The winners of the AIBs 2023

• The winners of the Association for International Broadcasting awards were announced. Nicky Woolf, the presenter of The Sound: Mystery of Havana Syndrome, won the audio Presenter of the Year award. Winners and commendations for podcasts included ITV, the BBC, RTÉ, and Project Brazen.

• The Podcast Marketing Academy has published its Podcast Marketing Trends Report. Podcasting as a whole is a challenging medium to build an audience in, the report suggests; and high-growth podcasts are more likely to utilize pitching podcast services and paid advertising.

• The National Association of the Deaf and SiriusXM are in negotiation for a settlement in the case brought against the company about a lack of transcripts. A judgement is now expected by Jan 31.

• Tenderfoot TV, Campside Media and Ventureland are working on a film and podcast.

• WNYC’s On The Media this week looks at how Apple shaped podcasting, and also asks has the podcast bubble finally burst? which focuses on WNYC itself.

• StreamGuys has updated the company’s SGReports analytics and measurement software. The new tool runs faster and includes improved aggregation and presentation.

• PODES, the festival of Portuguese podcasts, takes place next weekend

• Further reading: A commission for a BBC Radio 4 podcast seems, suggests Bill Rogers, more keen to appeal to US listeners than UK ones; meanwhile Matt Medeiros writes about all the AI tools he uses for podcasting.

The Tech Stuff - with RSS․com

• John Spurlock has published all useragents for YouTube Music’s RSS playback feature, which we covered on Friday. The user-agents are part of the shared opawg user-agents-v2 repository, and will now be measured by OP3.

• Extreme audio compression - can you fit a 45-minute podcast into just 40 kilobytes? It turns out you can - though it’s a bit of a cheat, requiring some reconstruction afterwards.

  • As a 12kbps Opus file, you can fit the same 50.4MB audio file into 4.9MB, incidentally. Opus, an open codec, is playable by default on Android and within Chrome. That’s not quite 40K though!

• Speaking on the Podnews Weekly Review, Buzzsprout has announced support for the “podroll”, a simple way to link to other shows you think your audience might like. Podnews’s podcast pages support it - see it in use in the Buzzcast, under “Other shows you may enjoy”. We understand that Blubrry will also announce its support today; as a supported feature of the Podcast Standards Project, we expect other podcast hosts to follow soon.

People News

• Richard Knight is to be the Director of Audio for BBC Studios. He is currently Head of Podcasts at Wondery UK, and returns to the BBC to start this new role in January.

Podcast News - with Airwave

From Airwave: All Creatures Podcast aims to educate listeners on the diverse animals that share our planet. Each week, the show discusses a different species, conduct interviews with conservation experts from around the globe, and highlight recent conservation news.

In the Podnews Weekly Review this week, we hear from sponsors Buzzsprout on their support for podroll; and we also hear about the new Podhome podcast hosting company.

RUN, FOOL! is new today from MrBallen, At Will Media and Campside Media - featuring a weekly compendium of grisly and harrowing tales guaranteed to make you scream. It stars award-winning writer, producer, and comic book creator Rodney Barnes.

A new show from Apple TV+, The Pirate of Prague tells the story of Viktor Kožený, who smooth-talked his super-wealthy Aspen neighbors and a Wall Street titan into investing huge sums of cash to snap up Azerbaijan’s state-owned oil company, promising staggering returns. Sounds too good to be true? Of course it is.