Podping Benefits for Podcasts, Developers, and Audiences

Dave Jackson: Daniel, future of Podcasting episode 20 we're gonna be talking about Pod Ping, which is just a fun word to say. It sounds like a game, doesn't it? In a way, because of Ping pong. It's like, I don't know, is that just me?

Daniel J. Lewis [00:00:36]: Pod Pain? I grew up ping pong. Whatever the case, give me one and only one Pod Pain, please.

Dave Jackson [00:00:42]:

Yes, because it sounds neat. They talk about it, I know it's something on a server, something updates something. And I was like, okay, since I'm going something, maybe something like we should probably explain this because that's the whole point of the show.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:00:57]:

Well, Dave, you work in tech support for Libson, right? And before iOS 14.5, what would you say was one of the most common questions you would get from podcasters after they publish a new episode?

Dave Jackson [00:01:13]:

Where is it? I had one today, and that one was because they never submitted their show to Apple. But even after people submit, they think it's a light switch. It says in Libson that it's released like it should be there. And then I have to do my bus analogy, like, hey, when you leave your house, you've left the house, but you're not on the bus, and then you're standing at the bus stop. Are you on the bus? No, but you're available for the bus. The bus hasn't arrived yet. And then finally, when the bus arrives, in this case, when Apple finally comes to, in this case, lipson and checks to see, hey, are there any new episodes in Dave's feed? Goes, oh look, there's a new one. And so it adds it to the Apple listing. So now when people go to my show, they see the new episode. But it's probably been saying and it's one of those weird things where the released option, it shows it's there, shows it's published, and Apple doesn't really consider it a problem until it's like a missing person. We can't really consider it a missing episode until at least 24 hours. And so there are times when the best thing you can do is release at more or less the same time. And so the bus will know that Dave's going to be at the bus stop at twelve, five on Monday morning. And in theory it will check that more frequently because it knows when you're going to be there. But sometimes there's snow and ice and the bus is a little late or maybe they got lost, I don't know. But what used to take maybe 20 minutes or a half hour or an hour, all of a sudden you're like, it's 3 hours and it's in Spotify, why isn't it in Apple? And that's when I go, then I pop out my other analogy, which is Netflix. So if you're in the living room and you fire up Netflix and it works, and then you go, you know what, I'm kind of tired. So you go to your bedroom and you turn on Netflix on that TV and it just sits there and spins with the red end. Is there a problem with Netflix? And the answer is no, because we just watched Netflix like 10 seconds ago in the living room. So we know there's a problem either with the router or something wrong with that TV, but Netflix itself is okay. So in the case to bring it back to podcasting, if you've published your episode and it's on Spotify, you know your media host, whoever it is, is working because otherwise it wouldn't be anywhere. This ends this segment of analogy Corner.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:03:41]:

Yeah. And this used to connect to a bigger problem with bandwidth in the podcasting world than actually your media files, depending on how many episodes you have out there, because your RSS speed can get bigger the more episodes you put out there. It's not based on how long your episodes are. So your episode media files have nothing to do with the size of your RSS feed. It's more about how much information are you putting in your feed? And I had until just a couple of months ago, I had my full show notes for all of my episodes in my feed. And my show notes are articles for every one of my episodes. So my feed I didn't realize this, my speed had gotten big, like huge for an RSS feed. Multiple megabytes. That's big, really. An RSS feed is best when it's about half a megabyte or so, no more than a megabyte. But even then, you might think that's a small file, and you think, oh, my episodes are 50 megabytes or so. So a 1 MB RSS feed is fine. Well, in the old days, every person who follows your podcast would check that RSS feed according to the frequency on their app. Like in the old days when I first got into listening to podcasts and itunes, I had it set so that whenever I would first open itunes, it would check all the feeds for new episodes, and then it would check every hour for a new episode. And so if everyone had that same thing going on and you had 1000 people listening to your podcast, then that means your feed is being checked or even completely downloaded, in most cases a thousand times every hour, right? And maybe even more frequently, depending on some of these apps. And so that creates a bandwidth problem. And that's all just looking to see if there's something new with iOS 14.5. Apple sought to fix this by doing what several other places are doing, where instead of now the individual installed podcast apps checking the feed. They now get their data about your latest episodes from Apple so Apple server now checks all of the RSS feeds. It was very broken when they first launched it, but then they got it worked out. So now it's one check instead of thousands or tens of thousands of checks. Essentially that math. That's not exact, but it's essentially like that. The problem still remains, though. That like what you were saying, Dave, that before this we could tell people, well, look, subscribe to your own podcast, and if you get the episode, fine, then it's available, and even if it's not in the catalog yet, well, now Apple podcast catalog matches the Apple podcast library inside your app. So even if you're following the podcast, you won't get the latest episode until Apple finds it. So that's the problem in the space, the bandwidth, the slowness, all of these systems, some of them use proxies, some of them don't, all of these things, that's where Podpean comes in to try to solve all of this by changing the way that this exchange of information works. Before, it was a pull method where an app has to go out there and pull new information into it so it goes looking according to its own schedule to find new information and pulls it in. This new method is push. Kind of like on your phone. You have push notifications from apps where you don't have to open the apps to go looking for a notification. The notification gets pushed to you. That's what Podpean does, is it switches things around to a push system. So when you publish an episode, you push out a notification to this Podpean system that then pushes out a notification onto this. It's basically a stream of everything that's going on and happening and being updated right now. And other apps can watch that. They don't have to download stuff. They can just watch it. And when they see something relevant, then they update their own system. So it's not exactly pushing your episode directly onto someone's device, but you're pushing the notification out there so that it is seen very quickly. And how quickly are we talking? We're talking sometimes mere seconds from when you publish to when it's available in a Pod Pin supporting Podcasting 2.0 app. And I think this is a great benefit. It's a great relief for podcasters because they don't have to stress about where's my episode? I want this thing to be out there right now. But it's also a great thing for the audience because for those audience members who eagerly await every new episode, they can get those episodes more quickly. And if they haven't notifications enabled, they would be notified more quickly that the episode is available.

Dave Jackson [00:08:46]:

Yeah, very cool. And that way, from what I've heard, hardware wise, this is easier on the servers involved because how many podcasts are in Apple now? It's two something million, whatever.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:09:03]:

Millions, we'll just say millions. That covers it.

Dave Jackson [00:09:06]:

Yeah. And so where Apple was having to send a bus out. Think of a bus route with millions of people on it. You're like, well, we got to go check Johnny and now Jill. And then it's like, okay, so you've either got to have a bus that's going eight gazillion miles an hour or multiple buses, either one doing a ton, and that's just a lot of moving parts and holy cow. And of course, what happens is the bus comes by, you're not at the bus stop, and then it takes off, and then you publish your episode. Well, now you got to wait for the next bus to show up. And that's where the whole, hey, where's my episode at?

Daniel J. Lewis [00:09:42]:

And the bus is stopping at every house along the way. Even though no one's getting on the bus right, still going to stop. That's the archaic system that was slow. It was resource intensive to have to check millions of RSS feeds. And that's why there's a whole thing where Apple is trying to learn how much you publish, how frequently you publish, so that it can look for something more around that time. And if you haven't published something for months, then it's going to check your feed less frequently, it seems. But you don't have to worry about that when Podpean is there because it's just a stream of information that these systems can monitor. And the system is so lightweight, a mobile app can monitor the entire stream of all podcasts with new episodes being published on a simple mobile app. It's so lightweight, it's incredible. The resource requirements for all of these other systems are huge. I've tried to build something like this too, and it was just getting so complicated and expensive to try and build. But that is a whole engine to find all of the new episodes out there. New podcasts and new feeds. And whenever they publish things, it's expensive to run. Podcast Index runs, something like that, and they have to do it with multiple servers. But the more podcasts are able to do Pod pain, the less that these major systems have to rely on looking doing the poll method to look for new content. They can just sit and wait and watch for if new content comes in.

Dave Jackson [00:11:26]:

Yeah, they watch. One thing when you publish that basically says, hey, Podping, we got a new thing for you. It updates in one place, and then the different apps are looking at one place. They don't have to go on this giant bus route. It just wait till somebody tells you Dave has a new episode and then it's there. When I went over to podcastindex.org, this is fairly adopted. I mean, it's blueberry. It's in PowerPress. It's in RSS. Blue justcast transistorrss.com buzzprout Caproni, I guess. Is that how you pronounce that one? Red, Circle, Captivate, and Moombeam all have put Podping into place. So what is this? I think in the early days, Brian from London was like, is this based on hive and I don't even know what that means. When the words come out of my mouth, I'm like, okay, sounds like I'm smart. But what would be the reason somebody wouldn't adopt this?

Daniel J. Lewis [00:12:29]:

They might be concerned because it's using Blockchain technology and Blockchain is related to crypto and there is some crypto related to this, but it's not really a concern of the value of it and anything and it doesn't really cost much to even work with this. So to support this on the publishing side does take a little bit more technical work or you use a publishing tool that does support this. And Dave, just read a list of things that support it right now. That list will continue to grow because it is very easy to support this both on the app side and on the publishing side. But until more systems support this, you're not going to be able to implement this yourself. It's not like you can just install a plugin on your site and it's going to work. It's more complicated than that to support. But the nice thing is like PowerPress, if you run a WordPress website and you're generating your feed with PowerPress, PowerPress supports it, has been supporting it for a while now. So you don't even have to worry about finding a Pod ping plugin for WordPress because it's built into PowerPress and maybe other podcasting tools and such for WordPress will implement this and more and more podcast hosting providers are supporting it as well. So it's just one of those features that when it's available, you don't even have to turn it on. That's what's great from the publishing perspective. It's not like you have to go in and fill in the information or get a crypto wallet or anything like that. You don't have to even know how it works. Just know that if you've got it hooray. That is fantastic.

Dave Jackson [00:14:11]:

Yeah. And again, it benefits the listener, it benefits the podcaster, it benefits the support team who doesn't have to answer the question, where's my podcast at? It reminds me a little bit of in the early days of RSS feeds. I remember you could go into, I think it was Power press and you could put in a list of places to ping. There are all these websites of RSS feeds and if you want to let them know, hey, I've got a new episode out. So it kind of sounds a little bit like that. And the fact that you're notifying something else that, hey, we've updated. And then again back then you would just check that one website for all your RSS feeds. Now you've got Pod ping that your media host can watch that, or in this case Apple, all the other apps can watch that. Have I got that right?

Daniel J. Lewis [00:14:59]:

Yeah, it is like that. And there have been other technologies like Web subHUB was another one. The reason they're not using Web subHUB is it didn't have some of the features that we needed to make it support podcasting as efficiently. And there are some concerns, I think, about the centralization of web subHUB, but Pod Ping is more decentralized, it is truly decentralized. So it's not like it's relying on one company or one server out there, but it's something that is more broad. It's like a CDN where you're not relying on just a single point of failure, but it's speed out, it's faster. And I'm excited about it because it means that companies that want to deliver fast updates through their apps or through their publishing tools, whatever, can do that. And it also lays the groundwork for a lot of other things where we might need to send notifications very quickly of something happening. Like we're going to do a whole episode about the live item tag and live streaming with your podcast and features that are now possible with Podcasting 2.0. A big part of that is Pod Ping because if you don't schedule your live episode ahead of time, but you want to notify people that, hey, I'm going live right now. The only way you can really get that right now kind of notification is with Pod Ping inside of the apps and that is being supported in some of these apps where you can see such and such. Podcast is going live right now. Just like when you're on YouTube, if you have some of your live notifications enabled or other places, you get that notification right away when it happens. That same thing is becoming possible with podcasting, whether that's for a live thing or it's an episode just published.

Dave Jackson [00:16:51]:

So if we go back to the blockchain thing, because that's a lot of times where people get confused. I could see where, I don't know, pick any media host. But if they're used to having their server, that machine there has the thing that runs the thing, and now it's decentralized, how do we know that's going to handle any kind of load you put on? I guess I could see the control freaks going, wait, it does the what on the what?

Daniel J. Lewis [00:17:24]:

Well, from the publishing system side, all it needs to do is be able to send a ping out to the proper place. And Podcast Index is even working on a special Bridge API thing so that some people wouldn't even have to work or integrate into the blockchain natively. They could just send a Pod Ping out to Podcast Index and then Podcast Index puts it on the blockchain for them. That sort of delegated delivery, but not using Apple's delegated delivery. So that process can be just tied in with everything else that happens when you press that publish button. When you press Publish, a lot of things are happening in the back end of the software. It's changing stuff from draft to publish. It's maybe sending out a tweet, it's doing all of these other things. It's refreshing the cache, all of the stuff when you click Publish. To support Podping would just mean adding another thing in there hooked into whenever you click Publish or click Update, that it then sends out this notification with a certain we call it a payload of data with it and it's a very small payload. So for a company out there or for an app or anything to support this, it's just sending a small piece of data out. It's not like some major server running. And even on the monitoring side, like if you wanted to set up something, whether that's inside your app or a website or a server or anything like that, to monitor for when new stuff comes in, that is really lightweight as well. And in fact, if you want to see a really cool example of this, if you go to Podping watch, this is made by Stephen B and it's just an example. This isn't something that you integrate with, this is a demonstration of what happens. So if you go there in your browser, you'll see all of these new podcasts just popping in. Podcast, podcast, podcast, podcast. And these are podcasts that are being updated in some way. Maybe it's a new episode, something changed about the feed, whatever, but they're showing up as new and updated in Pod Ping and it's coming in in real time. So you could even if you're on a publishing tool that supports Pod Ping, then it could be fun to have this page open when you click Publish and then you could watch for when it shows up. I'm not sure what the delay is. There might be a little bit of a delay. There might even be some maybe just skipping because I've watched Pod Pin before and a lot of stuff comes in and it's going to just increase. So even if you don't see your item pop in, that might be because 100 items just popped in and you're number 95 on a list of 100 and then before you even have the chance to scroll down, 100 more items come in. So it happens really fast, right? But that's the beauty of it is that it happens so fast.

Dave Jackson [00:20:20]:

I guess the other thing, it sounds almost too good to be true. So who pays for the blockchain? I guess my biggest worry, I could see people just worrying about the stability and how do we know it's going to be there and is it just Jim and Bob in their basement that have set this thing up?

Daniel J. Lewis [00:20:41]:

So in the cryptocurrency world we have a thing called gas fees or transaction fees. It's that thing that's usually a flat rate that just to move anything across the network costs a certain amount of a certain token. And that is the case also on the hive blockchain is what they're using. It does cost, but it costs so very little. That basically nothing. Like right now the publishing companies and tools that use Pod ping are able to do so. And I doubt they even blinked thinking about how much it would cost them, because it's probably costing pennies a month at most, I would guess. I don't know for sure, but that's about what it works out to. It is so cheap to publish to, but if you're going to read it, it doesn't cost you anything at all.

Dave Jackson [00:21:37]:

I see. And again, in the alternative of having all these servers running multiple bus routes or wherever, it's got to be cheaper to check one thing.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:21:49]:

Oh, yeah. It costs less than running an actual server to look for the updates and handle the updates and the electricity cost, the hardware cost and all that. It costs far less than that.

Dave Jackson [00:22:02]:

Yeah. So if I am somebody who, let's say I'm starting my own media hosting company, because why not? Where would I go to learn about how to implement Podping?

Daniel J. Lewis [00:22:15]:

The best thing to do would be to look at the docs. It is geeky. But if you're starting your own media hosting company, you're going to be a geek anyway. So look at the docs from the podcast index GitHub repo. How's that for nerdy?

Dave Jackson [00:22:28]:

That is nerdy.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:22:29]:

And a quick way to get straight to that is James Cridland has a really nice site that we've referred to a couple of times, podcastnamespace.org.

Dave Jackson [00:22:39]:

I know when I've looked at GitHub, I just go in and go, I have no idea what I'm looking at. And it's just code after code. James has this really explains what it is. And my favorite thing is at the bottom of James, he has an example and from there you go, oh, I just need to replace this with my stuff. And in theory it should work. And I was like, that's really cool.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:23:02]:

So we'll put a link in the notes because it takes you to GitHub. There's not an easy link that we can give or speak, at least that I know of, that takes you straight there if you want to check it out. I don't recommend you try Googling it because Google will just think you're talking about pooping, maybe for the podcast, as my post office once thought I was talking about when I said podcast, and he was like, what's a podcast? No, it's also not Podping, Google. It's Podpeen podping. And you can find it through the podcast index GitHub repo, if you want to look at the actual code, what it takes to support it, both on the reading side and on the publishing.

Dave Jackson [00:23:45]:

Side, it sounds great. And of course, if your media host doesn't support it, just email their support and go, hey, when are you going to implement Pod Ping? Because I want my listeners to get my episodes much quicker than they currently are and they don't know the way from what I've seen, at least they don't implement things unless they know you want them. So let them know you want it and then they'll throw resources at it because Daniel said it's fairly easy to implement. But anytime you have to pull a developer off of one job to put them on another one or move it up the roadmap, I hear that a lot. You'll talk to companies, it's on the roadmap. Okay. It's a lovely way. Like, where on the roadmap is it number 99 or number four? There's a difference. But I think I have a better understanding of Pod ping. And of course, if you have any questions about something you'd like to hear in a future episode of The Future of Podcasting, go out to futureapodcasting. Net. You can send us, contact us there. Of course, you can always send us a boostogram. We have no boostograms this week, but we do thank everyone who's been streaming the show. We see those stats coming in, so we definitely thank you for those. That definitely helps out. That's it. Episode 20 is in the can. Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back again real soon with another episode of The Future of Podping.