Podcasting 2.0: Why It’s Not Fringe Anymore
Earlier this year, my friend Rob Greenlee, on The New Media Show, used a word to describe Podcasting 2.0 that got a little attention.
Fringe.
To be fair to Rob, he later wrote an entire article explaining that “fringe” was the wrong word. What he was really talking about was the gap between innovation and mainstream adoption. Unfortunately for Rob, by then I already had a title for my Podcast Movement presentation.
So here we are.
The funny thing is, if you go back a few years, calling Podcasting 2.0 fringe probably wasn’t all that unreasonable. It was a relatively small group of developers, podcasters, hosting companies and app developers working on some pretty geeky stuff.
But that’s not where we are anymore.
It really was fringe at first
Podcasting itself is more than 20 years old now, and one of the things that made it work in the first place was its open nature. Nobody owns podcasting.
And that’s more important than it might sound. A podcast isn’t something you have to upload to one particular company before people can listen to it. You publish an RSS feed, and any podcast app can read that feed and follow your show. The publisher doesn’t have to ask Apple, Spotify or anyone else for permission to publish, and an app developer doesn’t have to ask permission to build a podcast app. That’s one of the things that has always made podcasting different from most other online media.
For most of podcasting’s history, Apple’s podcast directory became the de facto directory for the industry. Apple has generally been a good steward of podcasting, but because so many podcast apps used Apple’s directory as their source of information, an open medium had become surprisingly dependent on one company’s database. Apple didn’t own podcasting, but an awful lot of the podcasting world depended on Apple’s list of podcasts. That’s the problem Adam Curry and Dave Jones were trying to solve when they started the Podcast Index.
Around six years ago, Adam Curry (the Podfather) and Dave Jones (the Pod Sage) started the Podcast Index as an independent, open podcast catalog. That was the beginning, but it didn’t stop with building another index.
What grew around it became Podcasting 2.0. Today that includes the Podcast Index, the Podcast Namespace, Podping and a growing ecosystem of developers, apps, publishing tools, hosting companies and podcasters. Or (as I like to think of it) a happy band of pirates.
One of the things that gets misunderstood about Podcasting 2.0 is that it didn’t try to replace RSS. It extended it.
We didn’t replace RSS
RSS is still the beating heart of podcasting.
Sometimes Podcasting 2.0 gets described as though somebody decided the old way of podcasting was broken and invented an entirely new system. That is not what happened.
RSS was designed to be extensible. We’ve been extending podcast RSS feeds for years. Apple’s iTunes namespace is probably the most obvious example.
You don’t have to understand XML to understand how this works. XML is basically the language an RSS feed is written in, and a namespace is a little like adding a new dictionary to that language. The Podcast Namespace gives us new words that podcast apps and hosting companies can understand, without changing the basic language RSS has always spoken.
The Podcast Namespace uses that same basic idea. We can add capabilities to RSS without breaking the apps and systems that don’t understand those new capabilities. An old podcast app can still read the feed. A newer app can look at the additional information and do something useful with it. The Podcast Namespace now includes a lot of features. There are enough tags in there that I could easily ruin a perfectly good article trying to explain all of them.
So I won’t.
Instead, let’s look at three that are pretty easy to understand: transcripts, chapters and funding.
Transcripts
The \<podcast:transcript> tag lets the publisher provide a transcript or caption file along with an episode. That’s useful for accessibility, but it’s also useful for searchability and, most importantly to me, creator control.
The transcript travels with the podcast feed. The creator or publisher can provide it instead of depending entirely on every listening platform to generate its own version.
Podcasting 2.0 transcripts can use formats including VTT and SRT. Timed transcripts can also be used as captions in compatible apps. And here’s where the argument that Podcasting 2.0 is still fringe starts getting difficult.
Apple Podcasts supports the Podcast Namespace transcript tag. Spotify for Creators supports the transcript tag as well.
Now, I’m not going to tell you Spotify has suddenly become a full Podcasting 2.0 app. It hasn’t. Its Namespace support is limited to transcripts. But I think that’s actually part of the point.
Adoption doesn’t have to happen all at once. A company doesn’t have to implement every tag in the Namespace before we can say Podcasting 2.0 is being adopted. Features get adopted because they’re useful. That’s how standards spread.
Chapters
Chapters aren’t new to podcasting. We’ve had chapters embedded in media files for years. Podcasting 2.0's cloud chapters improve on that idea. Instead of putting all of the chapter information inside the MP3, the \<podcast:chapters> tag can point to an external JSON file containing the chapter data.
That means I can fix or update chapters without re-encoding and replacing the audio file. Chapters can also contain titles, links and artwork. Because that information isn’t buried inside the media file’s metadata, it can be much easier for different kinds of players, including web players, to use it.
This isn’t some out-there feature waiting for somebody to implement it. There are already apps and publishing tools using cloud chapters today.
Funding
Then there’s \<podcast:funding>. This one is almost ridiculously simple. It provides a link where listeners can support the show. That’s it.
Maybe it goes to your membership page. Maybe it goes to Patreon. Maybe it’s a donation page or something you’ve built yourself. The important part is that the creator gets to specify where that support link goes.
I bring this one up because Podcasting 2.0 sometimes gets reduced to Bitcoin.
There certainly is a Bitcoin and Value for Value component to Podcasting 2.0, and there are people doing some interesting things with it. But Podcasting 2.0 is much bigger than just streaming Bitcoin and Boostagrams.
You don’t need a wallet. You don’t need to know what a satoshi is. You don’t have to stream payments by the minute to get something useful out of Podcasting 2.0. In fact, you may already be using some of it without knowing it.
And then there’s Podping
Podping is one of those pieces of technology that’s really important and really difficult to make exciting. It’s plumbing. But plumbing is pretty important when you need it.
Traditionally, podcast apps, directories and other services periodically check RSS feeds to see whether anything has changed. Podping gives publishing systems a way to announce that a feed has changed.
Think of it as knocking on the door and saying, “Hey, you might want to check this feed.” The RSS feed is still the source of the information. Podping just helps systems know that there’s something new to retrieve.
At the time I’m writing this, the Podcasting 2.0 support matrix lists 24 publishing and hosting tools with Podping support.
That’s infrastructure. Infrastructure isn’t always sexy. Neither is DNS, and I’d still rather not run the Internet without it.
Look at who’s using this stuff
The strongest argument that Podcasting 2.0 isn’t fringe anymore isn’t anything Adam Curry, Dave Jones, Rob Greenlee or I can say about it.
Just look at who’s implementing it.
Apple Podcasts supports Podcast Namespace features. Recognizable listening apps including Pocket Casts, Podcast Addict and AntennaPod support Podcasting 2.0 features. Spotify for Creators supports the transcript tag.
Not every one of those apps supports every feature. Again, that’s not really the point. On the publishing side, it’s the same story.
The Podcasting 2.0 publishing tools directory is sorted by the number of supported features. At the time I’m writing this, TrueFans is first, followed by Blubrry and it’s PowerPress plugin for WordPress. And before anyone accuses me of putting Blubrry near the top because I work there:
I didn’t put Blubrry near the top. The support matrix did.
Other recognizable podcast publishing and hosting platforms are implementing pieces of the Namespace as well, including RSS
Not everybody supports everything, nor should we expect them to. That’s how an open ecosystem works.
Some ideas will become widely adopted. Some will serve a smaller niche. Some will change. I’m sure some will eventually disappear because nobody found them useful. That’s not a failure of Podcasting 2.0. That’s how this stuff is supposed to work.
RSS is still the beating heart
This is probably the most important point for me.
We don’t have to choose between innovation and RSS. There are new ways to distribute and consume media. Apple is doing interesting things with HLS. YouTube is obviously an enormous part of the media landscape. Spotify has its own platform and APIs. There will be more technologies after those.
That’s fine.
An open RSS foundation and newer delivery technology can coexist.
What I don’t want to see is podcasting become a collection of closed systems where creators have to upload their content separately to five different companies, and each company decides how that content can be consumed. One of podcasting’s greatest strengths has always been that a creator can publish something from a server they control, or from a hosting company they choose, and listeners can consume it using an app they choose. No one company has to give either side permission.
That’s worth protecting!
And extending RSS so it can do more is one way we protect it. Podcasting 2.0 isn’t about freezing podcasting in 2005. It’s almost the opposite. It’s about giving an open technology the ability to evolve so we don’t have to abandon it just to get modern features.
I have worked in this industry for a long time, and one of the things I’ve always liked about podcasting is what I call coopetition. We’re competitors. Blubrry competes with other hosting companies. Podcast apps compete with other podcast apps. We all want customers.
But we’re also building on the same open ecosystem. A feature developed by one group can become useful to everybody. Somebody can build a new podcast app without asking Apple, Spotify, Blubrry or anyone else for permission to enter the podcast business.
I think that’s something worth keeping.
It’s already here
Rob’s larger point about the gap between innovation and mainstream adoption was a fair one. There certainly was a gap, but that gap is closing.
Podcasting 2.0 doesn’t need every podcast app to support every tag. It doesn’t need every hosting company to implement everything in the Namespace. It doesn’t even require podcasters to know what all of those tags are.
That’s actually a sign of success.
Most podcasters don’t know the details of the iTunes namespace either. They fill out some boxes in their hosting platform, hit publish and their podcast shows up in Apple Podcasts. Podcasting 2.0 should eventually be just as boring.
A podcaster adds a transcript. Their hosting company puts the right thing in the RSS feed. Apps that understand it use it. The podcaster shouldn’t need to care what XML tag made it happen.
That’s where I think we are headed.
Podcasting 2.0 started with a fairly small group of people trying to make sure podcasting remained an open medium while giving it room to grow. Today, pieces of it are supported by Apple Podcasts, Spotify, podcast hosting companies and listening apps used by millions of people.
So, is Podcasting 2.0 still fringe?
If it is, the fringe is getting pretty crowded.
Podcasting 2.0 isn’t the future of podcasting. It’s already here.
