Belgian government to make their own podcast platform

• In Belgium, a Flemish-language podcast platform called Podgrond is being formed by media companies Mediahuis, DPG Media, SBS Belgium and the public broadcaster VRT, as a push-back against US tech companies. It’s being given €1.4m ($1.5m) from the Flemish government. De Tijd suggests that “The problem is that the vast majority of podcast consumption comes from two international players - Apple and Spotify - with Flemish producers having little control over how their work is marketed and valued.”

• Spotify’s enterprise podcast host, Megaphone, was not delivering podcasts over the weekend. A “content delivery issue” on Saturday, which caused publishers to be unable to upload audio, was followed by "podcast playback issues“ on Sunday. Podcasts were unavailable on various listener apps; a problem that appeared to take around twelve hours to fix. One Megaphone podcaster described it to us as a ”major outage"; it is the sixth this year.

• Podcast and music company Audio Up has raised almost $10m in funding. The company has more than thirty podcasts and claims more than 40 million downloads over the last two years.

• Here’s one bill you won’t need to pay again: PodcastStudio Pro™ a web-based planning and organisation app for podcasters, is removing its paid subscription and going free and ad-supported.

• Are you an audio fiction podcaster? Looking for others to follow on Mastodon? Evo Terra has a form to share your details, and a spreadsheet of others. We’re at @podnews@social.podnews.net by the way.

• Festival Estéreo happened last month in Argentina, which is the largest podcast event in the country. Pablo Fisher covers what happened at the event, and links to video and twitter threads.

• Twitter removed Twitter Spaces for a while on Friday, apparently to fix an access bug: it’s back though.

• Dan Shipper has built a chatbot trained on content from the popular Huberman Lab podcast.

• Podimo and Planeta Audio presented a new show, El regreso de Tutankamón, in Madrid.

• Further Reading: Nick Hilton posts the cheery “2022: The Year That Podcasting Died”, suggesting that everyone’s interested in video now; former Anchor exec turned VC Michael Mignano says something about The Future of Podcasting Isn’t Just Audio (it’s behind a paywall); Eric Nuzum shares a forbidden word list describing podcast hosts; The Wall Street Journal writes a piece about how “some of the most successful podcasters have kept their day jobs”.

Programming Note: You’re not going on vacation, so nor will we. We’ll be here every day during the holiday period.

Moves and hires

• Higher Ground has made a number of hires: Corinne Gilliard is Senior VP of Documentaries (ex Spotify); Nick White is Senior VP of Original Audio (ex Pushkin and KCRW); and Andrew Eapen is Director of Audio Production. Mukta Mohan is promoted to Head of Audio Content.

The Tech Stuff - with RSS.com

• How does live podcasting work? Dave Jones has written an article explaining how the <podcast:liveItem> tag works - by which you can send automated notifications to people who follow your podcast, letting them know that they can hear the show live.

• Podverse has added streaming sats to its latest mobile beta. The podcast app had previously only supported boosts. The full release of the app also now supports Apple CarPlay.

• In the Podcast Index API, the /search/byterm endpoint now returns the pubdate of the most recent <item> in the response.

• Alby has made it easier to top up your account, announcing a partnership with MoonPay.

• Captivate supports OP3, and has done for a while. (Many other podcast hosts let you type in prefixes yourself; “support” means additional UX to help you add services like this).

Podcast News

Germany’s former leader, Angela Merkel, is to appear on the true crime podcast from SWR, called Sprechen wir über Mord?! Instead of talking about real crimes, though, she’ll be talking about fictional crimes within Richard Wagner’s four-part opera “Der Ring des Nibelungen.”

Everything Everywhere Daily's producer, Gary Arndt, has signed with Glassbox Media. Glassbox will serve as the exclusive advertising representative for the podcast and will work on positioning the podcast for television and other media. The show also just had its ten millionth download.

Podcasting 2.0 this week includes a lively discussion about in-app comments, and possible reasons why they haven’t, yet, happened in an app.

Travelling over the holiday period? Our New Podcast Trailers feed will help you find the perfect new show to enjoy while you wait at the gate, or get stuck in traffic.