brand advertisers so they open the purse strings up and allow more revenue to come into content creators over here. So that's the episode tonight. Uh, thank you so much for being here with me. I appreciate it, and I'll be back with another episode next week, and hopefully I can get back to more of a, you know, helpful how-to type of episode. But, but I hope this was helpful, and please let me know. And, and I also— looks like I got some questions, so why don't I bring those up and we can quickly talk about that in the last few minutes. It looks like we got a comment from Dave Canyon again. Dave, thank you for being with us on the show again here. He writes, always wanted to do video since day one. It just seems like more difficult, right? It is more difficult. It takes different tools. It takes different skills. You have to learn something new. And that's why this, you know, you have to evaluate if it's something that you really want to do. You know, some people are going to be good at it. Some people don't, don't feel the need. And I think audio podcasting still has a big presence. And I'm hoping that what we see in the next year or so is we see the audio consumption continue to go up, but also the video consumption go up as well. And I think that's what we're gonna see. So Dave continues here, audio podcasts seem so simple. Yeah, that's true. But some in the industry say that audio also feels small or feels in second place now behind video. And I think that's the perceptual challenge that the industry faces right now. The advertising that Spreaker did back in the day really hooked me. That's how I got started. Yeah. And Dave also writes He writes here, that's me, 55+, and I'm looking forward to taking advantage of this. So, Dave, good luck if you're looking to get into video more. I, I think it would be a fun journey for you to do. I wouldn't put too much investment in it. I would just maybe play around with it and see what works for you. Um, but I think it's, it's probably a good thing to think about right now as far as, um, kind of following the, the trends of the market right now. So Dave, thank you for the comment. I see that you have a few more in here too, but I wanted to bring in, um, uh, Raven Blair Clover said, hi Bob, so great to see you, um, here. So thank you, Raven, I appreciate that. So, and then Dave also writes, um, cool, Flightcast, I'll take a look at that. Yep, go ahead and do that. It's at flightcast.com if you wanted to go, go visit that. It's definitely a, a hot trending website right now that people are talking about. So, and then, uh, Dave Canyon also writes, as long as it's a free speech platform, I'd love it. I can't really answer that question. I'm assuming it is like most podcast hosts. They don't really get involved in content moderation. That's more something that happens on the consumption side, like at Spotify or Apple or YouTube. So Dave Canyon also writes, thanks, Rob Greenlee. Great episode. I'll check out Flightcast. I love learning something new. You're responsible for much of my knowledge and growth. Well, thanks, Dave. I appreciate that, that acknowledgement. I'm just trying to share what I'm seeing happen in the world, and I appreciate you being here and being willing to invest time to listen to me pontificate of sorts, I guess. And then Dave also writes, Looks here. Too much investment, are referring to money. No worries, I don't have much. I'm quite conservative with it in any ways. So, okay, well, I understand that, especially in the economy that we're in today. So, Dave, thank you so much for all of the great comments. I appreciate it. And if anybody else wants to make a comment or ask me a question about it. I hope I was clear tonight. I know I flew through a lot of these concepts pretty quickly tonight, and they can be complex technical issues too. You know, a lot of people don't know what HLS streaming is. It's basically HTTP live streaming. So it basically is very similar to a progressive download of an MP3 file into a player. Except for it has a layer of more technical control over batch delivering to a player based on what the player needs based on its bandwidth. So it's a little more intelligent delivery of the content from the server to the player that creates a different kind of capability and invariably tracking and understanding on the part of the server that's delivering the content. So, and it's more of a real-time somewhat playback experience on that. It doesn't over-deliver the content and it doesn't under-deliver the content. It only delivers what the bandwidth is capable of delivering, which enables you to upload, let's say, like a 4K video if you wanted to publish that via HLS. And if the internet-connected device that's trying to play that back has more limited bandwidth capacity or screen size or whatever its compatibility, that stream will adapt to that requirement of that particular device. It won't just automatically play back a 4K file. It'll play back a 720p file or something like that, which will be much more compatible with the device that's consuming that content. So it has a little more intelligence built into it just to help explain that a little bit more. So, well, thank you everybody for all the, all the great comments. Please post more in the comment threads on the platform that you're watching this, and I will take a look at those, and, and hopefully I'll be able to, to respond to those. And if you have any other topics that you'd like me to cover on the show here, that are just bugging you about the podcasting space, I would love to kind of dive into those and to share that with you as well. And I can be found here if you want to send an email, rob.greenlee@gmail.com. I'm also on X @robgreenlee. And then I also have a YouTube channel that this is being played on as well, youtube.com/@robgreenlee. That's with two Es. And then I also have a podcast network now that this show is also, also available on. That's, I guess it's in here on the scroller, on the scroll bar. Let me disengage that. I think I was going to play that. So you can find this show and all the other podcasts that I do and be able to stream the video version, um, of all, all the shows that are part of myador.com, myadornetwork.com, um, podcast network website. So it has all, all my other shows too. So like I say, good night. Thank you so much. I guess I just hit the hour mark, so I went 60 minutes on this. Um, so thanks for hanging with me, and I'll be back for another episode next week of Podcast Tips. So appreciate you being here. Thank you. Bye-bye.