Here are the top 5 Podcasting 2.0 features I think you should try right now.
Thank you for joining me for the Audacity to Podcast. I'm Daniel J. Lewis.
Podcasting 2.0 is revolutionizing podcasting for podcasters, audiences, developers, and
even advertisers. But this episode isn't going to be rehashing everything about Podcasting
2.0 and why I think it's such a great thing for the industry, which I do think, I've
done a whole episode previously about Podcasting 2.0. You can get the link to that in the notes
for this episode a tap or swipe away or at theaudacitytopodcast.com/top20features.
Instead of covering everything about Podcasting 2.0, I want to focus in on what I think are
the best features that it offers that you should look to try these and see how you could
benefit and your audience benefit from these features. Now note that some of these features
are still in development or they might not be available in your publishing tool or in
all of the apps, but I'm happy to announce a brand new website to help you keep track
of these things. Podcasting2.org. That is the new home for Podcasting 2.0. This is a
collaboration that I'm doing with James Cridland from PodNews to make this home for Podcasting
2.0. So anyone who wants to know what is Podcasting 2.0, they can go to podcasting2.org to learn
more about Podcasting 2.0. Whether they are an audience member and they want to know what
apps support Podcasting 2.0. Or if they're a podcaster and they want to know why should
I care about this, what can I use to make this, what kind of publishing tools or hosting
tools support this. Or if you're a developer, learn more about the podcast namespace and
much more and another site I've been working on, canipodcast.com, will let you see the
complete overview of what features are supported and where and as of what version or what date.
So you can really get a good overview of seeing this feature is supported in all of these
apps while this feature is maybe supported in only a couple apps or a couple publishing
tools. Those two websites are available in the notes for this episode at theaudacitytopodcast.com/top20features.
The main one I want you to remember though is podcasting2.org.
That's the home of Podcasting 2.0.
Podcasting2.org.
On to the top 5 features for Podcasting 2.0 that I suggest you start playing with or start
asking for if your publishing tool doesn't support these yet.
Number 1.
Cross-App Comments.
When I recently attended PodFest Multimedia Expo, I was talking with a woman interested
to know more about Podcasting 2.0 and she lit up with excitement over two things, cross-app
comments and live streaming. I'll talk more about live streaming in a moment.
The vision of cross-app comments is simple. Imagine being able to comment on an episode
you're listening to without leaving your podcast app. That's the key here. And even
Even better, others can reply to you from their different podcast apps.
This is what cross-app comments will allow.
Audience comments from multiple podcast apps, but all going into the same stream of activity,
maybe even using the activity stream protocol, so you and others can engage from the preferred apps.
And this applies for the podcaster too.
You can see these comments from multiple apps in one place.
While I think this is the most exciting feature for everyone, podcasters and audiences, it's
also proving to be, unfortunately, the most complicated to implement.
Developers have to think about performance, data portability, authentication, and giving
you moderation control.
But when these features are solved, and I do believe they will be, probably this year,
This will be a dynamite feature.
And the best part is that this engagement can occur completely without leaving the podcast app.
But there will be other systems to let you as the podcaster monitor and engage with your audience.
For example, whatever we decide on, I will be building support for cross-app comments
into Podgagement whenever these other development issues are resolved.
Because Podgagement is all about engaging your audience and growing your podcast, so
it makes total sense for it to support these cross-app comments.
And I'll be able to do that when we have this cross-app comments thing working.
So there are some more popular methods right now, or one particular more popular method
that seems to be what we're going to go with.
And if you can, start using cross-app comments.
There are a few apps that support it, and it is a thing of beauty to be able to comment
in one app and see that comment in another app too.
There's still a lot more to go with this and a lot more that this feature can offer, but
this I think is the most exciting thing because it's a way that you can engage directly with
your audience around your episodes without leaving the podcast apps.
That's what's so exciting about it.
It's all right there inside of their preferred podcast app, as long as they're using a modern app.
some modern apps over at podcasting2.org. Number two, live streaming. When I spoke
with that woman at PodFest, the other thing she was most excited about was the
ability to live stream with live engagement directly into her audience's
podcast apps. That's what the "live item tag" or sometimes called
"LIT" is designed to do. Now live streaming isn't a good fit for all
podcasters or podcasts or audiences, it presents a whole new layer of complexity and multiple
distractions for sure. But when you can manage it well, live streaming is a fantastic way
to engage your most loyal audience in real time. I don't really think live streaming
is always a good way to grow your audience, although it does certainly present some opportunities,
especially if an app features "here are all of the shows that are going live right
now or have something scheduled to go live soon. That can be a cool opportunity to grow
your audience, but it's really about engaging your most loyal audience and it can be a ton
of fun. I've done live streaming in the past too and it was always a blast.
Podcasting 2.0's live feature will let you live stream directly into the modern podcast
apps. You start by scheduling your upcoming event and your audience will see that in their
apps. Then when you go live, your audience will receive a push notification if they have
that enabled and then they can jump to listening or watching live. There's even the potential
to have your chat room there too. And best of all, this is all right inside your audience's
podcast app. They don't have to leave it. They don't have to go somewhere else and have
a un-mobile friendly experience or lots of ads or anything like that. They can be right
there in their podcast app. That's what's so beautiful about that. They won't have to leave,
they stay there. And they can engage without leaving the app that they already like and prefer.
And apps can even do smart things like automatically marking this later download episode
as played if you watched it live so that you don't have to go back through and delete the episode if
you've already watched it, that's what this kind of thing can do for us. Dave Jackson and I host
another podcast called The Future of Podcasting where we talk about Podcasting 2.0, the things
that are being developed in podcasting, and like all things around the future of podcasting. That's
why the show is named that. And we did a whole episode recently about the Podcasting 2.0 live
streaming feature. I've got that link in the notes for this episode at theaudacitytopodcast.com/top20feature
/top20 features or a tap or swipe away inside your app.
Moving on to number three, micropayments.
Don't let the micro part of micropayments make you think they're small and worthless.
Podcasting 2.0 enables you to receive financial support in any amount from your audience by
leveraging the power of Bitcoin.
Now please don't run away.
This is not some scam thing.
This is a great way on the internet to exchange money, especially when we're going through
the Lightning Network as these Podcasting 2.0 micropayments do.
The Lightning Network is a sub-network of the Bitcoin network.
Let's just leave it at that kind of explanation for now.
That is faster and cheaper.
This is most commonly measured in satoshis, abbreviated as "sats" or a little symbol
that you can look in the notes for this episode to see.
It looks kind of like an S overlaid with another S. And a satoshi is 1/100,000,000th of a bitcoin.
Now that is very small and that does allow your audience to send you these tiny, tiny
little payments.
And you may be thinking, "Oh, this is a worthless amount," or "What even is 1,000 satoshis,
for example, worth?"
Here's the quick hack for it.
I shared this previously in an episode about micropayments.
And this works at least for US dollars.
To understand the value quickly, every 1000 satoshis is worth the current value of bitcoin
in pennies.
So if bitcoin is worth $45,000, then 1000 satoshis is worth 45 cents.
See how that works?
Bitcoin is worth $50,000, then 1000 satoshis is worth 50 cents.
So backing up from that, your audience could send you 5 cents, 50 cents, 100 dollars if
they want to.
They could send you whatever amount and a lot of your audience might enjoy having fun
with the numbers.
Like doing a 1776 boost, which is the Liberty boost because of the founding of America in 1776.
Or they might do something that's significant to them of some sort.
Or there are things like the Striper boost and different things like that.
Or fun little numbers and numerology.
Your audience can do that with this and it doesn't really cost them a whole lot.
And it also doesn't cost you a whole lot either.
So this is allowing your audience to give as little as a few pennies to as much as they
value your podcast.
Thus why this feature is called Value for Value.
You are giving value in your podcast and you're giving your audience the opportunity to give
value back to you.
And it uses the podcast colon value RSS tag.
But it doesn't stop there. Your audience can set their podcast app to stream the payments
to you for every minute they listen to your podcast. So even something that seems as small
as 100 satoshis per minute would be 3000 satoshis for a 30 minute podcast. And if bitcoin is
worth $45,000, that streaming payment would convert to $1.35. That may still not seem
like a lot, consider this. That's 54 times as much as that one listener would be worth
to an advertiser paying a common $25 CPM, which is $25 per thousand downloads per episode.
These kinds of micropayments would be nearly worthless or even impossible with common payment
methods like PayPal or credit cards like through Stripe or another payment processor. Because
Because these other payment processing providers usually take a flat fee around 50 cents plus
another 3% of the transaction.
So if their flat fee is 50 cents, then already you can't receive anything under 50 cents
from your audience.
It wouldn't be worth it.
And then there's the whole complication of the amount of time that kind of thing takes.
But with the Podcasting 2.0 Value for Value spec, it allows your audience to set this
up to happen automatically streaming as they listen, or they could send a boostagram, which
is when they hear something they really like in your episode, they can boost that section
of it and send a message along with it.
That's why it's called a boostagram.
So this is kind of like a super chat that you might see in Twitch or YouTube live kind
of thing where someone can add the comment and add some money with it.
If you want to learn more about the Podcasting 2.0 micropayments, I've done a whole episode
previously about are podcasting 2.0 micropayments worth it. And also there's a whole website
about value for value. I highly recommend you check that out to learn more about just
this concept of value for value. I should do a whole episode about that actually and
I will because there's so much more to learn about this and to appreciate about value for
value. It goes beyond trying to get sponsors for your podcast or just accepting donations
or Patreon, those can all be kind of part of it, but it's so much more and it can
be so much more exciting. Both of those links are available in the notes, tap or swipe away,
or at theaudacitytopodcast.com/top20features.
Number four, super chapters. Shout out to Dovidas from rssblue.com for coining the term
super chapters. And I love it because it totally describes in such simple terms what Podcasting
2.0 does with chapters. We've had chapters in podcasting since 2005. Back in the early
days, it was enhanced podcasts with AAC format but then came MP3 chapters and those have
been supported for years and they are supported in a lot of apps. So don't think that chapters
are anything new but they've always been very limited and you had to use a particular
kind of app to create the chapters too and some of the apps just couldn't put chapters
in an mp3 file. Those chapters, back then the legacy chapters we can call them, could
only contain a title, an optional link, and an optional image. That was it. They were
also embedded in the media file so updating your chapters would mean replacing your media
file. And that limitation meant that none of your audience who already downloaded that
episode would be able to see anything new in the chapters. Maybe you needed to fix a
link that was in the chapter. Maybe you want to add chapters after you've published the
episode. Maybe you want to use chapters for something else really cool. Well, you would
have to plan that ahead of time before you publish the episode or else your audience
might not receive those chapters. That was legacy chapters.
Podcasting 2.0's super chapters build on these legacy features and move the chapters
into an external metadata file. Woo! Isn't that so exciting? I knew you would love that.
I know, but bear with me because it is actually exciting what you can do.
Simply by moving the chapters into an external file, you can now update the chapters anytime.
And modern podcast apps are smart enough to check for updated chapters when your audience
engages with your episodes.
So if you have to publish the episode right now and you don't have enough time to do
the chapters, you could go ahead and do that.
Or if you have someone else who does the chapters after you publish the episode, or you use
an AI or something like that, or you realize that you forgot something, well you can put
that in after the fact and your audience in the modern podcast apps will still get chapters.
The optional chapter images are also external URLs instead of images embedded in your mp3 file.
So by having the images be external URLs, you can swap out those images any time as
long as it's that same URL, or you could update the chapters if you wanted to, but
even just changing the image at that same URL means that you can do some really cool
things like dynamically generated images with promotions, countdowns, dates, and more.
Like there's a whole service out there that provides embeddable images for email newsletters
and those images, when someone opens the email, those images do a quick call to the server,
see what time it is, see how much time is left on whatever promotion you're giving,
they display a countdown timer inside the email and it's a real-ish countdown timer.
The time on it is accurate as of when you opened that email and opened that image. You
could do that same kind of thing with Podcasting 2.0 Super Chapters, linking to a dynamic image
like that with countdowns, with dates, and so much more that you could do with that.
At this time, Podcasting 2.0 chapters still support only the same title, URL, and image
field, although it's an image URL instead of the embedded image, but still pretty much
like legacy chapters.
Even though you already can right now do some cool stuff with it, I'm excited to see Podcasting
2.0 super chapters emerge that will soon change to support stuff like image galleries, or
videos, or blocks of text, polls, and other forms of engaging your audience, and much
more. That's why I love the name Super Chapters. Shout out again to Dovidas from RSS Blue for
coming up with that. It's a fantastic name. It's perfect. I think it definitely describes,
it super describes what we are doing.
Number five, transcripts. I've long seen that transcripts were mostly a waste in the podcasting
space. Transcripts are usually low-quality written content and thus are difficult to
read and perform very poorly for search engine optimization. Yeah, they're better than
nothing but they're not all that great. Anyway. Some podcasters would even relegate
their transcripts to a separate download through their website, making them potentially even
less accessible for anyone who might actually need the transcripts for accessibility. The
irony there, but Podcasting 2.0 changed that. Now you can link to your episode transcripts,
which are best in SRT or VTT file formats. You can link to them right from your podcast
RSS feed. And smart podcast apps and embeddable players and such will see those transcripts
and even give your audience the ability to see your line-by-line transcripts in real
time with your spoken content.
So it's not like it's just a giant plug of text of here's every word that was spoken
in this episode.
No, it's line by line.
It's the closed captions for podcasts.
And a great way that you can see this if you don't have a podcast app that supports transcripts,
and I've started using transcripts with the Audacity podcast, go to steno.fm.
That's s-t-e-n-o dot f-m.
Look up a podcast there, like the Audacity to Podcast or another one, and press play
on an episode and look at the transcript.
And although you will see a big block of text, because that's the way they display it right
now in their web app, you'll see it highlighted as those things are being spoken.
Or inside a podcast app, you would see it line by line as those things are being spoken.
This is great.
But here's the big surprise of 2024, something that I wasn't expecting.
I'm super happy about this.
Dave Jackson and I did a whole episode of The Future of Podcasting about this.
Apple announced official support for Podcasting 2.0 transcripts starting with iOS 17.4.
This is huge.
I'm not going to reiterate every point we made inside of the Future of Podcasting episode
about this, but let me tell you, this is huge because it's the first Podcasting 2.0 feature
Apple has supported.
This is Apple we're talking about, the legacy podcast app but also the number one player
in podcasts.
And a lot of people thought Apple's never going to support Podcasting 2.0.
Well guess what, they are.
They're supporting the transcript tag.
And since Apple is still an industry leader and pretty much a trendsetter in podcasting,
you can expect to see a lot of other podcast apps start to support the same podcast standard.
the Podcasting 2.0 transcript tag. And that could also open the floodgates to much broader
Podcasting 2.0 support, as some developers might decide, "Well, as long as I'm going
to support another RSS namespace," which is a technical thing for what they'd have
to do, they might think, "Let me check out what else is available. What other new features
might there be?" And maybe they could support these other things, like cross-app comments,
live streaming, micropayments, super chapters, and more, along with the transcripts.
So go listen to that episode that Dave Jackson and I did on the future of podcasting to learn
more about some of the implications of this news for I think the whole industry.
I've got the link to that in the notes for this episode at theaudacitytopodcast.com/top20features.
So these 5 top features are number 1, cross app comments, number 2, live streaming, if
you're interested in live streaming that is, number 3, micropayments, number 4, super
chapters and number 5, transcripts.
So you might be thinking, how can you use Podcasting 2.0?
Again, I've talked a lot more about Podcasting 2.0 overall in a past episode.
But my ultimatum is this, if your podcast publishing tool, whether that's something
you use on your own website or your podcast hosting provider, if that tool doesn't already
deeply support Podcasting 2.0 by now, switch.
And if you're looking for a place to switch to, the four best options right now are, number
one, Blubrry with PowerPress on WordPress, if you like a WordPress focused workflow.
Captivate, they do this stuff really well.
They don't necessarily support as many features right now, especially not as many features
as PowerPress supports, but I think Captivate's implementation of these features is the best
in the industry.
There's also Buzzsprout, who surprisingly still keeps it so simple and easy to do, and
yet supports many of these features.
And if you're really stuck with where you are, the tool you're using, the hosting provider
you're using, like maybe you've paid for 10 years of service and you don't want to
waste that money, or you just, for whatever reason, you can't leave the hosting provider
the publishing tool that you're working with right now, you have my pity. I really
suggest you do leave if they don't support Podcasting 2.0. But if you're
stuck, there is an option for you and that is using Blubrry's Podcast Mirror
service. Now it does cost now, but it does allow you to add these Podcasting 2.0
features, many of them, to your podcast. Not all of them, not the episode level
stuff at least right now, but some of these top-level things like the
micropayments and some live streaming stuff you can do with Podcast Mirror using any other
podcast feed.
Think of it kind of like, this is a throwback here, think of it kind of like what FeedBurner
could do with its SmartCast feature back in the day where FeedBurner could turn a non-podcast
feed into a podcast feed while Podcast Mirror takes a podcast feed, we could say a podcasting
1.0 feed and upgrades it to a podcasting 2.0 feed with many but not all of these features
just because of some technical limitations. I spoke more about these separate podcast
hosting providers and why I think they're the best going forward at this time in my
previous episode. I've got the link to that as well. So if you want to follow up with
any of this stuff, I've mentioned several links in this episode that I highly recommend
you check out all of these links, listen to the other episodes, check out the other websites.
The two links you need to know for this episode are first, podcasting2.org.
Podcasting2.org.
That's podcasting2.org.
I wanted to say it three times to make it more memorable because that is the new home
for Podcasting 2.0.
And I'm working on this with James Cridland and it's open source even.
So you can contribute if you know about stuff like GitHub poll requests or if you just want
to reach out and say, "Hey, I noticed maybe this could be explained a little bit better."
We can look at that and we're happy to explain things better on the site.
That's what we want it to do.
We want it to be a marketing site, an explanation site for Podcasting 2.0 so that you don't
have to be a developer, you don't have to go to a scary place like GitHub.
You can just go to podcasting2.org.
The second link that you need to remember for this episode is the link for all of these
links that I mentioned, the other episodes and all the other resources in this episode,
theaudacitytopodcast.com/top20features or a simple tap or swipe away inside your podcast app.
And please share this episode out with other podcasters.
Share it on your social networks.
I'd love to help other podcasters with this and especially any podcasters wondering what
should I support first?
What should I be asking my hosting provider to support?
Send them to this episode at theaudacitytopodcast.com/top20features.
Now that I've given you some of the guts and taught you some of the 2.0 tools, it's
time for you to go start and grow your own podcast for passion and profit.
I'm Daniel J. Lewis from theaudacitytopodcast.com.
Thanks for listening.
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