iOS 17 brings episode art to Apple Podcasts

• iOS 17 has been released for iPhone and iPad. A free update, it includes significant changes for Apple Podcasts, unlocking episode art and a new Now Playing experience among other features. Episode art is already supported by Spotify, Pocket Casts and other large apps: you’ll find it in our daily and weekly podcasts.

• First look: Acast has announced a partnership with Slip.Stream, offering all Acast podcasters access to more than 70,000 royalty-free music tracks for use in their content creation. Acast creators get free access for six months and a discount thereafter.

• Data: PodPros released its Actively Established Podcast Report for September. The report pulls in a number of data points for the industry, including industry download averages and a scoring of hosting providers.

• First look: Triton Digital unveiled its Canada Podcast Trends report with data from the country. An accompaniment to the Canadian Podcast Ranker, it reveals that Canadians listen to three hours of podcasts on average per week, and that true crime is the most popular category.

• First look: Lemonada Media has launched a full-service studio for brand, talent, foundation and non-profit partners looking to create original podcasts.

• First look: NPR has renewed a brand-lift measurement solution with Veritonic, to measure the impact of their client and sponsor audio campaigns.

• PodReacher has unveiled a service that turns your podcast into a book, and can publish it on Amazon within eight weeks.

• A new version of Open AI’s Whisper speech recognition software was released today. It includes improvements to word timestamp accuracy and support for the podcast namespace requirements. Ryan Heise tells us the magical incantation is: whisper --word_timestamps True --max_line_width 32 --max_line_count 2 audio.mp3 which outputs JSON, SRT, VTT and TXT formats. (As of today, we also support JSON transcripts).

• Apple has an Apple Podcast Studio in Apple Park, Cupertino. The team at Las Charlas de Applesfera recorded it in directly after Apple’s Wonderlust event. The podcast team describe it as “a generously sized recording room that includes everything any podcaster needs to produce quality content”. The Podnews Weekly Review would sound nice from there, just saying.

What’s a “first look”? It’s where Podnews has been trusted to be one of the first to cover a new product or service to our 29,300 readers.

Moves and hires - with Podnews Live: where podcasting connects

• Programmatic audio platform Audiohook has announced David Krulewich (DK) as the company’s Chief Revenue Officer.

• Amy Westervelt, founder of Drilled Global and the Critical Frequency podcast network, has received a Journalist Of the Year award from Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration co-founded by Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation. Watch the video announcing the award.

Tips & Tricks

• Talib Jasir, the founder of the Afros & Audio Podcast Festival, suggests 11 ways to repurpose a podcast.

Podcast News - with Airwave

Sunday’s episode of NPR’s Up First was from Radio Workshop in Cape Town, South Africa. This Coal Life was a story starting in Emalahleni FM in Mpumalanga, and worked on by senior producer Dhashen Moodley and youth reporter Siya Mokoena, who spent six months covering what will happen to families who have built their lives on coal as South Africa moves towards renewable energy.

Lava for Good has launched Earwitness, a podcast docuseries that dives into the wrongful conviction of Toforest Johnson — a man who is now sitting on death row in Alabama. On October 2, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide if it will hear Toforest’s case.

Circumnavigate with Bear Grylls and Coyote Peterson is new today from Outdoor.com and Backyard Ventures. Episodes will feature Grylls and Peterson virtually traveling the globe to speak to adventurers and athletes about their expeditions, careers and motivation.

From the Airwave Podcast Network: History of the Second World War is a weekly podcast which looks at World War II, beginning with the tumultuous years after the First World War, continuing into the descent into war during the 1930s, through the war years, and then into the post war aftermath.

Podcast promotion in the wild

Seen by Podnews reader Katie on the London Underground, Audible is marketing series three of the Steve Coogan podcast From The Oasthouse, The Alan Partridge Podcast. An “Oast house” (two words) is a building in Southern England designed to dry hops, the chief ingredient of beer, apart from water that is, which we guess is really the chief ingredient of beer come to think of it. Here are some pictures of oast houses that we can’t afford to buy from Alamy.

Podcast promotion in the wild is our series showing podcasts being promoted on poster sites, in tube trains, on aeroplanes, those stickers in the gents, on t-shirts, postcards and all kinds of other places, reaching the 58% of people who don’t listen to podcasts at least once a month, because that’s where the real growth is. It also lets us write things about beer and/or oast houses. Send any you spot (podcast promotion, not oast houses) to editor@podnews.net or just hit reply.