Podcasting is open and decentralized, built on an open protocol called RSS. That means it’s not owned by any of the centralized platforms (Apple, Spotify, YouTube, etc). Anyone can publish a podcast, any app can consume it, and no single company controls the ecosystem. That’s rare and valuable, and worth protecting.

I’m one of the founding members of the Podcast Standards Project (PSP), a group of hosting platforms and podcast apps working together to innovate on top of RSS. We get together in the same room (sometimes physically, sometimes in Slack and GitHub) and collaborate on which new features we should add next.

The goal for the group is alignment. New features only work when both sides adopt them. For example, a hosting platform could implement the Live Item tag, but if podcast apps don’t support it, it won’t work. So the PSP is really about creating the conditions for that coordination to happen.

A lot of our discussion centers on which Podcasting 2.0 features to adopt. Podcasting 2.0 is an open source project doing some genuinely exciting innovation on top of RSS, but for it to be truly valuable, hosting platforms and apps have to move to adopting new features together.

A couple of wins I’m proud of:

• The first is the podcast transcript tag. It’s now widely adopted by big apps like Apple Podcasts and smaller ones like Pocket Casts. Getting hosting platforms to offer transcript upload and generation, and getting apps to display them, took real coordination.
• The second is HLS video in RSS feeds. HLS is a streaming protocol that’s well-suited for delivering video to podcast consumers. I spent a lot of time last year advocating for it, and since then Amazon Music and iHeart have adopted HLS in RSS, with Pocket Casts coming soon (Fountain, TrueFans, and Podcast Guru already supported it).

When Apple came out with their own HLS announcement (through an API rather than RSS), I still felt like it was a win for the open ecosystem. It means more hosting providers are now offering HLS encoding and streaming, which means more creators are uploading video, which means more HLS manifests are ending up in RSS feeds. This means more creators are publishing video to RSS than ever before. (Plus, Apple could still choose to ingest HLS video via RSS!)

The PSP runs entirely on volunteer effort. No membership fees. Nobody’s getting paid. To become a certified member, you need to adopt a certain number of features (on the hosting side if you’re a host, on the app side if you’re an app). You can see the full list at podstandards.org/features.

If you want to get involved, you don’t have to be a certified member to participate. Join us in Slack, follow along on GitHub, or come to one of our in-person meetups. We try to meet around conference time, usually at the London Podcast Show, and we try to do at least one meetup in the US as well.

We’re also actively trying to bring more creators and people from the broader podcast world into those conversations.

If you want to reach out, head to our contact form.

​Cheers,
Justin Jackson
Co-founder of Transistor.fm,
Founding Member of Podcast Standards Project