Better Seasons with Podcasting 2.0

Daniel J. Lewis:
Better seasons with podcasting 2.0.

Dave Jackson:
Daniel, future of podcasting episode number 45. We're gonna ramp up. We're gonna pimp out our seasons. Now that'll be awesome. Maybe get some flames on the side, some nice spoke tires, something. I don't know. But, we had super chapters last week. Are these gonna be super seasons or just

Daniel J. Lewis:
They're more like seasons 2.0, but they do bring some pretty handy features to it. So do you remember when Apple Podcasts actually, back then, it was called iTunes still. Do you remember when they launched Seasons?

Dave Jackson:
Yeah. Vaguely because it was for me, I was like, oh, that's a cool feature that I'll never use. But I can see where people, like, back in the day I think it was probably invented for cereal because that show is so popular, and that's one of those shows where they announce about 34 people at the end of their show that worked on it, and they fly all over the world doing these interviews. And so those people need to take a break when their their season is over. And I was like, well, that makes sense. And ever since then, they've they take I mean, I know they just released, I think, a new season of Serial. I thought I heard rumors or something like that, maybe. But, any any of those big shows or or somebody who just like, I need a break, and they wanna they'll break it off in the season.

Dave Jackson:
So, but I just remember they came out, and I was like, I don't know. What about you? What what was your initial thought?

Daniel J. Lewis:
Yeah. It was in 2017 when they came out with it. And I thought it was great because, already, seasonal podcasts existed. And Podcasts would talk about what season they were in. And I'm a proponent for making the seasons actually make sense to your audience. If it doesn't make sense months from now, then you probably don't need seasons. In other words, if it's a schedule based thing, you probably don't need it. But if it's thematic, then it's a good idea.

Daniel J. Lewis:
And, like, I was hosting a TV show fan podcast at that time for the TV show Once Upon a Time, And the TV show has seasons. Each season would have a story arc. So I liked the introduction of season and episode number. And, by the way, this came out when Apple had done nothing with their podcast spec for years. And then, they dropped all of these new features like episode numbers, the season numbers, the specific iTunes title tag, and some of these other features, and also more categories. So this was fantastic that they brought new features to their spec, and then other apps followed suit. And this was all before podcasting 2.0 when we let Apple decide what goes into a podcast feed. Well, I loved it because it meant, like, for my podcast about the TV show, I could divide my episodes into seasons because my episodes match the seasons of the TV show as well.

Daniel J. Lewis:
And I think that works great for when you have chronological seasons like a TV show would have. But a show like Serial, does season 2 have anything whatsoever to do with season 1?

Dave Jackson:
Yeah. That would be no.

Daniel J. Lewis:
Right. It's completely different. Now, yes, it is a different season. So it's fine that they use a season tag. But to call it season 2, when I see something that says season 2, you know what I'm thinking immediately? I need to go back and listen to season 1 first. Right. Otherwise, I'm going to be completely lost. So it was someone who used to be with NPR who came up with this idea and proposed it and everyone jumped on board of how about we allow seasons to have 2 new features in podcasting 2 point o.

Daniel J. Lewis:
So they could still be numbered seasons like Apple Podcast supports with the Itunes namespace spec. But the Apple spec is limited to whole numbers. So you can only have season 1, 2, 3, 4, like that. So with podcasting 2.0 seasons, we can have decimals in that. So we could have season 1.5, 1.6 if you wanted to or whatever. So you can do that. But the other cool thing, and this was the more exciting thing about it, is that you could give your seasons a name. And I think that makes a lot more sense than a number.

Daniel J. Lewis:
I'm a name, not with a number.

Dave Jackson:
Well, I know, Colin Gray from the podcast host does seasons, and I remember there was one season where they just talked about microphones and then another season where they just talked about they were all all podcasting related, but they separated their chapters by topic. And so that would be great if you could name that differently. And then I think you said, is there something in the spec about having a different picture?

Daniel J. Lewis:
That's the new proposal. And this is something that I think is a fantastic idea. We'll link to more information, like, both from podcasting2.org about the season tag as it exists right now. And, also, the idea here that it was Dave Jones who wrote this up, and I I can't remember if someone else actually came up with this idea, and he's just writing it up to start the conversation. But the idea is that you have your seasons as you do with the numbers and a name and you could add an image to it. Just like we can have images on individual episodes and images in individual chapters if you want, You could potentially have images for the whole season. And I think that helps to enhance the experience and potentially enhance how that podcast is displayed in a podcast app. Because you could think of it this particular way.

Daniel J. Lewis:
As imagine, you're looking at a podcast, a seasonal podcast that already has multiple seasons in your podcast app. And as you're scrolling through the episodes, this episodes that are in particular seasons have a different background image to them. And maybe some color scheme thing around that just like we see how color schemes are changing for chapters artwork and episode artwork. You could do that same kind of thing. So in a way, a season might be the blue season, then there's the red season, then the green season. Just based on assuming that those are the primary colors used in the cover art. You could do that kind of thing to really enhance the experience and make a podcast app look more visually interesting, kind of like you would see in Netflix or Amazon Prime, Hulu, and places like that where you see that every time you visit a show, it looks like you're on a page that was designed for that show, Not just data fed in from text and a couple images here and there, but actually built to look beautifully branded for that show.

Dave Jackson:
Yeah. That's interesting. I was trying to figure out how that would work in the back end of most media hosts Because right now, you just put your season number and your episode number, and so somewhere you'd either have to make the season, and then maybe you say this is season 1 JSON. And then later, when you go into an episode, you just have a drop down of which season is this for or something of that nature. I was just trying to figure out the the fun thing about adding all these features. It's, you know, it can definitely improve the experience. But the more features we add, the the fun part of that is adding it on the back end of the the, you still wanna make it easy to make an episode in that whole 9 yards, but it's, that could be a tricky one.

Daniel J. Lewis:
Yeah. And Thomas Rhine in the GitHub that we'll link to for this episode where this is being discussed, he brought up a good point that we're starting to complicate a tag that will be pretty much just duplicated across several episodes. And that's unnecessary bloat Because you really don't need like, even right now with the podcasting 2 point o tag, it has the title for the season in that season tag. And you really don't need to repeat the season title across every episode. And whenever you do have to repeat something like that across capitalization that's off could confuse podcast app and make it treat that one episode as a different season. If it's capitalized or spelled differently or there's an extra space in it or anything is one character off about the name, it could trigger some confusion in that. And besides that, as long as the information is the same across the whole season, it's not all that necessary to repeat it. So Right.

Daniel J. Lewis:
When you start to add then an image on top of that, well then you have to add that same image to every episode that is in that season and it starts to get unnecessarily bloated. So one proposal that I put out literally minutes before we recorded this episode So this is just one idea, and then I'm not sticking to this as saying this is the best idea. And there will be other ideas, and we'd love for you to contribute on the GitHub too. If that doesn't scare you off, you just write something if you have an idea of how this could be structured. But, an idea that I had for this is we re simplify the individual episode season tag. That all it contains is a number. And that number becomes an index number of a sort. And then at the top of the RSS feed before all the episodes, then you have a sort of index of the seasons where then you can have the season tag up there.

Daniel J. Lewis:
But this season tag includes the number and the name and the image and maybe someday further down the line, we decide to add more to the season tag and it could include that there too. So then you very easily get a table of contents for the seasons as well as having one place to maintain this stuff so you don't have to ensure that you're getting everything exactly right from episode to episode. You just have this one place. So then in the publishing systems, the interface could be something like how you create a new episode. You just click create new season, it adds the season to your RSS feed and then when you're creating your episodes, you could either manually type in the season number or just pick from one of the seasons you've already created. So that could make it very easy on the user interface side too. So even, like, for the podcasters, they don't have to worry about copying and pasting the title. They don't have to worry about typing it correctly the same time.

Daniel J. Lewis:
They just see these are the seasons I've already created. I want to add it to one of these seasons.

Dave Jackson:
Yeah. Because I've seen people do that. They will have no seasons and then they'll add 1 or if they do have a season, they'll type in the wrong number And depending on how things are set up, in some cases, it'll go way to the bottom of your your RSS feed. And you're like, hey. I published this episode. I don't see it anywhere. And they'll, like, in in the case of Libsyn, they'll try to upload the file again, and they can't because it's already there. But they're like, but it's not here.

Dave Jackson:
And that's where you have to go in and you do a search, and you're like, oh, you put season, you know, 11 when you really meant number 11 in your episode title or whatever. You just get the wrong number in the wrong place, and it messes everything up. So, yeah, I I like that idea. Build it once and then just pull from some sort of down, drop down list would be great.

Daniel J. Lewis:
And I think, yeah, that simplifies it for the user. That makes it less likely that they would make a mistake. Makes it easier for them. And it moves away from the dependence on numbers. I'm kind of against episode numbers in most cases. And the same thing now that we have the ability, we've had this ability with podcasting 2.0 to give seasons names. I think that's so much better so that, like with, Colin in his podcast, The Podcast Host, that they could name the season the microphone season. Or the first time that I saw a season used in a really good way in a podcast was a web design podcast I listened to many, many years ago.

Daniel J. Lewis:
I'm not sure if this podcast is even still going. It was called the BOAG World Podcast, and they did that same thing where for one season, it was all about best tools. And then another season, they interviewed website owners to talk about the experience of running websites. Another season, it was just top ten things. So every episode was a top ten of something. And that was really clever. It was thematic. You knew what you were getting into.

Daniel J. Lewis:
And they could then name those seasons something like that. This is the top 10 season. This is the website owner interview season. And that's a lot better than season 1, season 2, season 3. There's nothing compelling about a season number.

Dave Jackson:
Yay. I was hoping I could listen to season 3 today of something that I don't know, and it would be great if you if if this all makes them more obvious. I remember somebody told me there was a a podcast about a local radio station here in Ohio called WMMS, and it broke Bruce Springsteen and Rush and all these other bands. And so I went to the podcast, and it was, like, episode or season 1, but they were on, like, season 3. And so I click on it, and they're talking about this amusement park in Ohio. And I'm like, this isn't about WMMS. And it wasn't till later that I scrolled down and I was like, oh, it's way down here. So I I have to go back and look at it.

Dave Jackson:
But if there was something that just really made it obvious that, hey, this is season 3. This is season 2. This is season 1. Because I think what they were doing where they were changing, they were adding the tagline to their show. So it'd be like future of podcasting dash season talk or something like that. And then they would do 5 or 6 episodes on seasons, and then they'd be like future of podcasting dash, you know, whatever the next thing was. And so it was kind of confusing because you're like, wait, this says this, but the thing I want. So it's just anything that would make it more obvious that this is a chapters, and you wouldn't have to hack the name of your show, anything like that.

Dave Jackson:
And I just wonder, I'd have to go back and look at the show. They might not have even known that, you know, seasons 1.0 were available. They might have just missed the whole boat. But I just remember being very frustrated when I was like, I've been lied to. And then I was like, oh, wait. No. I haven't. It's down here.

Dave Jackson:
So that's always fun.

Daniel J. Lewis:
Yeah. And then you can even look at this further as we're thinking of ways that we could add images to seasons. What size, what dimension should that image be? Should it be a square image just like the cover art is and the episode artwork is and the chapter artwork is. They're all square images. So should the season artwork be square? Or just like there have been some proposals for other images that you could include with your podcast, should we maybe say season should be a wide image? Like a wide screen, 16 by 9 ratio. Something like that that might be a little more interesting to integrate into a podcast app. Or would we allow people to add multiple images? I would be a bigger fan of that actually. I like having the options to optimize it as I'd like.

Daniel J. Lewis:
So being able to give it a square image and a 16 by 9 widescreen image. So that then the podcast app can display that in a way that works well. And we could put certain guidelines around these things also to say something like, keep the bottom 10% clean of text. So that way, if there's any kind of fading going on, we could get into that, but the best thing really is not to have to define margins and colors and that kind of thing and the requirements for what kind of image you can put in there. Just focus on the technical aspects of it of this is the kind of format it needs to be. These are the dimensions or the the ratio that it needs to be.

Dave Jackson:
So at this point, you said the 2 point o spec, they have a number which can have decimals because I I forget what there was a pretty popular show that released their whole season in chunks. Like, they gave you, like, the first five episodes, and it was like a TV show of some sort. Or it might have been Game of Thrones where they really like their last season was like, here's the first 6 episodes. And then they were still recording it. There was and here's the last 5 or whatever it was. But, so I could see people wanting to do that. Maybe, again, depending on the content, maybe you want to have a big cliffhanger half the way through to get people talking about your show, and then they're ready for, you know, bring us part 2 of the season. So but right now, you have season names and season numbers that include decimals.

Dave Jackson:
That's what we have available now. And then the proposal is for the ability to add images. And then what else am I missing that we're Well,

Daniel J. Lewis:
my fix for the proposal, and I'm not stuck on this, but is a way to maybe restructure this to make it easier on the RSS feed and easier on the users. And this is totally open to someone else to suggest something better as well, but it's just an idea of a way to simplify it of breaking out like an index, a season index, basically.

Dave Jackson:
As you are the man that loves stats, do we have any clue or is there any way to figure out what percentage of podcasts are using season numbers? If I'm a person that's making an app or from a media host or whatever, and you're like, hey. We got this new thing. You should code into your system. I could see where they might go, wait. Hold on. Before we go adding all this extra work and redoing our interface, they might wonder, you know, exactly how many people are using seasons. I know a lot of the the bigger shows, you know, the the NPR style shows and things like that and true crime and all those people with the the teams of 18. Right.

Daniel J. Lewis:
Where the first season is great, but not so much after that.

Dave Jackson:
Yeah.

Daniel J. Lewis:
I haven't been tracking what number of podcasts used seasons, and it looks like John Spurlock, the other guy who loves tracking data and some of the other people haven't been tracking it either. One of the reasons that it's more complicated is because it means you need to look at the RSS feed. And, realistically, you have to look at every episode in the RSS feed to know if a podcast uses seasons. You could maybe assume it by their latest episode. But still that means evaluating every single RSS feed out there. But I would guess, just pure guess based on what I see out there, I would guess maybe 4 or 5% of podcasts, active podcasts right now. Maybe 4 or 5% are using that is purely conjecture just based on my observation of podcast. So don't cite me on that.

Daniel J. Lewis:
I could be way off. That's just a guess.

Dave Jackson:
And I'm sure those people, that 5% are sitting there going, oh my god. That'd be amazing if we could have seasons that were all sorts of pretty and things like that. So, I I could see you know, we'll see what happens. It's I like the idea.

Daniel J. Lewis:
And what I really like from this, since I come from a design background, I am a web designer, is that this gives podcasters the opportunity to more beautifully brand their experience inside the podcast app. Because for years, all that you could do to brand your podcast listing inside an app or a directory was text and your main image JSON that was it. And the one main image. Nothing else. You couldn't influence the colors. You couldn't give it any kind of background image or extra images like widescreen or anything like that. So some of this stuff and there are other proposals too for branding guidelines and certain things like that. But some of this stuff is bringing it closer to making it really easy for podcasters to make their podcast listing look beautiful.

Daniel J. Lewis:
Like, if you look in Apple Podcasts, it's some of the most popular podcast. In fact, probably, if you click on almost any podcast that's on the front page of Apple Podcasts, you will probably see a custom designed page. And I see pretty frequently, maybe every couple of weeks, someone will ask, how do I get my podcast listing to look like this in Apple Podcasts? And the way you get that is to be invited by Apple to submit artwork to them because it's not something that you can influence. But now in podcasting 2.0, we've got things like the person tag, which gives you the opportunity to give credits in your podcast. So you can have pictures of everyone who participates in your podcast. That can now be included with your listing powered by your RSS feed. And this proposal gives it the opportunity to have the season branded in a particular way that's visual without having to rely on the episode artwork or do something like only pull the latest episode artwork or have to display every episodes artwork something like that. And then you just end up with the same image multiple times if you change your cover art for every season.

Daniel J. Lewis:
And even that, that's the other thing too. Is if you think about now the only podcast I know of that does this is No Agenda where they change their podcast cover art. Their top level podcast cover art. They change it for every episode. So that's an extreme example of this. But that is a good example of the idea of if you're changing your cover art for every episode or for every season, more specifically, relevant to this context. Your old seasons will still get the branding from your current cover art. So this proposal to be able to give a season an image would allow you to lock those episodes with a particular overall visual branding in addition to their potential individual episode branding if you change that.

Dave Jackson:
Yeah. That would, again, make it easy to identify what's what, because the older seasons would have the older branding, you know, potentially. Yeah. That'd be interesting. Well, that, I I think this is the end of the season about seasons then. So, how about, how do we do in the old land of boostograms?

Daniel J. Lewis:
We got a bunch. Alright. So big thanks to everyone here. We've gotten 4 BoosterGrams in addition to the streaming Satoshis, and so we're very grateful for this. We got 16,000 sats from Eric, r dash podcast. He said, hello, Dave and Daniel, longtime listener and first time booster to your show. I'm a huge fan of John Spurlock's o p three project, and it would be great to see the principles behind the project set a trend for others to join the space of transparent metrics and analysis. As part of my quest to contribute my data science skills to podcasting 2.0.

Daniel J. Lewis:
Dude, that's awesome. I just created a new r package. R is a statistical programming language called 0p3r as a front end to the 0p3 API. Lots of letters here. Yeah. I consider that a small demonstration of value for value in action linked to my package, and it's rpodcast.github.io/0p3r. And we might have that link in the notes for this. So Yeah.

Daniel J. Lewis:
Huge thanks, Eric, for that boostagram.

Dave Jackson:
Yeah. Very very cool. Thanks, buddy. Appreciate it.

Daniel J. Lewis:
We also got 2 boostagrams from Brian from relaxedmail.com. 1 for 5,000 sats and another for 10000 sats. His first message, Dave, you might be able to read this one better.

Dave Jackson:
Yeah. Brian said poo you at the same

Daniel J. Lewis:
time. What is that?

Dave Jackson:
I believe he is referring to, I believe the show the movie is called Scent of a Woman featuring, Al Pacino, who is this, snarky old military guy that's blind. And every time somebody says something that kind of a zinger, he'll just go, hooah. And so I think that's where he's getting that from.

Daniel J. Lewis:
Okay. And then Maybe. And then he sent a 10,000 SAP boost saying thanks for sharing the info on super chapters. Gets my brain moving. Good. That's what we wanted it to do.

Dave Jackson:
That's it.

Daniel J. Lewis:
And 2,222 sats. That's a row of rubber duckies as I like to call it. Marching ducks, rubber duckies, whatever you wanna call it. From Andrew Gromit. And my apologies there. I think of Wallace and Gromit, so that's why I pronounce it that way. He said, thanks for explaining chapters. I've seen it mentioned but didn't know how they worked.

Daniel J. Lewis:
Now, I do.

Dave Jackson:
Yeah. Andrew is OG podcaster. He goes back to the days of pod show for those of, of us that remember that. So, Andrew, great to hear from you. And did we ever figure out what we're calling the purely positive Peter Piper Peck something, whatever it was?

Daniel J. Lewis:
Peter Piper picked a peck of podcast praise report.

Dave Jackson:
That's it. I wanna praise, John Spurlock because I decided to put my money where my mouth is and went over because you can there's, like, two levels of sponsorship, and then there's the I'm just a poor podcaster level, which I think is like something like $10 a month that I'm like, look, I I added another show to OP 3 and was like, you know, I'm using this now on 2 or 3 of my shows. I'm like, I should probably again, value for value should give something back. And so I, thank you, John. And I he was very nice. He said, hey, I just noticed you signed up. Thanks so much. I'm like, well, again, I've only been using this for a year and a half now.

Dave Jackson:
Maybe I should pay something for it. So that would be my particular positive praise. Well, thanks so much for listening to the future of podcasting. If you know somebody else who's nerdy and is into this, definitely tell them to go over to future podcasting.net/follow, and you'll never miss another episode because that's gonna wrap it up for, this episode of the future of podcasting.

Daniel J. Lewis:
Keep boosting and keep podcasting.