Notices by John Spurlock (js@podcastindex.social)

‘I'm trying to provide the subtleist unwavering form of movement’

https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/1.5849979

AI-generated podcasts have entered the open system in a big way, it will be an interesting story to follow in 2026.

RSS tags will not help here. Podcast hosting companies may not always cook up the slop, but they are paid by the bowl to distribute it. Best thing that ever happened to them.

Podcast apps are where the slop is actually on the menu, and where they have a compelling interest in seeing the customer return to the restaurant.

@dave they are all over, every host

it's like they all decided at the same time to hit the gas recently (last few months) with mass slop production, after testing out with one or two shows earlier in the year

I guess the glass-half-full view is that many hosting companies are making it super simple to upload tons of stuff, good jorb guys!

@dave lol, and scrolling to the very next post in my timeline...

https://podcastindex.social/@alberto/115706308283411748

google just passed microsoft in market cap, what year is this again?

https://companiesmarketcap.com/

‘Older programs were all about what you need: you can do this, that, whatever you want, just let me know.

But recently (a decade, more or less), this relationship has subtly changed. Newer programs (which are called apps now, yes, I know) started to want things from you.’

https://tonsky.me/blog/needy-programs/

New data: Top CDNs used by the 1.5 million new podcast episodes found in October 2025

- #1 Amazon Cloudfront with yet another high episode share, at 65.39%

https://livewire.io/podcast-cdns-by-episode-share/

‘Now the interesting thing about podcasting: there is, still, a power to people listening to conversations (if they listen to the whole thing) that I think is different.

If you have time to go and have a conversation with someone, then _that_ is consistent with democracy.’

– @barackobama

‘More than 80 percent of time spent on Facebook and more than 90 percent of time spent on Instagram is spent watching videos, the company reported. Most of that time is spent watching content from creators whom the user does not know.’

https://www.derekthompson.org/p/why-everything-became-television

Buzzsprout just published their public stats for September 2025, so I just updated my post tracking them over time

- big spike for browser-based downloads from computers, which is 🤔

https://livewire.io/buzzsprout-stats-visualized/

New data: Top CDNs used by the 1.5 million new podcast episodes found in September 2025

- New record share highs for #1 Amazon Cloudfront, and #2 Cloudflare, corresponding to the interesting share drop for Megaphone/Omny seen in Sept

https://livewire.io/podcast-cdns-by-episode-share/

Big Media Companies Spent $210 Billion on Content in 2024, Led by Comcast, YouTube and Disney
https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/content-spending-2024-record-210-billion-comcast-youtube-disney-1236526081/

‘The big problem is YouTube. With YouTube, Google has a centralized chokehold on video. We need a way that’s as easy and scalable to host video content, independently, as it is for written content. We ought to start working on it with urgency.’

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/09/23/goddard-kimmel

Ok, four hours into the space black iPhone Air lifestyle.

This is going to sound needlessly provocative, but I swear it is what I honestly keep thinking...

Feels like I'm using an Android phone running iOS

started keeping track of AP iOS version share seen across all shows measured by op3.dev, thinking about turning this into a real-time page at some point

calm before the storm, iOS 26 to be released on Monday...

@tchambers @rimu

other than the server and client work to implement both sides, in podcasting there is also the question of free and cutoff vs paid and full-length versions of the same episode, and also free with-ads vs paid without of the same episode

ideally in the same feed or some defined relationship between the paid and free episodes (best listener exp) - this is still very early with other payment schemes and would have to do a bit of work with this scheme as well

cc @dave

@tchambers @rimu @dave

personally I am still very dubious on these proposals, and view it as walking through a one-way door that I'm not sure we want to walk through in a large-scale way without a ton of experimentation first

this one is only interesting in that it has Reddit on board and a few others - and to me the especially-grating shameless comparisons to RSS

When a crawler requests a page that is managed by an RSL license from your website, it must include a valid RSL License Token for the page in the HTTP header using the new proposed License RFC 7235 HTTP Authentication scheme.’

https://rslstandard.org/guide/web-crawlers

‘RSL is an open, decentralized protocol, based on the widely adopted RSS standard’

New RSL Web Standard and Collective Rights Organization Automate Content Licensing for the AI-First Internet and enable Fair Compensation for Millions of Publishers and Creators
https://rslstandard.org/press/rsl-standard

‘RSL adds licensing capabilities to the RSS feed format, enabling publishers to create standardized, public catalogs of their licensable digital assets. When used in an RSS feed, RSL functions as an RSS module that adds licensing capabilities to the RSS item element’

https://rslstandard.org/guide/rss-feeds