Hello friends of the Podcast Standards Project!

As part of the Podcast Show in London, we got the Podcast Standards Project members together on Wednesday, and the room was packed.

20+ people showed up, with representatives from Amazon Music, Headliner, SupportingCast, Auphonic, Buzzsprout, the PPSA, Transistor, Hubhopper, Podigee, Fountain, Acast, Snipd, RSS.com, TrueFans, and Pocket Casts.

I can’t believe how much we’ve grown. Here’s our meeting back in 2024:

The momentum keeps building. As more people join Slack, show up to meetings, and become certified members, our ability to collaborate and advocate for open RSS gets stronger.

Here’s our mission:

“We are a grassroots industry coalition (hosting companies & listening apps) dedicated to adopting new features that improve the open podcasting ecosystem for both listeners and creators.”

We try to frame our discussion around one question: “What will (ultimately) bring value to listeners and creators?”

One of the best parts of this meeting was bringing the listening apps (Fountain, True Fans, Snipd, Pocket Casts) and the hosting companies into the same room to exchange feedback and requests directly. This is the part I’m most excited about: getting companies to talk to each other and to form an open standard together.

HLS video in RSS is happening

We’ve been talking about this for a long time, and it’s finally happening: HLS video in podcast RSS feeds using the alternateEnclosure tag!

Here are the hosting companies currently supporting it: Transistor, RSS.com, Fountain, and True Fans.

Apps supporting it (or about to): Amazon Music, iHeart, Fountain, and True Fans, with Pocket Casts and Snipd close behind.

This is the “upload once, distribute everywhere” future we’ve been working toward, built on open RSS rather than being locked into one platform.

One big item we discussed was the problem of bot traffic. Video files are much larger, so bots downloading them are a major concern (as they could cost hosting companies a lot of money).

The proposals coming out of the meeting

A bunch of concrete proposals came out of the discussion. These will get written up as Issues in the PSP GitHub project:

• Securely signing video requests. Tom (Buzzsprout), Oscar (Fountain), Kevin (Snipd), and Ellie (Pocket Casts) are writing a proposal to sign video requests from apps, so hosts can block bots from pulling down large amounts of video.
• A standard for private podcast feeds. I’m writing this one up: a proposal to define the different types of private feeds and improve on what hosting companies are already doing.
• AI disclosure. There was a real consensus to adopt this. Alberto (RSS.com) is writing up how we might all implement it. Worth saying clearly: this isn’t only an ethics thing, it’s also strategic. It helps creators stay compliant with regulations like the EU AI Act and Apple Podcasts’ requirements.
• Item-level podroll recommendations. The “if you liked this episode, you might also enjoy…” idea. People liked it. Now we’re figuring out how to actually implement it.

Two other things worth flagging

GUIDs are getting broken on import. Oscar (Fountain) and Kevin (Snipd) pointed out that some newer hosting providers (Substack and others) aren’t properly honoring GUIDs. They’re generating brand new GUIDs when they import a show, which breaks things downstream. I said I’d reach out to those companies directly.

Collaborative marketing with the PPSA. The Podcast Professionals Association wants to work with hosting companies to produce materials for their members that explain questions like “What does a podcast hosting company actually do?” and “What features in RSS should you know about?”

I’ve put my full notes from the meeting here: meeting notes

I’m sure I missed some of the discussion. If you were there, add a comment to that doc so we have a record of everything we talked about.

Thanks again,
Justin Jackson
Co-founder, Transistor.fm
Founding member of the Podcast Standards Project