Podcast Standards meeting in Los Angeles

During Podcast Movement Evolutions 2024, a handful of PSP members met for lunch to discuss our ongoing goal of improving the open podcasting ecosystem for listeners and creators.

Our first topic of discussion was Apple Podcasts’ recent adoption of the <podcast:transcript> tag. The entire group felt that this was a big win for podcast standards. Now that there is a major platform supporting the tag, there is an opportunity for this tag to be adopted by other apps (Pocket Casts and Castbox are interested). Doing some advocacy work with Spotify may also encourage them to adopt the tag.

Another big opportunity is for listening apps to adopt the <podcast:person> tag so they can feature host and guest credits on podcast and episode listings. This would allow apps to emulate Apple’s host and guest credits (which are currently proprietary and unavailable to all creators). This conforms to our desire to bring value to listeners, app builders, and hosting providers by innovating on top of RSS with tags that provide value.

It was nice to have Ellie at the meeting as a representative from the podcast-listening app side! Ellie spoke about Pocket Casts, their recent backend overhaul, and how it will set them up for new feature development (and adoption of new podcasting tags). We all agreed that getting more apps to adopt podcast tags like Person, Podroll, and Transcripts should be a main focus moving forward.

The group reiterated the need for podcast hosting platforms to continue to adopt certain tags as a group. RSS, Transistor, and Captivate all committed to launching their <podcast:podroll> implementation soon (by April-June). Buzzsprout has already launched theirs.

Sam Sethi pitched the group on being the public face of Podcast Standards as Chief Evangelist. Sam has long advocated for open standards in podcasting and promoted the Podcasting 2.0 namespace. The group in attendance voted to have him perform this role for one year, with the possibility of extending it. His primary responsibility with the group will be communicating (on a monthly basis) with the press, creators, and apps about new developments. He will also help with our advocacy and outreach work to onboard more platforms.

The group also voted to move PSP communication to Slack (almost everyone uses it). We think it will help us onboard participants and improve engagement. If you would like to join Slack, email Sam Sethi.

Finally, a renewed call was made to encourage more representatives from platforms (like YouTube, Spotify, and Castbox) and hosting providers to join the Podcast Standards Project.

In attendance at the meeting:

this post was written by Justin Jackson, Transistor