Video Podcasting: How Has Apple Changed the Game?

Well, welcome to the New Media Show. Uh, tonight we're going to dig into, uh, which probably isn't a big surprise to anyone, video podcasting, which seems to be a hot topic right now, especially if you're in the podcast or new media industry. But how has Apple's announcement today changed the game? And I'm, I'm Rob Greenlee. I'm a 22-year podcaster, a 2017 Podcast Hall of Famer, and my goal tonight is to give podcasters and video creators a clear, practical understanding of what Apple has just launched and, and the full spectrum of what they're improving on and what they're breaking. So what what it changes on the technical side and what it means for your distribution strategy in 2026. So you're not confused. And I'm joined by James Kirtland to my side here, who's editor of podnews.net and a 2026 Podcast Hall of Famer. James, I want to publicly congratulate you on that.

Well, thank you very much.

James tracks the global podcast market daily, and he's one of the best people in the industry at separating the headlines from the real technical and business implications. So that's what we hope to accomplish tonight. So James, give me your thoughts and then I'll give my thoughts too. Why is this Apple announcement important, just at a real high level?

Yeah, it's really important that Apple has video. Apple, of course, has supported video ever since the beginning, but certainly over the last couple of years or so, video's really hidden away in the background of the Apple Podcasts app. And so now they've clearly seen Spotify getting in on the action, YouTube of course getting in on the action, and then now we're seeing Netflix and Hulu and all of those people with what they call podcasts, which is a debate for another day, I'm sure. But so, you know, clearly Apple felt that they should be focusing a little bit more on video, and so they've launched a what they call a new video Podcast Experience, which is very much focused on a slightly different way of doing video in the Apple Podcasts app, a much more front and center way. I think it's, in total, I think it's very good news. I think that there are certainly things that they are doing which are the right way of doing things, playing video in a nice way using a technology called HLS to produce the videos, which will save everybody bandwidth, will save everybody cost, will make the videos work better and all of that. So I think that they're doing that in a very good way. There are questions around the business model, which I'm sure that we'll get on to, and I think really, you know, they've done a pretty good job there. There are— it's a bit disappointing some of the things because it is a little bit proprietary, a little bit secret source, um, and I would rather that everything was as open as RSS is. But nevertheless, you know, Apple don't do things first, but they do do things properly, and I think in this particular case they've done a pretty good job.

Yeah, I think so too, kind of, kind of in a bigger picture and kind of, kind of starting out with a a more optimistic and positive view of this is that many in the industry have been talking to the Apple team for many years now. I know I have, encouraging them to head down this path and to make video podcasts, you know, an important part of their platform again, because in the early years of podcasting, it was an important part of their platform and they they chose over a subsequent period of years to de-emphasize it and pull back from it because video's always been a part of the Apple Podcast experience and more broadly the podcast industry in general. And so I'm happy to see this happen. And I think that there's some aspects to it that kind of reflect where we are with podcasting right now and where we are with video and where we are with kind of the trajectory of big platforms playing against what has been traditionally open distribution of podcasting via RSS. And I do wonder if there's a little bit of a growing momentum that may be pushing us further and further away from having RSS be the primary way that these platforms get our content. So You know, is there anything— I mean, I think if we back up and kind of dive into this, I'm— there's almost so many things going on, James, that I'm not even sure where to start. But, but I think the, the big thing is probably just talking about the, the high-level aspect of this and maybe what changes this could cause to the, the listener or the viewer experience in the podcasting experience. And I I do want to pull up on the screen the Apple website that basically has, basically put it out about what they're doing here. And there's a screenshot here that if you're watching the video of this, you can kind of see this. And what's been going on here too, to some degree, is video has always been in the Apple ecosystem. It's just that it was I guess, say, James, what's the right way to say it was kind of pushed to the side to some degree and ignored? Might be.

Yeah, yeah, I think so. I mean, I think it was both pushed to the side and ignored a little bit, but also wasn't a good experience. So when you press the play button in a video podcast, and you can still get video podcasts, of course, but when you push the button, you know, in terms of that, then I mean, it started playing in a window which was a tenth of an inch high. I mean, it was a—

yeah, it's tiny, right down in the bottom left-hand corner, right next to the player.

None of that made any sense. And so now, even if you're, uh, even if you're producing just a, uh, an old-fashioned, uh, MP4 file, you know, with, um, with, uh, um, just a normal, uh, video, which, um, an awful lot of podcast companies still support, even when you're using something like that, then it looks really nice on the screen. It opens fully, it opens fully in terms of playback and everything else. I'm there trying to show you how it works because I have the new developer beta on here, but for some reason, for some reason I can't get the new media show to play. So we won't be showing that, but in terms of that, yeah, I don't know, it's probably might There you go, look, it's working, it's working beautifully there now.

That's a different show though.

It's you.

Well, I know it is.

I know, but it's, so let's not get confused. I know that they're using a thing called HLS where the L stands for live. This isn't live streaming. This is on-demand video in the same way that YouTube is, in the same way that Spotify is, at least throughout the main thing. So from that point of view, it is video podcasting. The old-fashioned way still works, but the way that Apple have— the way that Apple want to do it is a much better way, which is using technology called HLS, which will essentially enable you to go to one place in the Apple Podcasts app, find the show that you want to have a listen to or to watch, and you can press the video button and the video will show, and you can press the, you know, hide the video and then the audio will just play instead. So it's a much better experience than at the moment this show having two totally different RSS feeds, one for the audio, one for the video. That causes problems with recommendations, it causes problems with, you know, Google Juice or the equivalent in Apple in terms of pointing people to one show because you've essentially got two individual shows. So it's actually, it's a really good thing that they are doing this as one so that you will just go to, in the future, if you, if you decide to support this, you'll be going to the New Media Shows feed and you'll be able to watch video or have a listen to it as well.

So it's, it's trying to duplicate somewhat the Alternative Enclosure approach that the the Podcasting 2.0 initiative is trying to push, but with two different pathways into the publishing. And I, I'm just curious how Apple is going to navigate this, this situation, like with this show of, um, I've got video in there already. And, um, so, so does that mean that my, my video feed would, would not be necessary anymore, or do you think that, um they would somehow make my audio feed have video in it and then my video feed have audio in it. I'm just curious if you think that might be the case. I don't know that we have an answer to that.

I mean, what Apple wants you to do is to still use RSS for your audio. So your RSS still exists for the audio, it still exists for what the episode title is called, the show notes, uh, all of that. So RSS is still very much part of this. And then through a separate secret API, your podcast hosting company will give Apple the, um, the HLS, uh, feed for that individual episode and say to Apple, this show, this episode has video, and therefore you should— you can show that as well if you want to. That's what Apple wants you to do. Now, Apple will still support the old-fashioned MP4 way, which costs an awful lot of money for all of us, but Apple will still support that, and that is absolutely fine. But the way that Apple would like to do things in the future is for you to change how you do your video right now and to use this thing called HLS. And so for those who don't know, and you can probably do a better job of explaining what HLS is than I can, Rob, but for those who don't know, HLS is essentially— it's just a list of individual video files. Those video files are about 10 seconds long, and it tells the player, play this file first, then this file, then this file, then this file. And so when you're watching something— and YouTube and Netflix are already using this, right? Yeah, everything's all in chunks. It can then monitor 'Okay, it's taking time to deliver these chunks. I'll show a slightly worse quality version so that it continues to work fine.' So it can do all of that stuff behind the scenes, and also it can stick ads in there as well. And that's the interesting change here, because Apple all of a sudden are saying, 'Yes, we will support video. We will support video using HLS,' which, by the way, Apple invented. So therefore it's going to be a really nice experience. But if you have dynamic ads in your video, which let's be fair, you can't get in YouTube, you can't get in Spotify, but you can get in Apple Podcasts in the future. If you're going to support dynamic video, then we will charge you a per impression fee for showing a dynamic ad. And that's quite a change, I think, to the way that podcasting has worked in the past.

Yeah, that actually puts Apple beyond where they decided to go to with the premium podcasting stuff into making some revenue from podcasting, getting a chunk of that advertising business without actually having to be in the advertising business. So I think that was an interesting little twist on it, cuz I thought maybe they weren't gonna get involved in anything related to advertising. This is kind of a technical way of doing it, but not really doing it. So, because, you know, let's say it like it is: Apple has tried advertising in its past, but it failed miserably. And then that conflicted with their priorities around privacy. And so that's going to be an interesting little twist on this as well, because they're going to be— well, it's probably not a big change from what they're doing. But I think the big thing that's interesting is that It looks like they're going to be converting programmatic on the audio side into programmatic on the video side. I just wonder if the programmatic is going to continue working on the audio side or if it's going to be replaced, the programmatic is going to be replaced by the video side.

Well, if you have video enabled for a particular episode, then if you're using an HLS-enabled device like an iPhone, for example, as most people do, then you will get the audio feed of the video track or the audio track of the video. So it's much the same way.

It's not going to wipe it out like Spotify does from the experience. But if you upload a video to it, it will replace the audio feed that's in there, right? On the playback side.

Yeah, on the playback side. So my understanding is on the playback side, when you play a show that has video, then you will always hear the audio track of the video. And that's a bit of a shame, I think, because I think some creators like to make their audio show sound different to their video show. Editing with video is much harder to get rid of the ums and the ers, for example, without everything skipping around an awful lot. But you can do that much better in terms of audio. You can explain things in audio if you need to, whereas you don't necessarily need to explain what you're looking at in terms of video. So I think that that is a bit of a shame. But yeah, my understanding is that as soon as you upload a video version of a particular episode, then that, just in the same way as Spotify works, that is what the user will get. And of course, we shouldn't forget the dynamic ads will be delivered through HLS, and Apple will get their money from that as well. So that's quite a change. And I think, you know, I mean, it's very different. If you look at Spotify, Spotify is there saying, please upload your entire video to us, um, and we'll give you some money if you're big enough. YouTube is saying, please upload your entire video to us, and we'll give you some money if you're big enough. Apple is saying, don't upload your video to us, you can host that yourself, and we'll have some money, please. It's a really different choice, and I think it's going to be fascinating to see the uptake on this from podcast publishers. And there are only 4 podcast hosting companies right now who are their launch partners, and that's Acast, Art19, OmniStudio, and Simplecast. And of course, all of those four are also ad networks as well. And that's why Apple has partnered with those initial four, because those people will also be obviously wanting to deliver those dynamic advertising. So, you know, it's, it's a real change in terms of how the economics works. It's a real change in terms of how the you know, how the app works and everything else. I'm sad that again audio is now going to be seen as second best because I think podcasts are something for the ears when the eyes are busy, and I like producing really nice sounding audio, and I find that a bit sad. But, you know, you can't really argue with the fact that lots of people are wanting to watch, you know, wanting to watch a video version of their favorite show.

It does feel like it's a little bit of a forcing function towards change, right? If I think about being a publisher and a creator now, and I want to have that different audio experience compared to the video experience, does this mean that I have to create a you know, a second RSS feed to create that environment that doesn't have a video associated with it. Is it, you know, because the creators, just like what they've done with Spotify, I've heard a lot of creators tell me at Spotify that if they're going to upload video to Spotify, they create a different account. So it's— and that's a way to retain the monetization through the audio while at the same time you know, getting your video into Spotify. And it, it kind of goes back to what, what I think they're trying to accomplish, which is trying to integrate these things together. And I'm, I'm just not sure it's going to work out the way they think it is.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's going to be— it is going to be fascinating. So I mean, with all of this, the timescales are that we will probably get this new version of Apple Podcasts sent to most iPhones by the end of March. That's normal normally how the timescales work. Although I should say, you know, everything that we're seeing right now is a developer build and things may change before it goes live. But then the dynamic advertising stuff Apple is really talking about later on in the year, maybe June, July, August, before properly enabling all of that. I haven't seen any dynamic ads as yet in any of the shows that are already on on the platform that are using this new service. And I think, you know, we've probably got a bit of a wait there. Yeah, yeah. And my understanding is, you know, we— I mean, we still don't have the full details in terms of what format do you want the videos, what sort of bitrate are we talking about, what sort of resolution, you know, all of that stuff we don't yet have. But it is very, very early days. And of course, you know, only if you are a developer and you've paid, I think it's $200 to gain access to the developer builds. That's the only set of people who can actually see this right now anyway.

I'm not sure it even would work because there aren't any HLS providers out there providing content, right? Or is it just test content?

Yeah, there are. So there's a there's a podcast, um, by Kiki Palmer, um, which you can go and, um, and play with, and that is, you know, is done in, in that, uh, in that way. Um, if I was clever, what I would have set up is, uh, iPhone mirroring on this, um, on, on this machine so that I could have shown you. That would have been clever, wouldn't it? Oh yeah, very clever. Um, but sadly I've not done that. Yeah, but in terms of, in terms of that, so there are, there are a few. That one, um, I think the Kiki Palmer one is, uh, is hosted by Art19. There is another one which is hosted by Acast, um, which is a show made by BetterHelp. And so those two are up there, and they've got about 6 months worth of video in them. So you can actually play around with that and, you know, and see, and see what happens. So there is content to play with.

Is the content labeled as HLS or streaming or some way of telling the difference between it and maybe an MP4 file that's playing?

No, there's no difference to the audience. And to be fair, the audience doesn't need to know that there is any.

No, no, I was just curious how you would know very much that what you're watching is HLS stream.

Because there's only one feed rather than having to find an audio feed and a video feed. There's only one feed for a start. And also because I asked Apple. Of course, is the other reason.

James, that's evidence that these initial partners or a few of them have already built some infrastructure to enable this. Yeah, I'll be a stretch for ART19 because of the Amazon ties that they probably have this in their tech stack already because if they're streaming, you know, Amazon Prime platform.

So yeah, and we saw an announcement from OmniStudio saying that actually they were enabling, they were doing things with video, they were talking about HLS, they were talking about a few of these interesting things. So I think from that point of view, that was quite useful seeing that a couple of months ago. But of course, you know, things are a little bit, you know, still we're still finding out how all of this works and, you know, and how it might work in the future as well.

Yeah, you know, it's going to unfold. Apple doesn't always disclose all of the pieces of anything when they launch something. That's, that's the history. It's the same thing that Spotify does too.

Oh yes, yeah, no, absolutely.

Because really, really, the, the details are what matter here, um, and I don't think that we have all of the, all the details, and they may not want us to have all the details yet because they probably haven't worked out all the details. And I do think that there's probably going to be more podcast hosting platforms that are going to want to be part of that program, right?

Then absolutely. Yeah.

And the initial 4 that were announced, I'm sure that there's a few hosting platforms that are going, you know, what do we do here? You know, are we going to lose customers because of this? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, there are a fair amount of people who are, who are quite angry that they didn't know anything about it. Um, people that have worked with Apple for years and years and years, and I'm sure that you have heard, uh, some of those as well. Um, so I think, yeah, you know, from that, from that point of view, it's, it's, um, uh, you know, clearly people are going to want to, um, uh, launch with more than those partners. The benefit of the partners that they've launched with is that they are ad networks. And because they are ad networks, you know, Apple can do the whole thing, you know, in terms of this. And I think that's going to be quite useful and quite, um, and quite, uh, you know, interesting in terms of, um, in terms of how that bit works.

But I do think that one of the interesting things is, is that— and I'll bring up on the screen a little slide that will kind of clarify this, but Apple has now offered two paths, and that's what we've talked about here, into their platform. You know, one is via a separate RSS podcast feed that enables an MP3 download that simulates a stream playback experience. And currently, these are the three primary players: Lipson, Blueberry, and Podbean that have historically supported this going back to the very early days of podcasts. I do believe there's a couple other hosts that are supporting video via RSS and then also the enclosure tags too. And then obviously the HLS streaming like you mentioned earlier, 8Cast, SimpleCast, ART19, and OmniStudio. And I did hear from an owner of a platform in Germany. I'm trying to remember what the name of it is that, that told me that they were part of the Apple program. But when I went to the partners page, if you search that link link right there that's on the screen there, um, podcasters.apple.com/partner-search, um, that, that platform, um, wasn't showing 4, um, I know it was showing 4, it wasn't showing any more than that. So yeah, that's the, that's the thing. So I think there are people out there or platforms out there that think they're part of it, but they are not officially part of it yet.

Yeah, I mean, my understanding is, in terms of this, you can be listed as a partner on those Apple Pages, which quite a lot of podcast companies are trying quite hard to do. Yeah, to make sure that they're actually on that page. In this particular case, just as with Apple paid subscriptions and being able to upload audio for those things through your podcast host, there is a certain amount of podcast partners for that. And similarly, there is a certain amount of podcast partners for this new video work as well. And of course, you know, it does mean there's a billing relationship here between Apple and the podcast hosting company, or between Apple and the ad network, which in this current case is the same company. So there's a billing relationship there, and there's also, you know, Obviously Apple want to make sure that they are doing this slowly, methodically, and carefully to make sure that the user experience is really nice user experience.

One of the things I did notice on that Apple Podcast partner page was that the only shows, or the only platforms I should say, the hosting platforms that showed in their description that they supported video was the 4 that were announced in this release. But the platforms like Podbean, Lipson, and, and, and Blueberry who have supported video via RSS into the Apple platform, those, those showed the, the video mentioned in the, in the description as crossed out, which makes me wonder if that part of the platform may be getting depreciated is a nice way of saying it, where being able to publish video into RSS may not be something that long-term we're going to be able to do. It's all going to have to go through HLS.

Yeah, I think, you know, Apple have certainly been very open and very clear that MP4 is fine, Probably MP4 is the only way if you self-host. If you're using a small podcast hosting company, probably that's always going to be the only way that you can actually get video into Apple Podcasts. But that's not, not going away. It's not a great user experience for a lot of rather complicated technical reasons, but it's, but it's certainly not going to go away is my understanding. But clearly what Apple want, clearly what Apple want is they want people to podcast hosting companies to sign up with this new HLS service, because firstly, it's better for the user, that's better, sure, but also secondly, Apple gets money. And that's, you know, the other sort of side of this. If Apple gets money, then of course Apple is going to be doing, is going to be keen to do to do a little bit, yeah, a little bit more in terms of that. I could show you the new experience in Apple Podcasts if you wanted to see it. The only issue I've got there is that I would need to close my web browser and open it again, so I would go away for 30 seconds. So it depends if you want to talk to yourself for 30 seconds, Rob, I can come back with the ability to actually show it to you.

Oh, okay. Yeah. I mean, if you want to do that, that would be okay.

So yeah, let's do that.

I can— while you're doing that, I can bring up on the screen what it— what HLS looks like in the RSS feed. Now, granted, if you're a geek, this is probably cool, but if you're not, then it's going to be garbly goop. But I just wanted to show on the screen what the— changes that exist in the RSS feed around your attachment to content in the RSS feed and what the coding looks like to actually add the enclosure of the HLS stream. And it's really very similar to what the alternative enclosure is, and it's interesting. I don't know, James, if you can see this or not, but this would be one way of adding the HLS stream to an enclosure tag in an RSS feed. And this isn't something that Apple is doing, but this is an option that they could do.

So yeah, absolutely. And if you are going to be using Apple's secret API to feed Apple the HLS playlist, which is the thing that ends M3U8 here, then actually it is no additional work to also put the alternate enclosure in here. Why would you want to do that? Well, because iHeart has already said that they will be supporting the alternate enclosure coming a little bit later on this year. So that's pretty good news. But also in terms of, in terms of other podcast platforms as well, TrueFans of course supports HLS off the bat. So does some of the other smaller podcast platforms as well. So actually, you know, what I would say to anybody who is looking at this from a technical point of view and is able to do it, if you're going to supply Apple with the super secret HLS feed, it should also work if you stick it in the, in the alternate enclosure as well, because you'll reach additional podcast hosts that you currently aren't actually reaching.

Yeah, so I pulled up on the screen kind of a screenshot of, um, some information off of podnews.net, uh, about— this was, I think this was a few months ago, uh, I guess you posted a Q&A with iHeart and they posted here. This may be hard for you to read if you're watching on a mobile phone, but, um, they do confirm that they're going to support video via RSS, which I thought was an interesting thing. You know, I don't know if this is official or if this is kind of like just a comment that someone made on a, on a call or email with you. But this is a sign that maybe, maybe alternative enclosures is in the cards for IART as we look to the future. And that could be a pressure point for other players in the, in the industry. But I don't know about that.

Yeah, no, this is, this is definitely official. And, uh, you know, it was a, a good long chat with the folks at, um, at iHeartRadio. So yeah, I mean, that I think is, is very exciting. It means that, um, it means that, you know, iHeart isn't going to take money away, um, from, uh, podcast publishers. Um, they're just going to support it as they do RSS feeds as well. But they'll only support that if it's in the alternate enclosure tag. So it's a 2-minute piece of work to make the same HLS file that you're making for Apple available, as is my understanding at the moment, to make that available in the alternate enclosure tag as well.

Now that's a minor tweak to the Apple's platform to support this. Now granted, is it going to cause a problem with their, with their revenue model, um, is the bigger question.

Yeah, well, yeah, exactly. Um, so I think that's a question to ask, but I think certainly, um, uh, if, if I was any podcast, uh, hosting company, I would be making sure that, um, the alternate enclosure was also supported in there as well. Um, much, much cheaper to support HLS video than it is to support MP4s, massive great big MP4s. If you watch This Week in Tech, for example, which is a great show which everybody ought to watch, that is available in video form and in audio form in two separate feeds. The video is, I think, 2.7 gig. That's a big old file. It's in 1080p, of course, and Leo has done a fantastic job.

That's what I'm doing with this show.

Yeah, well, there you go.

Exactly the same thing.

So, so very, very expensive. Thank you to, you know, great podcast hosting companies who are who are, you know, sorting that one out. But yeah, so I think, I think from that point of view, it's very, you know, it's important that that is done. And clearly HLS is a better piece of technology than, than anything else. Well, I don't know if you can—

yeah, I'll, I'll pull up on the, on the screen here your, your screenshot that you're sharing with me. So let's, let's go ahead and do it.

Yeah, so here is my Here is my phone. Let's hope that it doesn't show you anything. But yes, there's a thing. So if I go into— this is some of the shows that I listen to, don't me— but if I go into the list of shows which are coming up next, where am I going? I'm going up here to Up Next. I'm going to choose Up Next, and you should be able to see if this Does anything— come on, machine. Right, so you can see down here, the third one here is a show with Keke Palmer. You can see that it has a little video icon there if you're watching this on a big screen. And if I go in, if I go into this particular show, this is one of those shows which is being hosted through ART19 which has video. So if I go down to this episode, there's an episode that I'm seeing on the screen right now which is called Your Favorite Artist's Favorite Artist with Anderson, Anderson.Paak, I think that says. You can see that there's a little video icon in there, and if I click into it and press the play button, then you will notice that it starts. I don't know if you're going to get any audio. I don't know if you can hear that audio, but that is showing video. And it's showing video in quite a nice way. So in this particular case, you can see that it's got captions in there. Some of these show captions, some of these don't, which is interesting. You can, of course, pick your phone up and rotate it round and watch this full screen as well. And the interesting thing here is if you continue playing it, and I hit the turn video off button, which is down here, then that will stop showing the video and just show the— there should be a little image in there instead, the image from the episode. And so that is now no longer showing you the video, but it will continue to play the video audio is my understanding. But that's how it works. So it's a really nice experience. It works in exactly the same way that all of the rest of these shows do. You just press the play button and the audio starts playing in a full window. So that's a really nice experience, I think.

So what would, what would it show if it went to the new media show video feed? Is that accessible in there?

Yeah, absolutely.

So if I was to type in new media show, just curious what the actual experience is.

Is it any different? So the experience is different because as you can see here, you have an audio feed or a video feed and a video feed. So that's the one of the big differences. If you click into the video feed, then again, things are marked with video on here, and all of that works nicely. So if I click into your interview with Janine Wright, and I can start playing that, and again, it looks absolutely perfect.

It pops up, which it gets, gets rid of that little tiny little thumbnail.

Absolutely. So it, so it's a, so it looks just as good as, um, as, uh, the experience that you get, um, when you're, uh, you know, when you're using HLS video. You would not know that this was being delivered in a different way. And again, there is a button here which says stop, stop video, and you can click on that and it just shows the episode artwork instead of the video artwork. Now I should say, with all of this, this is a developer build. Things may change before the release. Normally Apple say that you can't share the developer build in terms of this, which is why I've been very careful to only show you the Apple Podcasts app. But in terms of, in terms of that, that's a useful, that's a useful thing. This may not be what we all see once it goes live. As far as the final build, you mean? As far as the final build, but it's pretty well done now. So yeah, so as you can see, there's no real difference in between the video experience through MP4 and the experience that you get through HLS, except of course the HLS experience under the hood is going to work much, much better, and it's downloading far less of the file. It's costing me much less money, you know, in terms of all of that. So that's an important thing to to bear in mind as well.

Yeah, the progressive playback thing is a little bit of a wildcard, and maybe, you know, it'd be helpful to talk about that a little bit too, because there is some similarities between the playback dynamic of a download, a progressive download playback versus an HLS. But it is a little bit more locked down, the HLS side, as far as how much bandwidth is utilized to deliver the content. And that's really what the difference is, because if you're on a very fast connection on your phone and you activate a progressive download playback experience, it'll actually download more of the content than you're actually consuming. Where I don't think that there's much extra that the HLS delivers to the device based on the speed of the connection from what it's playing back, right? So that's, that's where the savings is.

Yeah, I mean, the savings here, particularly in terms of HLS, is it's only downloading the bit of the video that you're watching. Yeah, right. So in this particular show, this is a show served by Acast, and it's a show that's sponsored by BetterHelp. If I was going to scrub all the way through this and go a little bit later on in the video, that has loaded instantly, that little clip of video, but it's not downloaded the entire show in this particular case because it's HLS. It's just downloading that little 10-second video file. And that's very exciting actually for podcasters because it means that we can see exactly how long you listen. It means that we can see exactly when you drop off. It means that advertisers know when the ads have been watched, which is also a difference to where we currently are.

That's the real kind of business benefit of all this stuff too. And it's a monetization approach that hasn't existed in podcasting. That's the dynamic ad insertion capability around video, which hasn't existed in the past. James, can you go back to the New Media Show and do that same test? If you can start playing the episode and then pull it forward and yes, if there's a latency there that is greater.

Well, I can certainly do that, but I'll do that in a way that's fair to, to this, which is the Janine Wright Show has been downloaded. So, oh, right, right, right. That wouldn't be fair. But let's go and find this one, for example. So I'm going to hit the play button and now it's having to download all of that possibly 2GB file. And as you can see, nothing is happening quite yet because it's still downloading enough of that file to start playing it.

It's caching enough to start the stream is what it's doing, right?

Yeah. And so here we are with— oh gosh, that's me on the screen.

Brilliant.

So here we are in terms of that.

So pause it and then try and pull it forward and see how long it takes.

There we go. So I've pulled it through to halfway and taking its time because it needs to download pretty well all of that file.

Yeah, it's arguably—

yeah, it's a large file too in order to get, in order to get all the way through that particular file. And as you can see, it's certainly taking its time, but it—

okay, but it will get there. Right.

Yeah, it started now. Yeah. And there's that. The one thing I would say, by the way, with all of this is video playback works in exactly the same way as audio playback. So you'll notice that for this show, I listen at 1.3x. 1.3x, it's playing the video in 1.3x right now. So it plays the video fast. If you prefer this particular show fast, that's nice. You can also click on the enhanced dialogue button, and that will automatically, through AI on your device, get rid of all of the background noise, get rid of all of the echo, make the audio sound, you know, much, much better. So in exactly the same way as Apple Podcasts works for audio, you can now change the speed, you can do all of that in terms of the video that you're playing back, both the MP4 and the HLS versions as well.

Yeah, it's going to be interesting to see what the specifications are for the actual video itself will be. If it's going to be 4K or if it's going to be 1080, my guess is it's probably minimum 1080 would be my guess, but it could be 720.

So I don't know. Of course, the minimum could easily be 320 because of the way that HLS works, because HLS can deliver lots of different versions of that file. Files.

So I'm curious to see, is it better at upscaling or is it better to downscale?

That's always better to downscale, right? But when you produce an HLS file, then you're actually producing however many different files that you want to produce. So you're taking probably a 4K file and you're producing a 1080p version of that, a 720p version of that, and even a 4K version. Type of a file? Yeah, so the way to think about it, yeah, that's a nice way to have a think about that. So from that point of view, that, that works, that works very nicely. The weird thing about Apple Podcasts Video as it launches is that it won't be launching on Apple TV, which seems a bit of a miss. So it will be launching on Apple Podcasts, on the Apple Podcasts app on your phone.

But the, the MP4 version will be available on Apple TV, I believe.

Uh, yes, yes, probably.

Um, probably.

But that's a legacy thing. Yeah, yeah, that, that's a legacy thing. And to be fair, the big publishers won't be doing MP4, so the big publishers will be caring about, um, doing HLS. So this nice new experience weirdly won't be on Apple TV from the get-go in March. You would assume that that would come a little bit later on. Um, I can confirm, by the way, here's an exclusive for you. I can confirm that it does not work in the car. I can't watch video as I'm driving along the highway.

Probably a good thing. Oh, in CarPlay?

Is that what you're talking about? Yeah, in CarPlay. It weirdly doesn't show you the video in CarPlay.

Well, it should do it if you're parked, right? It should play it if you're parked, right?

Well, that's a thing to come, I think. But yeah, so that's That's good. If you are one of the 5 people in the world with one of those Apple Vision Pro things, then you will be able to watch video through your favorite podcast app in that way. So that's nice, through the Apple Podcasts app, of course. So it'll work on that, but in terms of— but, you know, we're really talking about— we're talking about Mac and we're talking about the iPhone, of course.

Right. So we got a comment from Elsie Escobar who writes us and asks a question here. Do you feel that eventually HLS will be used for audio-only feeds or, you know, you know, to get the same type of monetization? Well, you know, Elsie, I can answer that really quick is that it sounds like they're defaulting to the audio from the video. So if the video is monetized, the audio will be too.

Would be my answer to that, right? Yeah, I think I would definitely say that. Captivate, Elsie Escobar, as of now. So many congratulations, Elsie, that's great. Yeah, I have asked Apple, other people have asked Apple, are you thinking about using HLS for audio in the future? Of course, as soon as you ask Apple any question that ends in the future, they say we never talk about what we're planning, what we're doing in the future. So I think the answer is Probably not. But let's not forget, they need the MP3 file for devices that doesn't deal with audio. They need the RSS feed for the title, for the description, to make sure it's in the Apple Podcasts directory in the first place. So the RSS feed isn't going away. I don't think that the audio MP3 is going to go away anytime soon. I've been playing with HLS for audio. To be honest, HLS for audio offers you nothing other than knowing whether an ad has been played. It really offers you nothing else, and it's much more expensive to host if you're charged by the file request, as I am. So I'm not a particular fan of using HLS for audio, but HLS for video works an awful lot better.

So yeah, yeah, and I'm not sure that there's a big motivation to head down that path when they're getting their monetization in the audio and the video. When you upload a video. So there's a disincentive there. I guess Elsie was really asking about if there was an audio-only feed, and I guess that's a bigger question about what the future looks like. How is Apple gonna— I guess Apple is gonna continue to embrace audio-only feeds as long as there's no video attached to it, which would make it an audio-only feed. So yeah, that's probably going to stay in there. And I think the traditional monetization methods for that with the programmatic advertising models will continue to work with that. But once you upload a video to it, the model changes just like what happens at Spotify. So this is a—

they're copying Spotify here, aren't they? To a degree, but actually I think the benefit is it's not.

I mean, it's, it's HLS over there. Now granted, they're probably using— Spotify is probably using HLS to stream the content, the video content. It's just that you're giving them the file.

The difference is you can't do dynamic ad insertion off of the hosting platforms, right? With, with Spotify, you can't do dynamic video. So monetization models with YouTube, actually, currently you can't do dynamic video ads either, at least dynamic video ads that you control. So the real nice thing that Apple has done here is that they haven't done a Spotify and gone, the only way you can do this is with our stuff. The only way you can do this is through Megaphone or Spotify for podcasters. In this case, Acast can go and serve ads in their stuff, and Simplecast and AdsWiz, of course, which is part of Simplecast, can do the ads in, in their stuff, and, um, and so on and so forth. Omnistudio and Triton, um, So all of that, I think, is really good for the industry. Apple is taking a small chunk, as you would expect. They haven't actually told us how much yet, but I think it's good news for the industry. It means that we are still— we still have the relationship with the advertisers rather than Spotify or rather than YouTube. I think that that's really nice news, and we are still in control of our own, of, you know, of what's going to happen in the future.

Yeah, I think that is definitely an important takeaway from this. And, and I, you know, the whole monetization piece is so important to the podcaster community to, to sustain its very existence at this point. You know, there's been a lot of, a lot of pressure on the advertising side already, I think, in the industry over the last couple of years. Yeah, this, this could give a nice little boost to, to the industry, though I have heard people say that occasionally the CPM models for video is a little bit lower than the audio. So it makes me wonder if, if you're dynamically inserting video ads, the audio is going to travel with that. So I just wonder if the CPM models, if they do not pay as high as CPM numbers for video, that could impact the monetization on the audio side too.

Yeah, I mean, and I think from my point of view, radio ads and TV ads are different, right? Yeah, right. If you're gonna talk about a new car in a TV ad, then you'll have a nice picture of the car weaving through some exciting Italian mountains and stuff like that. If you're gonna talk about a new car in a radio ad, then you will have beautifully crafted words that do the same kind kind of job. What happens when you're just given the audio feed from a video is that it just won't work very well. It's not a very good experience. I'm quite sad that when you press that button that says don't show the video, it still plays the video, the audio from the video, if you see what I mean. I'm quite sad that that is actually happening because I don't think that's going to be very good for the advertiser. It's certainly not going to be very good for the audience. And actually, the better podcast creators— and I've got an article coming up in PodNews all about this— the best, the better podcast creators are producing different edits of their show.

That's exactly what I do with this show. So yeah, and it's And unfortunately, these platforms are encouraging kind of bad content editing practices.

Yeah, you know, I mean, it's— I mean, so we are safe to talk about editing audio on this show now, which is nice. We could never talk about that.

Right, right. Yeah, that's true. That's true. I'm afraid I'm a firm believer, James, in editing audio. Even though Todd was almost spiritual about it, right?

Correct. But I think, yeah, you're right. You know, I mean, from my point of view, audio isn't second best. Audio is different, and we should be treating audio differently. There is a great show that is worth seeking out. It's called If You're Listening. It's from the ABC here in Australia, and you can watch the show on YouTube. You can listen to the show on Apple Podcasts. It is a very different experience, and it is mixed and edited specifically for those platforms. And you can't put one on the other because it doesn't really work, because there's lots of, there's lots of, of archive and all of that stuff. So I think from a point of view of doing a really nice job, it's a bit sad that that Apple is following the Spotify and the YouTube model of just giving you the audio track of the video, whatever you've ended up choosing. And I think that that's, you know, a bit of a shame. There are questions in the comments as well, I noticed. There's one question: will this work with Spotify for creators? Which I've seen quite a few people saying that. Who's that from, Rob?

Because I can't I can't read that, and certainly I don't know how to pronounce it.

Gil Dormius. Excellent, you've done a better job than I would have done. And I think the answer is no, no, it won't. You need to be using a podcast hosting platform that will support HLS. That podcast hosting platform needs to be signed up with Apple to do this through their secret API. Spotify for Creators is not currently one of those, and you could probably guess that Spotify for Creators may not wish to be one of those in the future.

Who knows whether Megaphone will? Well, it's interesting, though not surprising, that Megaphone was not included in the announcement, right?

Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, yes, you would imagine that they took one look at that and went— well, to be fair, you would imagine that Apple haven't talked to them yet because that would be kind of tipping the wink to the competitor, right? To the competitor, yeah. So time will tell whether or not Megaphone are also part of this. But again, you know, if iHeart are moving to the alternate enclosure, which they've said that they will, if they choose HLS as part of that, which we don't know yet. But if they choose HLS as part of that, then more podcast hosting companies will probably want to support that in the alternate enclosure as well. And that then means that companies like Megaphone will be under quite a lot of pressure from their users to implement that, to implement that tool too.

It kind of, kind of feels like a little bit of a a throwback moment to some degree because of the, the early battles that we had with Spotify over pass-through. And there was an earlier era when Spotify, when Spotify wanted to cache all of the episodes, right? So they wanted your RSS feed just to get one copy and then they, they wanted to redistribute that and put their own ads into it. The problem is, is that they wanted you to give it to them without any ads ads in it so they could monetize it. And other platforms wanted to do that too. You know, I'm pointing the finger at Spotify, but there were other platforms that I talked to back in that era that wanted to do the same thing. So, you know, so we— the industry has been through this before. And the other thing to think about with this too, with Apple, is that this HLS is kind of a pass-through type of approach. You know, it's centralizing the distribution, and I would love it if if the efforts on the part of these hosting platforms that build HLS streaming, that technology could be utilized across the industry into other apps as well. You know, and that's where the alternative enclosure tag comes into. And we should be able to support both in the RSS feed, I'm assuming.

Yeah, we can, absolutely. So we know that alternate enclosures, they're ignored by Apple, but they work fine in the RSS feed. So it doesn't cause you any issue if you want to to end up doing that. There is a, there's a bunch of weird alternate enclosures in the Pod News Daily RSS feed if anybody wants to have a look at that, podnews.net/rss. So you can have a sort of play around with that. There's some HLS audio which I'm probably going to be taking out very shortly. There's some MP4 video which I might turn into HLS, who knows, that might be fun. So all of that kind of stuff, you know, we know that we can do that. We know that it doesn't it doesn't break anything because of the wonderful extensible way that RSS works. So thank you to Dave Weiner for doing that and for the others that worked on the RSS ecosystem all the way back then. The RSS namespaces are super helpful and super useful and enable us to do this in a way that doesn't break anything. Yeah, so we know that, we know that all of that works. So what I'm hoping is that as we move forward forward. We do see companies supporting the alternate enclosure as well as supporting this special secret API into the Apple Podcasts app as well. I do know that at least one of the four companies does support the alternate enclosure, which is good news for all of us. I think the real sort of questions are exactly how the podcast apps will deal with the dynamic ad insertion, exactly how that bit works. My understanding is it's using something called HLS interstitials. I don't know enough about the HLS specification yet to understand all of the ramifications of that word, but my understanding is that it's your device that understands where to go for the ads rather than it being stitched in somewhere else. So the, um, so your device is told, okay, there's an ad break coming up, you need to go and get the ad from over here. Um, and it's the device that knows that. So it's the Apple Podcasts app that knows how to do that.

It's not a server-side process, it's a client-side process is what you're saying. Yeah.

And so, and so my understanding, and so, you know, clearly that's how Apple is going to going to be charging for it. And it's my understanding that that then, you know, is going to be something that we just need to make sure that all of the other podcast hosting— sorry, all of the other podcast apps understand how that works as well. But, you know, so it's still very early doors. We still don't quite know what the HLS specifications are because they're not public yet on the Apple Podcast website. I'm sure that they will be in the future, but I mean, it's a great step forward from where we were only, only a week ago. Such a great step forward. So I'm very excited about, I'm very excited about it, but it is massively different. And I think, you know, all of the chats that we've been seeing, Rob, with all of the various people that we've, that we, that we talk to there's just a lot of uncertainty about how the whole thing will work, um, because there's so much change. It's such a different way of doing things. And so kudos to Apple for, for thinking all of this through and making sure that it will be a really good user experience first and foremost.

And, uh, and let's see what happens. Yeah, I think it, you know, like I've been thinking for, for years, is that Apple needed to make this move to really move the industry back towards video again. And if they didn't then we would fall prey to the dominance of, of YouTube. Yeah. And, and that would be harmful to, to the, the podcast medium, I think, to be seen as kind of like, you know, living in the past, or somewhat, um, might be a good, good way to, to paint the picture.

So I think, I think you're absolutely right. And I think, and I think, you know, so, so it's a great benefit there. And let's not forget Apple Podcasts is still number one for podcasts. If you look at total consumption, YouTube has many more people using it, maybe for a couple of seconds, who knows? But Apple Podcasts is the number one in terms of total consumption and has always been. And so this is a really big deal in terms of making sure that videos are now as they once were in Apple Podcasts, but are now again equal alongside audio in the Apple Podcasts app. That's a great step. And Apple Podcasts still drives so much of our industry, and the fact that they have done this in such a way that leaves all of the industry still able to monetize in the ways that they want to end up doing that, you know, I think all of it is a very positive move. All we need now, Rob, is comments as well in the Apple Podcasts app, although I'm not quite sure that I want that.

Are you worried that the comments aren't going to be favorable, James?

I've seen some of the comments that my shows get.

Well, you know, you take the good with the bad, right? It's the old saying goes, right?

Yeah, I do a very quick unedited version of a show on YouTube and on Apple Podcasts, all about radio. And I just got a comment the other day saying, this guy's a moron. So probably, probably we don't want more of that, but it'd be nice though.

Yeah, I do like what's happening here because, you know, and I know you have too, but I've been seeing this trend around video for like the last 3 and a half years, 4 years. I think when I first saw this crack and what was going on is, uh, at the, the podcast show in London, uh, back in 2022 when YouTube was one of the title sponsors of the podcast show in London. That was the show that I went to and we met up there and, and stuff like that. But, um, seeing YouTube as a sponsor of a podcasting event was kind of of a breakthrough moment in my comprehension of what was happening here. I just wonder how, or even if YouTube needs to respond to this in somehow. I don't know that they, they're so big right now that it's hard for them to think that they need to do anything here.

But I mean, arguably YouTube have already, you know, the big difference, the one big difference here is that Acast can, or Art19 or whoever it is, can sell dynamic ads into these podcasts. YouTube has already said that they're going to enable that, albeit for sponsor reads.

Well, you can run your own ad insertion campaigns in their platform, but you have to manage it through their tools.

Yeah, and you have to give them, I think it's 40% of the money as well, which is possibly something nobody wants to do. Only that? So, and Spotify as well have said that dynamic video ads are coming soon, depending on who who you talk to, they're here already. But I think for most of us, they're coming soon. So arguably Spotify and YouTube are already making that move to be on parity with what Apple Podcasts have announced. I think the difference is that Apple Podcasts have announced it for everyone. It's available from launch, assuming that you're with the current 4 partners. But I know that they're talking to other partners as well. So I think, I think from From that point of view, I'm not sure that Spotify or YouTube have necessarily any catch-up to do, other than they've already said that they're going to be launching all of this stuff anyway. What Spotify do quite a lot is they will announce something is rolling out, and then it'll take 2 years to roll out, and they hope that people like me don't notice the fact that it takes them 2 years to actually roll something out. That's the same thing with Apple too, right? Well, the benefit, the benefit with Apple with this is it'll be live come— oh, as far as after its version of iOS goes? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, absolutely. And so Apple are very good at keeping something quiet until they're going to announce it. I mean, they talked to me about it on Sunday afternoon, so they actually got people in from their weekend to talk to this annoying journalist all about their tool. You know, which I think shows that Apple want to get this right. Apple want to make sure that we all understand, you know, what the product is and we can talk about it well. And I think that that's pretty good. That probably isn't something that every company would end up doing.

Yeah, so the really, the other thing I wanted to kind of get clear on is what the industry needs to think about as far as going forward from this. Now, granted, we're We have some structure around what Apple is doing here, but what's the— what are the pressure points? And I think it really gets back to what we already talked about, and that's the alternative enclosure still needs to be a pressure point to— for all the other listening apps. I don't know if Spotify will ever embrace, you know, alternative enclosures, or I don't I don't think YouTube will ever do that, would be my comment. I think the only one that might would be Spotify, and that would be going back to a pressure point around pass-through on the HLS stream side. But, you know, do they have a big incentive to do that? I don't know. I guess if they see what's happening with Apple Podcasts, and it seems to be scaling very rapidly with this type of process that they might, you know, there might be a crack of a window of opportunity for them to tap into that same technology that's been built for all these host platforms that they can tap into if they can get a cut of the revenue, right?

So yeah, I mean, I think the good news from the podcast creator's point of view is that you shouldn't see any of this stuff. You should be able to upload a video to your podcast hosting platform and they and they can stick it through an API which is coming to Spotify. They can stick it up through an API to YouTube, and they can use this super secret HLS thing for Apple Podcasts. And the podcast creator doesn't need to worry about any of that. And I think that that's a great step forward. Instead of the podcast creator having to upload 3 different video files to 3 different companies, All of that complication is going to go away, and I think that that is fantastic. What we could really do with is, you know, you can see podcast hosting companies keen to support all three of those platforms. They're probably not going to be so keen to support, you know, Podcast Addict, especially after my story this morning, but probably not very keen to support Podcast Addict and Overcast and TrueFans and Podcast Guru and Pocket Casts and all of these other platforms.

Platforms.

So there does need to be something which is open, delivered in the RSS, which is the alternative enclosure tags, which is the alternate enclosure tag. I would, I would say, yeah. Um, and so that, from my point of view, would be the ideal. If we've got, yes, direct API connections into Spotify, Apple, and YouTube, but then something so that everywhere else, wherever you get your podcasts, can access the video if they so want to. And I think that would be a really important part of where the future of podcasting is going, because that reliance on the open RSS feed is still a hugely important thing for all of us.

Yeah, and it's, and it's something that the industry really needs to push hard on, because I think that this API content sharing with these big platforms is is, you know, it's not a good trend line for RSS, right? It's— I'm not saying that it's going to disrupt quite yet RSS, but if it keeps progressing the way it seems like it has been, I think there is a little bit of risk there that, you know, there are other methods of getting content into other platforms, and it's not always RSS. Now granted, you know, we may see sometime in the future where RSS is used for a certain set of apps and APIs are used for another set of apps, you know, that are consumption apps. And that may be what the future looks like. But, you know, in the meantime, we can keep, you know, adding some new tags and some innovation to RSS to make it more, you know, attractive to keep it in the, in the front and center for, for the whole industry.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that that's certainly where comments comes in because we would all like to see more comments. Yeah, shared across through platforms, right? Shared across all of the platforms. That would be really helpful. So comments is important. Some form of payment would also be really nice, of being able to turn on, please give me, you know, a cent every minute you listen to. You know, all of that kind of stuff would be really great. I'm not sure that Apple would ever get into that, you know, game, but, you know, but let's see. But there are so many other things that we can do to do with additional features into the RSS feed. And again, the beauty is that we can do all of those without ruining the RSS feed for anybody that's currently using it. And that's the really important bit. You know, if we can come up with all of these interesting ideas, some will fail, some won't be used at all, some will be used fantastically, like transcripts where we're using the Podcasting 2.0 tags already. You know, and there are other examples of that. I'm a big fan of the location tag because I can see there being real opportunity in the future of saying, I'm going to California for a holiday, give me some podcasts about tourist places in California. And the podcast location tag could deliver that automatically. So all of that kind of stuff is, I think, really exciting. So we shouldn't forget how powerful RSS is and how part of our history it's been for the last 21 and a half years, but also how much of our future it's going to be, you know, as well in terms of that.

Yeah, I think that there is a lot of energy right now around kind of local podcasting too. You know, I think as we look at what's happening to radio, and I know you're a good person to talk about this as is podcasting going to start filling in the holes that will increasingly exist around local radio, do you think?

Oh yeah, I mean, I'm sure that local content through podcasting is, you know, I mean, it's becoming more and more of a big thing at the moment, and perhaps that is actually where with short-form podcasts or shortcasts if you want to call them that.

Perhaps, please— You just coined a new term there, John.

No, I haven't. Somebody else has already got that. I tell you what, when I launched the first podcast, daily podcast from a radio station back in 2005, we called it podvertising. Weirdly, podvertising never caught on. I can't think why that was. But yeah, but you can, you can certainly see, and I know that Inception Point AI is making these very short 60-second shows that, that are, you know, the weather for Chicago, for example, which you can then pull in to your podcast playlist so that you can, you can be updated on what the weather is or what they, or what's happened on the stock market overnight. You don't need a human being to end up doing, you know, quite a lot of that. So I I think, you know, there's— there are interesting things that you can do with local stuff. I wonder whether that is a feature that Apple Podcasts is interested in, or whether actually you end up with a, uh, a local podcast app which plays this kind of content for you, which is a bit of a separate experience. Um, and maybe that's, you know, um, I know that Adam Curry is working, um, you know, in terms of that for Christian for Christian ministers and things with the Godcaster. That again is a very different, you know, experience just for that audience. So maybe there will be different types of podcast apps for, okay, this is my local podcast app, and this is the podcast app that I use for fiction, which has very different things than you need for a, you know, for a general podcast app, and so on and so forth. And I would certainly see I see that as being part of where the future is going, certainly. I mean, you know, I remember using the Stitcher app way back when it was launched, and the Stitcher app had channels in there, and the channels were, you know, here's the tech news channel, and it would choose shows for you, and you could have a listen to those back to back. I see there being quite a lot of opportunity there. There. Um, and, um, you know, we're not seeing too much of that at the moment, but why not have the equivalent of Godcaster but for tech news, um, or for, um, people who live in Connecticut, or whatever it might be? So, um, I think there's a bunch of stuff there. So, um, yeah, I find that quite, that quite interesting too.

Yeah, I always thought that, uh, there was a big opportunity with, um, tuning TuneIn, the platform called TuneIn, to do that local podcasting stuff, because a lot of their— the whole basis of their company was offering links to local radio stations all around the country. So if you were in a particular, you know, area code or something like that, or zip code, you would be mapped to the group of radio stations that were in that area. And thought that if podcasting added some sort of a location tag, that that could be linked linked up to a particular geographic location, but TuneIn never really turned into being what I thought they would become.

Well, I have to say, I think the future is good for TuneIn. They've been bought by a company called Stingray, with the slightly scary name of Stingray. If you're unfamiliar with Stingray, apart from being a quite deadly fish here in Australia, but then everything is trying to kill you. Yeah, exactly. Apart from that, it's a large radio broadcaster in Canada, and they have now bought TuneIn. They understand how local radio works more than anybody else does. Instead of TuneIn, which always has been owned by a venture capitalist company, you know, and investors and people that frankly didn't care about radio in the past— I know that Bill originally personally cared about radio, but certainly in the last 10 years or so, it's been really run for the money. Now it's being run by a radio company, and they're breathing new life into that. And I'm actually interviewing Steve Jones from Stingray on the stage at Radio Days Europe in Latvia. Of all the places to meet up with him, right? I know. Apparently, apparently it's very, very cold in Latvia.

Latvia.

I would imagine, right? It's a beautiful warm day. It's going to be up to about 90 degrees here. Um, yes, I think Latvia will be -20 or something, so I'll need to find something, something there to deal with that.

But, um, yes, I'm really— I've got like more about that, like, like 16 inches of snow on the ground outside of my house right now.

So yeah, well, yeah, um, all I can say is that my daughter is 13 and, uh, last year she saw snow for the first time Rob Greenlee. Oh, she did.

Wow. Yes. So what did you think about it?

What did you think? We went to Iceland, so there was quite a lot of snow there, but she couldn't have been more excited.

I would imagine. Yeah.

Yeah. Something different. It's a different, it's a different world. It did once snow in this state here in Australia. It did once snow here and it was front page news of the newspaper. So it's a different world down here.

I'll tell Yeah, yeah. So anyway, that's just, you know, you're down under and I'm on top, I guess. Is that what— is this what this means? But, um, it's, uh, it's spring is coming and winter's coming for you, James.

Yeah, winter's coming, winter's coming for us. It'll, it'll only go down to the mid-40s.

Yeah, there you go. That's rough. So anyway, James, it was great to have you on the On the New Media Show trying to clear up some of this stuff, and I think we're only getting started, right?

It's been a great pleasure. I'm sure that there will be more on the Pod News Weekly Review, which is another podcast you can go and find. The good news about that is it's not available in video in spite of what Sam wants me to do.

So are you going to cave in and go cater to Sam's wishes? I am absolutely not. Okay, you're the loyalist for the audio only.

Correct. I think Sam is wanting to do a little bit of sort of social media, playing around with some video clips and stuff like that, and I'm absolutely not going for that. But yes, so there may be more in terms of that. If you're not already— if you don't already get that wherever you get your podcasts, then please do. But it's been great to be back on the New Media Show show. And yeah, I hope to be again one day.

Well, you were on at Podfest too, so you got on there, there too.

So that was good. I was wearing a suit there and we were talking again all, all about video. This is going to be a recurring theme, I think, for this show.

And AI. And I didn't really talk too much about AI tonight, but I certainly could have. But yeah, it didn't seem like the topic of what we needed to focus on Tonight, so not quite, not quite. All right, James. All right, well, thank you everybody for being here, here tonight. Uh, oh yeah, it looks like Paul, Paul Collin wanted to poke the bear a little bit here.

So yes, winter is coming for me. Oh yes, those mid-40s winters, Paul. Oh yes, I might, I might have to put a jumper on. Yes, exactly, or a sweater, or whatever it is that you, you folks call it.

Yeah, but you'll be up here in the US for some podcast conferences, right? And, you know, as you look at the balance of 2026, I'm sure you'll be at Podcast Movement, right?

In New York. I will certainly be. So next, in terms of podcast conferences, I will be at the Podcast Show in London, which I'm very much looking forward to in May, which is warm for London. So that should be nice. I'm looking forward to a nice warm air And then, yes, and then probably Podcast Movement in New York, which I know lots about, but I've been sworn to secrecy. But it's gonna be amazing in New York. You'll need to block out a week, that's all I can tell you, but it's gonna be really, really worthwhile going to. So that's going to be a great event. Event. So looking forward to a little bit of that in September, which isn't going to be too hot or too cold, which will be nice.

So are they— yeah, they announced firm dates yet?

They have firm dates, but they're not announcing it as yet. Of course, the thing that you— the thing if you want to go to a Podcast Movement event, the thing to go to is South by Southwest. If you want a tip, go to the Podcast Movement website, podcastmovement.com, and register your interest. It's free to go, but if you register your interest, then you get priority in the queue, which is just worth knowing. So I would go and do that. But that's, that's going to be great. That's going to be a good 2, 2 and a half days of great podcast content at South by Southwest. And of course, all of the other South by Southwest stuff going on as well. As well in Austin, Texas. So that is in mid-March. I won't be there because I'll be shivering in Riga, but still, there we are. So that should be fun. But yeah, if you want a bit of podcast excitement, then that's probably the next one after On Air Fest, of course, which is next week.

Next week, yeah. Just a couple hours south of me here. So, yeah, so awesome. All right, James, well, I'll let you move on with your day. It's, uh, Thursday there, right?

Um, yes, it's already tomorrow here, so, uh, yes, I need to work kind of living in my future.

Uh, you're living in the past, Rob. Yes, that's not a good place to be when it comes to podcasting, is living in the past.

So yes, I'm looking forward to a full day of working out exactly what more news is going to be thrown at me, uh, through the email.

Yeah, well, that's a daily thing for you, so good luck with that. Absolutely. All right, James, everybody, thank you for spending time with us tonight. It was great to, to have you join us. And if you're watching the podcast, uh, go, go check out newmediashow.com and, and you can go watch, uh, or listen to some of the past episodes. Uh, this is an audio and video podcast in Apple, so you can get it over there, but it's only an audio podcast on most other platforms, though, though this show does have an alternative enclosure tag in the RSS feed. So those apps, um, I have a separate, uh, you know, video feed from an audio feed, and then in the the audio feed, I have the video link, and in the video feed I have the audio.

Don't use— don't use Fountain or TrueFans or any of those apps, and you'll be able to watch as well as listen.

Yeah, well, great. All right, James. Well, good night everybody, and good night everyone. Good morning to everybody in, in Australia. So thanks.

Okay, bye-bye.