They're called "Podcasts"
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Welcome the verge cast the flagship podcast of A R S S enclosures. I'm my friend David peers, and I am sitting in my car recording a podcast. So our episode today is all about the early days of podcasting.

We're doing this whole big package of stories on the verge all week, all about two thousand four, the stuff that happened in two thousand four, the legacy of that year, twenty years later, which is a surprisingly consequential one in tacit, was the year google went public. IT was the year gmail was created. IT was your facebook launched.

IT was your deg launched. IT was the year that firefox browser became a thing. IT was the year of the anode Jackson s wardrobe male function, which was a huge deal that changed the streaming and television world forever, all kinds of stuff.

But for this episode of the verge cast, we're going to talk about the word podcast because the word podcast became a word and came to describe this whole industry at this whole thing we're doing right now, back in two dozen four. So we're going to talk about where that name came from, what IT has come to mean and then what might happen in the next twenty years. But the thing i've discovered in doing all this research and in talking to lunch people who were around in those early days, is that a surprising number of people were just sitting in their car making podcasts back then.

They were, you know, talking into microphones, or had really crude sort of rudimentary cell phone setups that they could call into with a phone number and record a podcast that way. But the acoustics of a car are pretty good. IT does a pretty good job of dampening noise and echoes and all kinds of issues.

So the car IT didn't look great, but IT turns out to be a half decent place to make a podcast. So here I am in the car, making a podcast just like our are good four fathers of the podcast years did. So anyway, all of that is coming up.

We're gona talk about the past, the present and the future of podcasts on this whole episode is very matter. It's a super fun epo de. I'm really excited about IT.

All of that is coming up in just a second, but it's warm out. And I had to turn the car off to do this. I don't know how people made bike gas when, like the air conditioning was running and everything was insane.

But right now, IT is too hot in here, and IT has to stop. This is the verge cast. We will be right back.

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Welcome back. Do you remember when you first heard about podcasts? If you've been listening to this show, the verge casts since twenty eleven, maybe IT was that or if you were a listener of the n gadget podcast before, even that maybe that's where you get into IT or really to be way less self absorbed and much more realistic about IT.

Maybe IT was cereal in twenty fourteen that turned you and Frankly, millions of other people onto the idea of radio on demand. That's when podcasts became a thing. But I bet that for most people, be far this possible distance back you could go would be this moment in two thousand five, when Steve jobs got on stage at W.

B. D. C, and before he announced that apple was switching to using intel chips, and before he said that leopard would be the next version of Michael s, he explained to a lot of people why they were about to start seeing podcasts in itunes.

As you know, the podcasting phenomenon is exploding right now. And podcasting, of course, as a concatenation of ipod and broadcasting. And what is podcasting, you've been described a lot of different ways.

One way has been tvo for radio. You can download radio shows and listen to him on your computer or put him on your ipod anytime you want. So it's just like television programs on tabo, and that's true.

Another way it's been described is wines world for radio, which means that anyone without much capital investment can make a podcast, put IT on a server and get a worldwide audience for their radio show. And that's true too. We see IT as the hottest st thing going in radio.

A fun fact from that one. By the way, jobs talked about how there were eight thousand podcasts available at that time in two thousand and five, and that was a huge number. He was really excited about IT.

Now that number is somewhere between three and five million podcasts. Lots changed anyway. A lot of people credit jobs with mainstreaming. Both the word and the concept of podcasts, which is probably at least a little true podcast, was the oxford dictionary word of the year in two thousand five IT, beat out in case rendering, bird flu, reggae on life, hack home, bunch of other stuff. But jobs didn't create the concept or the word. The concept, I think, is the one of those two that is tRicky is to figure out, technically, you could argue that the idea of a part is just like radio, and we've at that around forever. But I think you can make a pretty good case that the thing we now know is a podcast became a thing in about two thousand three, and IT involved a guy in Chris lighten.

IT was a very exciting coincidence for me. One thing I had been ignoring, isly bumped out of a wonderful job in public radio and looking for something new, charted nesson at bergmann. Senter said, come and think with us. Gave liner arrived a few weeks later, and he said, try to tell me, David, when I was coming. Charles nesting.

by the way, was the creator of the berkman client center for internet in society, which was kind of an early internet think ink tank at harvard that actually still does a lot of really interesting digital work. Dave winner is one of the internet earliest and longest ten years bloggers. His blog just turned thirty last week.

He's also a key creator of R S S, which is the technology that spreads feeds of content around the internet. And he's just a guy who cares a lot about when public standards at the time. If you wanted to start a blog calling dave viner was like calling gordon ramsey for tips on how to open a restaurant, and Chris light hit him up, I wrote .

today one to think a six month ago, I couldn't spell blog. Now I want to be one. And we went to the blog cycle very, very quickly. But then he said, you know radio, I know programing. What the world needs is an mp three file that can go worldwide instantly. I said, sounds good to me and we got to work and only took, oh, couple of months that a and he said, I think we got IT I said, now what did he said? That is you're onna, do a conversation with me and were going to put IT out.

We did lighten in winter in a publishing that conversation in july of two dozen three. And I just want to play you the first thirty seconds or so of IT, which I found, by the way, thanks to James cridland over at pod news that net, he did a great whole big thing on the history, the word podcast. And we're actually going to talk to him about the future podcast 人的 anyway here this day。

And I feel like a new immigrant in this blogging world where you're a kind of founding father. Walk me around IT and i'm going to talking about the technology. I want to know what kind of democratic experiment this log idea really amounts to well, um I should change is all this time we first started doing this IT was just a bunch of people sort of writing hello world and being amazed that this was possible to do that um and and then the next step was recognition of other people and say, wow, there's somebody else doing this and um learning how to communicate in um I don't know how to answer that question. I mean, this is what you make up that everybody brings something different to IT in different set of expectations and everybody moved to be whatever that means to them.

They don't call what they are doing there a podcast bringing that a part right there like it's two tools, talk and tech. It's all very matter. Sound quality is good but kind of messy.

That's all the homeworks of forecasts all in one place. And I think the thing that whiner says at the very end IT is what you make turned out to be more impression than maybe either of them realized at the time. But still, they weren't calling IT a podcast.

Nobody was. They were calling these things audio blogs. If they were calling them anything, there were a handful of them out there, but none of them were podcasts until ben hammersly showed up. Then I should say red up front is not exactly sight that he is part of this particular slight of .

pocket history I can place in my life because there's absolutely no honor in the origin story, right? The either when I die I want to be remembered for, I know a twenty year project or something, or saving orphans from a burning building, or or something, something like that, rather than a word that was invented in a sort of deadline. Friends say that I didn't even realize I was doing until a few months later.

In two thousand and four, ben was working on some early R. S. S. In publishing tech and was also writing about the burgeoning tech industry for the guardian. And in february, if he doesn't for, he publish peace called the audible revolution, all about the cool stuff people were doing online with audio. At the time, there were people building software that could automatically record radio streams over the internet and make them available for listening later.

The ipod obviously was everywhere, and people were also building software to take all those dreams that you had downadup put them on your ipod one step at a time. All of this stuff f was starting to come together. Ben actually interviews Chris laden for the piece that he wrote.

And laden talked about how audio over the web was gonna change people's relationships with their audience. IT was gonna democratize media. They had all these big, high minded ideas about what audio might do.

But it's right there in the second paragraph of the story that benham sly does. The thing actually. Let me just read the first two paragraph.

With the benefit of hindsight IT all seems quite obvious. M, P, three players like apple's ipod in many pockets, audio productions, software, cheap or free, and web blogging and established part of the internet. All the ingredients are there for a new boom in the amateur radio. But what to call IT, audio, blogging, podcasting, corilla media there is that almost everyone agrees, is the first publish use of the word podcasting. The big moment, of course, ben had absolutely no idea what he was doing when he wrote that word.

The god an at the time was a print first paper as, and you wrote for the paper and you had a print deadline when the physical printing Prices would run at six o'clock. And if you missed that deadline, the word weren't going to go into the page. And that meant that every day this was working rythm was that there was a big rush to get everything done by quarter to six or whatever.

And i'd written this article and about five thirty or you know, just before the print deadline, I got an email from my editor saying we've put that on the page and it's very nice, but it's kind of a line short and IT doesn't look very good on the page. You know the text hasn't gone Green in the type setting program. Can you write me another sentence just to pad IT out, right, just to make IT fit beautifully on the printed page? And so I wrote next to sentence in the email over.

And the sentence is, this would like mildly meaningful sentence of book. What do we call this new phenomenon? And then I sort invented three words and put them in there. And then so often, and I went to the pub.

look, on the one hand, thank god we call IT podcasting and not gilla media, but then doesn't even remember how he came up with podcast everyone now says is a port mental of ipod and broadcast, which is what Steve jobs in that clip earlier, and then basically just said, yes, that seems reasonable enough. But he does not remember coming up with IT. He also at the time had no idea, truly no idea, what he had done.

And IT was only a few months later that I got a emails from from the trading diction we saying, where you find this word, we're trying to find an early asset for IT your peace and and we can't. Where did you get? And I know, pulled IT out the back of my head on on a deadline panic.

C, I had no idea. And i'd looked on all of the our access related development mAiling lists and so very much, which is what the place where I would have been. And I couldn't find any trace of IT either.

And so I said, clearly, I just most made IT up and then I said, great because it's word of the year. And then in the and then IT became the thing that apple took on, and that's what they could there up. And that's what IT became. No, as know the rest history.

bin made very clear several times when we talked that he didn't invent the idea of a podcast and nor does he deserve credit for what podcast eventually became. But all these years later, he does seem to kind of like the word he came up with. It's got that nice positive P. You can use IT as a now or reverb pretty easily. It's a good, useful word that way.

but also that within IT there are context clues that norms could understand. So you know, the ipod was the biggest sing in the world at that time. That's what the pod bit comes from.

And although IT was super fitly at the beginning to take these focus and put them on to your ipod pretty rapidly, some software came out and made that simpler. And then so much that apple made IT possible within itunes and to say it's kind of like tivo for radio that you listen to in your own peace. Three player is a pretty good sentence in two thousand, two, two thousand, three. Yeah to sort of not not necessity, usually techy circles or or even like super early adopters, but to sort of whoever comes after the early adopt IT as those people you know they can understand IT.

And so I think IT becomes one of those things where it's a fun word to say but also what kind of has meaning within IT that somebody who's used to new technologies um can kind of understand straight away and and so and IT becomes the self evidently good idea, right? And then when you have a few years later, you have these very successful professionally made podcast which take full advantage or start to take full advantage of the the fact that they are at liberty to use as much space, there is little space that they need as much time as little time. Different epo de links or that sort of thing that people started expLoring that and and being able to self commission and make make programs that were something you would never, ever have heard before on regular brokens radio, then that in suddenly IT becomes its own, its own thing very rapidly. And people still see the value of IT hugely tied in with the court test content on the market at the time. So I think all of countries that learning of all of those different things happen the same time.

Most people do seem to agree that ban coin to the term podcast, or at least use IT first. But there is one other person in the equation who definitely deserves credit. That's dane, greg war, who's a software engineer who use the word in an email to a list of folks working on and with an APP called eyelid.

Eyelid was one of those things that could tomato ally take recorded audio and put IT on your ipod. The list at the time was brand new, and eyesight was an upstarted by a guy name, adam curry, who had an audio blog of his own at the time called daily source code. Adam was a long time radio guy. He's also been an mtv vj for years, and he'd also been an early internet entrepreneur. And for years at this point, he had been chatting with dave viner and others about the whole concept of putting audio files in our, but adam is one of the very first people to have kind of a whole vision of how this on demand internet radio thing should actually work.

Now, IT was end of two thousand and three a when a friend of mine said, look at this cool thing I have, so what do you have? And IT was the ipod. And I looked at this ipod and I was like, filtering like lightning balls, because IT looked, IT looked exactly like this transition radio my grandmother had given me when I was seven years old.

This little, little SONY transition. Dio, nine vote battery, right? Yeah, you can call this a digital walkmen, or, you know, whatever you want. But this, to me, he was a radio receiver. And right away, my, oh, let's hold IT up to this R S S thing.

So again, with my very poor a scripting skills, I tried to rig this either with apple script and then Kevin Marks, who I think worked IT. He worked at google. He worked in silicon valley somewhere, as we said, oh, here's the script that you need and boom was like, okay, IT works so I could create a blog post.

And then this little script will be looking to to find at some a new item in my blog post with the file attached to IT IT would download the file IT could you still had to sink your ipod back in the day um to your computer and so you would trigger an update and then in the morning you'd walk in and there would be your ipod with as the album would be. Basically we didn't have the name pod testing yet IT would be kind of the blog name or know the show name. And then to have these episodes hundred and I immediately started to just get the word out there because I needed software developers who could create this for real.

That thing he's describing that script was eye potter. IT would watch R, S, S. Feeds for audio files.

IT would download them, send them to your ipod and you're done. That's just a podcasting APP for him. I don't curry made a podcasting up, that's all IT was. And in fact, show daily source code was in part of podcast for its own sake, you know, entertainment and content, whatever. But IT was also in part sort of an ongoing beta test of how all of this podcasting technology stuff might really work.

So i'd like, okay, I have an audience. It's these guys and couple goals at the time who develop software. How do I keep them engaged in this process? Well, I need to give them content every single day.

And IT has to be about the stuff they are doing, which is programming. What do you do in program? You create source code.

So I did IT every single day for a long time, and I I missed one from time to time, and they became more spaced out over time. But we kept daily source code. And I would literally talk about the developments they had done the previous day. So they needed something to test on.

There were no programs, so they needed something daily that sounds of life, a show um that they could use um so we could figure out where the show notes go and um you know when someone first subscribes to a fee, do you given the most recent one, do you download all the archives, all of this stuff? And so I know from my radio background, when you talk about people on the radio, IT makes them feel good. So when I was talking about Andrew grammar and know the guys at ipod or x and one was in australia and the other one was an I know somewhere in viana um that motivates you. And so IT was both a feedback look because I was the ultimate user, both from the content creation side and from the from the listener side.

So you can hear this fly whil going. At this point, the programmer are making podcasts. They're listening to each other other's podcasts. They're building Better software for listening to and making those podcasts. They're making new stuff to test IT and round and round and round IT goes.

And a lot of that conversation was in on the eyesight dev email list, which is where we come back to Daniel ward in september of two dozen four, he wrote to the ipod or dev list that he could imagine a world in which people would want to be able to subscribe to one of these audio programs and get access to older stuff. He didn't know whether to call that older stuff posts or episodes or shows. He actually suggested calling them POS or SOS, which i'm very glad did not catch on.

And he thought they might want an easier way to go through the archives. But then he wrote this. I guess one could argue that this is simply an R S S slash server side issue, and that the pod caster, yes, I like making up words, should be responsible enough to offer a page of separate feeds of old sold by month, year, season eta. He kind of made up podcasts again, dave whiner and others have over the years, given gregor credit, for, if not making IT up, at least making the term podcast a thing. Adam curry, in particular, is pretty forceful about IT.

And for my money, danny grig wars, the one who showed up with that, with that name. I know then hammersly fuels invented IT. He used the word a long time before that, but i'd never heard IT. So danny showed up with podcast. IT made a lot of sense because we were doing this on the, on the ipod, and so is obvious where IT came from.

However, IT came in to be winner, and curry both bought into the word immediately and did a lot of work promoting the word podcast once IT had been sort of unofficially decided on. As usual, there is no clear story about who did exactly what, who knew what, when, where the world came from. And if anyone is singularly responsible.

I don't know that that matters to be onest, but I do know this. After rewards email to the ipod group, the word podcast caught on really fast. I think the first podcast to ever referred to itself as a podcast was probably dave slusher on evil genius chronic ics, which had been around in blog form for a couple of years and was becoming an audio blog at the time, three days after gr email in september of two thousand. Four, like all good early podcasts, such a spends a long time talking about how all this new single technology works for making and downloading audio, talking about his servers in bittorrent and bills in all this up, and then he talks about what .

he calls IT. And so and I saw somebody, there's somebody has registered podcasting dot net. And I saw pod casters or pod casters on that.

And I saw pod casters as a user agent, you know, hitting my R S S. feet. I went to look at IT.

And right now, it's just a coming soon page. But i'm going to pay attention to that, going to see who's who's got that and what they're doing. But that term, I think they have coined the term, so ipod platform just doesn't spring from the tongue.

But what I am doing right here and what Adams doing and what dave winners doing and what IT conversations are doing, that's podcasting. I think that is the term I am using that from here on out. So I am a pod casters, and they are pod casters, and I am podcasting right now. And you listen to my podcasting fuck.

Think about how quickly that changed a few months after ben hammersly hab hazarded wrote the word in a story, a few days after dani grewal brought IT up to that super influential mAiling list, podcasts were being called podcasts.

One really fun thing about listening to some other podcast from this era is hearing these podcast hosts actually reckon with the idea of being podcast hosts, like, here's a clip from a show called the dawn and drew show, also from september of two thousand and four. This is their very first episode. And you can hear them kind of trying on the term for size right now.

What what is podcasting? We're broadcasting to pod devices, which. Ipod would be M P, three player, but not an I.

Well, podcasting, the term has been coined. And do someone geta give us one for free? I would.

Dear internet, please give me a pod. Drew has like a little machine, this little tidy thing that he put music in. And I don't have one.

It's a from R, C, A. But you know, that would technically be considered a pod in this regard. I think we should crown inside of pod to do this. I have the right here. Let me add IT.

Get out of my pod. That is the .

one of at this moment, IT is still only been a few days since the word podcast hit that mAiling list, and already is just the accepted term. They are broadcasting to pot devices. They are podcasts.

That is how quickly IT happened. And now for Better or for worse, twenty years later, they're still podcasts. All right, we got to take a break and then we're going to hit the skip button and go all the way forward to today. And we're going to talk about where podcast are now and where they might be headed. We will be right back.

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Welcome back. alright. We've talked a lot about the history of podcasts. Let's talk a little bit about the future and kind of where we are now as a way to understand where we might be going.

Twenty years after a podcast became a podcast, podcast are bigger than ever, right? Like the podcast revolution kind of worked. There are people after doing amazing things, their whole companies being built around podcasts, more people to listen to podcasts than ever.

But podcasting hasn't killed radio IT hasn't become the future of the media business or democracy or whatever high minded stuff those folks are talking about twenty years ago. It's doing really cool work. But how important are podcasts and how big is this industry going to be? And how is that supposed to work? Even after two decades, so much of that stuff feels like IT hasn't been ironed out yet.

So to helpme figure out where we are and where we're headed with all this stuff, I invited James kris lin from podcast news dart net back on the show to talk about IT. I mention James of top. He did a great peace a while back about the history of the word podcast that I got a lot of really great information from.

He's also been in and covering the pocket industry for longer than almost anybody and knows this space incredibly well. His super fund talk. So I figured I would just sit here and throw some of my questions, slash x essential crisis about the future of my life and career and all of my favorite podcasts at him, and see if together we might be able to figure out where all of this audio blogging stuff is headed.

Next, let's get into IT. I think if we had at this conversation a year ago, I was like, dooming gloom everywhere. The the golden nature.

Podcasting is over. Everything is a disaster. You know, this was all fun while lasted. Goodbye, everybody. IT feels like going a slightly different place in the podcasting universe, like at the risk asking a needley broad question here at the begin, where where do you feel .

like we are right now? I think we're in a pretty good position. I think what happened between probably twenty twenty and twenty twenty two was that a lot of new money came into the podcasting world.

IT was new money that was really destined for T. V. And instead was diverted into the broadcasting, you know, existence. And and really that was, I think a lot of TV exec got into podcasting because they felt that I was an easy win for them.

And I think that they didn't properly understand anything about audio and anything about making great shows because it's very different world to T, V. Audio is a very habitable thing. You listen to a particular show, which you'll listen to every single week.

So a limited series shows bine large, don't work too well. So I think that we saw a lot of people who were you know who are coming at this with a different media understanding of how TV works, trying to apply to the podcasting world. And they're not really understanding why IT wasn't actually working. And that's really what stopped happening at the end of twenty twenty two, beginning of twenty twenty three and why we all of a sudden saw lots of layoffs, lots bad things uh, happening coinciding of course, with um whatever is going on in the media industry as a whole anyway.

right. So does he feel like to a certain extent what we're back to where we were with podcasts? I don't know. Prey cereal like there is a moment where is like cereal happen and there was like a podcast is going to go through its its peak TV era and maybe ten years later were at the end of the peak TV, uh, in the way that in the TV world were at the end of the peak TV uh, and we're going to go back to, I don't know that the lake sit comes in reality T, V version of the podcast universe.

Well, so I think, you know, broadcasting has always had to kind of separate industries. You've got the industry of, you know, the serials of these worlds, big, high budget shows where a lot of people working on them. And you know that has been always a part of podcasting.

And then you've had, you know a show which is put together by, you know two people and a computer program, and that's IT. And those shows seem to have weather the storm, obviously, because the costs for making those shows are much, much lower. But those shows are typically around sort of, I would say, eighty ninety percent of all shows out.

There are things that are putting together, you know, at relatively low cost. IT isn't a massive staffing thing of you know, twenty people involved in one particular show as some of these shows are. And I think podcasting has always done very well because of that because IT is a because it's an open medium that anybody can actually get into.

I think that's been the real benefit. So so I think here, there have been ebon flows in terms of that top ten percent in terms of the revenue coming in from advertising. But I don't think podcasting itself has changed that much, to be honest, in the last twenty years.

O okay. So that brings me to one of things I was going to ask you, which is, uh, a question you asked a spotify executive very recently that I really liked and wanted hear your energy, which is what is a podcast in twenty twenty times because I think you could argue IT is both the same and diametrically different than what I was twenty years ago. So how would you define what IT is now?

But I think a podcast, the easy answer is a podd cast is anything that the audience thinks. IT is whatever the audience wants to claim is a part cost and .

feels like cheating. I don't like that answer.

Yeah and it's and it's a cheap answer because I don't think IT necessarily understands want to benefit of a podcast is but if you ask somebody whether they're watching a podcast on youtube, what's the difference between a podcast and another youtube video? And typically, you will get the answer you can see the microphones in a podcast, which is a really weird, weird answer um but I think you from an overarching thing of what is a podcast, I think that a podcast is a piece of on demand audio first content that basically all that IT is.

Now there is there a lot of people who will turn around and say R S S. Is massively important and enclosures are important and all of the technical detail that makes a podcast a podcast. I'm not to sure that, that as important as we think IT is. And actually at the end of the day, whatever somebody thinks upon casters.

okay. Let me just press on that slide year. A person who covers podcasts, you have the raw line somewhere. Where is that line for you?

Well, so the podcasts that I write about are podcasts that are open that are available on uh on every single platform um unavailable you know in a you know that phrase wherever you get your podcast is an important thing because that to me is what a podcast is.

So if a podcast is only available on audible, I typically weren't weren't write about IT because it's not I don't think a podcast um similarly, if it's only available on wonder plus or on the baby, he sounds up or whatever IT might be. So that's where I draw the line. But I think you know IT IT all differs if if you ask people you know what their most favorite to podcast APP is, there's a lot of people that answer youtube, even though youtube doesn't satisfy any of the text ical elements of what a podcast is.

An audio father in M P three without D R M available to download um virus with an enclosure. All of that stuff. Youtube does none of yet. I think it's perfectly acceptable to say that you can listen to a podcast on youtube speaking .

of things that had a moment and feel like their fading. This idea of the non open podcast feels like IT has started to go away. There were a few years there where there was a real sense that a bunch of companies, spotify, an audible and serious and whoever else we're going to sort of build themselves the library of exclusive audio products and would use that to win in some large way.

A wonder, imagine has been pushing to that. That idea seems to have, if not disappeared, then at least gone away. And there are a lot of folks doing, you know, the advertising contribution deals, but the idea of like the platform exclusive podcast seems like IT is fading. Do you think that, that era is just behind us and that openness in a certain way is is going to win going forward here?

yeah. I mean, I would hope put IT that way. I would hope that exclusivity is going away. I mean, Daniel was very clear in early on in this year when he was doing his earnings school, he was saying that some of those exclusivity deals worked, but generally IT washing aligned with what the creator wanted.

My understanding, for example, is that there was a um there was a big author who um SHE put her show as an exclusive on to specify and SHE saw the amount of books that he was selling went down because the amount of people who were listening to her show went down because IT was an exclusive and only available on one thing so you know so clearly, if you want both, if you want you know both large audiences but also you want to be able to get your ideas out there and have influence, then exclusivity doesn't necessarily work too well. We are seeing a few hold on in terms of exclusivity. I mean, some of the the large broadcasters in the world seem to be pulling you know some of their shows into exclusives on their own apps.

The B, B, C. Is doing a little bit more of that, which I kind of wish that they wouldn't. And we're still seeing a few or a windowing type of things where you can hear a show first on a particular an exclusive platform.

Wondering plus being a good example. But I think that those are relatively few and far between. And I think that people now understand that reach and influence is just as important as you know, as as trying to build a particular APP that doesn't necessarily work too well.

Why do you think that is? I think it's so different than the way that streaming T, V and movies has shaken out. I think again, the back five years ago was that the podcast world would look a lot like the T, V world in that IT would be a bunch of competitive platforms all competing on their library, right? Why do you think pocket didn't go that way?

Yeah and and there was luminary, for example, which tries to I think IT was one of the first companies that was trying to do um all of this and interestingly, I mean that there are still quite a few large companies in europe which have a big exclusive you amount of of shows as well. But I think you know at the end of the day, doesn't necessarily work because we are used to the status quo of having all of our podcast available in one place.

And you know I mean way back in time when I was um working in a radio station and looking at radio apps, I used to always say to people that a radio APP was downloaded by your fans. Your p one listened in radio world. You know you wouldn't necessarily get people downloading.

And just in case there was something worthwhile, you know, shooting into honors. And I think that podcasting is exactly the the same way. So there's no doubt, for example, that joe rogan moving as an excuse to spotify helped grow the amount of installs to spotify.

But joe rogan is, I think, different to most shows. And I think if you were to say that about pretty well any other show that spotify had, i'm not sure that you would see a massive increase in the amount if installs of that APP just because a podcast happened to be on IT. There are you know three million shows out there.

If one of the shows is available on your chosen up, then guess what? There's another there's another three million for you to go and and and have listen to. So I think from that point of view, the exclusive should hopefully have gone IT wasn't good for anybody really. But as you say, IT was exactly the point that TV executives, you know, looking at hello, looking at max, looking at all of these weird and wonderful things, thought, well, that will work in the audio world. And and I think you again, that was one of the the mistakes made during the big excitement of twenty twenty two, twenty twenty two.

And what about youtube? I think youtube is in a lot of way, is not a platform for podcasts and also kind of by far the most interesting platform for podcasts. And as as a person who makes podcasts, I have an awfully hard time thinking about how I should think about youtube. Yes, what is your sense of of what youtube means to the post test industry, especially kind of over the next few years?

I think youtube is fascinating. I think that there is there a couple of things going on. Firstly, as we have established, people don't really know what I podcast is. And so therefore, if you ask the general public, where do you listen to your podcasts, quite a lot of them will say youtube.

But youtube, so far as I can see, is not delivering the amount of place, the amount of listens to most shows then you would expect from a very large you know platform for a podcast. Listen, IT seems to be delivering an incremental amount of place and downloads to a show. But IT isn't the number one place where people are going to have a listen to a particular podcast.

That said, I think what youtube has is it's clearly got a lot of people who use IT every day. I I pay for IT and I use IT, you know pretty well every single day if the algorithm is very good at surfacing new content that I might want to go and have a listen to baLance of fantastic opportunity for the podcasting world. We're always told on with the podcast discovery, you know it's a real problem and blab a blah.

I'm not necessarily sure that IT is, but certainly youtube and youtube s algorithm can actually help fix all of that. So I think that that's one sort of side of IT. I also think from the creators side, they look at some of the big youtube es and they go, oh, I can get some of this money and it's it's a way of earning me cash.

And perhaps this is the right way of earning money out of the show that I do. But I also think that it's putting an awful a lot of creators off because all of a sudden we have to talk about cameras and lighting and we have to talk about video editing, which is way more complicated um than audio editing which is why my definition of the word podcast starts with audio first. It's something that you can enjoy with your ears while your eyes are busy.

That's the benefit of a podcast. And so youtube on that, I find the absolutely fascinating to watch what is going to happen with that particular platform. But I think it's still very much, you know, let's wait and see what youtube actually offers. I mean, you know it's it's a google thing, so therefore google will probably lose interest in about eighteen months. Have thought .

historically speaking, word I would take over time on some of some of those things right now, youtube music not exactly innovating at all speeds right now. Um but no, I I think you're right. I think the again to the kind of what is a podcast question, audio first is is a good one.

And I think yet another place where the line is really blurry, right? I think about I hear people all the time who talk about getting youtube premium. Just you can listen to videos in the background and they just listen the videos, yeah, what is a good youtube S A, if not a post, right? like.

And there is a youtube TV announcement the other day that you can now listen to TV in the background with your screen off. And it's like, did they just turn every T, V. Show on earth into a podcast like maybe, I don't know all these all these lines are so blurry and so and so interesting, but I do think the video piece of IT is is important and complicated for both of the reasons you just said.

One is that I think the thing that youtube has going for IT is IT is the best content discovery engine on the internet uh and IT podcasts are hard to find. It's it's hard to find a new podcast is hard to get into a new podcast like the the bar there is very high and youtube is very good at that. But IT also IT IT also requires video, right? Like we've had this experience and we've seen the other places that if you do the thing that is just like the the audio gram on youtube, IT doesn't nearly as well as if you have video, like the algorithm kes video, because youtube a video platform.

And so we hear this from creators all the time who are feeling somewhat forced into becoming, if not video of first then sort of video level shows yeah and it's changing the things that people make because suddenly when you're on camera, you start thinking differently about the whole thing that you're making and you can make different kinds of stuff. But IT does feel like for Better and worse, just because of like the way the business of all of this works and how you find people video is not going a bit IT is more and more attached to the idea of what the podcasts is than ever. I'm curious if you agree with that.

Yeah I I, I I think you mentioned cereal earlier on what cereal have existed as a podcast. If they had to make video, no, I I would probably argue no, you just couldn't IT.

I mean, they're making that show week to week as they were doing. You can make a netflix show? Yeah yeah. exactly.

So I think I think that there are certain things that you know a chat cast or a chump cast or whatever whatever you want to call an interview on cast that is relatively easy to slap a couple of cameras on and take presto, you've got some video over IT becomes much harder if you want to produce something a bit Better. And I think that's the thing which is scaring creators away because all of a student, they don't wce.

You know, quite a lot of us went into the audio industry because you can do amazing things with audio. You can paint incredible pictures um just using audio um not having to worry about what the video actually works. In fact, the pictures are Better with audio in many ways because you are attempting into people's imagination.

And you know I I might look, if you don't know what I look like, I might look completely different to one in their minds eye to someone else. That's an amazing thing that audio can do, that video can't. And IT worries me slightly that we are having people who are being put off the whole podcast world because they have to think about the video side.

And it's not just youtube doing this. Of course, spotify big, big, big push right now is video. Video is still exclusive on spotify platform. So spotify certainly isn't sharing that even though you can do video in a pod casta as as feed if you want to. That is most definitely still an exclusive on their side.

But IT is interesting seeing some of the data that's coming out of spotify and seeing that, for example, people are just listening to the audio during the day, but in the evening they might watch the video. I think that there's some really interesting things there around how people are consuming content and the different ways that people consume content. Video is not always right.

What like when I talk to audio people, people who like deeply believe in, you know publican audio in the first time. The thing they're worried about is that video just eventually eats all of this because it's easier to monetize, uh, but then there are a lot of cool things you can do in audio and call things you can do with both like IT. Is is IT a Better world when these two things kind of exist separately? Or is is sort of smooching all of these things together on the internet going to lead to good stuff?

Yeah I mean, I I was reflecting the other day that everything now that we listen to audio on has a full quality caller screen that never used to be the case. But but IT is now the case that literally everything that you have, you have that beautiful kind of Green. What are you going .

to do with IT.

including like the dash port of your car? Yeah exactly exactly. Um I mean, I have been in in uh uber where the driver has been listening to and I think watching a youtube .

video then yes.

so I think going you so I think that the will intentionally be that urinous. I do think though that there is a real opportunity for audio in this world, a real opportunity for something you know for years way when your eyes are busy. I think that that is the thing that podcasting has always been very good at using.

And if we get rid of that unique selling point the podcasting has and turn IT into another form of video, then I don't think that the world is a richer place for doing that. I think there is something to be said for, something which is specifically there for audio that you can enjoy while your you know going out for a walk a while you're doing the dishes, while you're driving a you know one time truck down a highway. I think all of those are very, really important things. And we should be very careful about whether or not we want to lose the benefit of a podcast as being an audio first. And just because somebody sponsible y or at youtube has told us that we ought to have the video side because, as you so rightly say, they earn more money from him .

that how they know how to sell ads that is like, you can boil so much of IT down to that how they know how to sell ads.

Yeah, yeah exactly.

So what what about the user experience of being a podcast listener? I mean, especially if you think about some of the open apps, it's still R S S needs with enclosures. We're we're dealing with not terribly desist AR distribution technology to what we .

had twenty years ago. Yeah I I think I think has has changed needs changing. So we've seen very recently, for example, transcripts appear in a bunch of um podcast apps.

Apple is doing transcript for everything. But if you want to do a decent transcripts and a transcript that you can trust, you can write that transcript for yourself. You can put that in the R S S. Feed and the that will pull that creator made transcript in, whether is apple podcast, whether its pocket casts and tena pod, you know, so on and so forth.

So I think one of the problems that people that people like spotify have been trying to convince us of is that you can't get some of the new features that audiences would like into R S. S. And that really isn't the case.

We when podcasting started, podcasting didn't have fun nails, didn't have categories. There are a lot of things that podcasting didn't have. An apple came along and said, we want to podcasting, but we wanted to look Better. This is what we would like to add to the back. And one of the benefits of our asses that it's extensible with a name space so you can put that additional stuff in there.

And so I think this is the exciting thing that i'm seeing with the podcasting two point of piece of work, which is being done by a bunch of a bunch of geeks, including, by the way, one of the current vendors of podcasting itself, adam curry, where theyve actually gone. Let's add a new name space with some new ideas for how podcasting can work. So not just a transcript tag, but tags in terms of micropayments, tags in terms of locations, tags in terms of cast lists, all of the stuff that we have missed from the podcast world in the last twenty or so years. And I think it's actually a very exciting time now seeing some of these new ideas coming in and seeing some of the more brave apps using some of the data which is now available in them. My last question .

to although back to the beginning of what is the podcast twenty years later, did we name at the right thing? Should we should we have just never called a podcast in the first place? College show move on with their lives was was podcast right to we get that right in two dozen four.

I I think the pocket is a useful word because IT says a few things. IT says that IT isn't a broadcast, is a podcast. It's different.

And actually, I think you know, to come back to some of the mistakes that perhaps were made between twenty thousand and twenty twenty two people were assuming the broadcasting was another form of broadcasting and you could reach tons and tons and tons of people. And that really isn't the case. It's more knick casting or niche casting, if you like, rather than anything else. So I think it's useful that IT has a word.

I think it's also useful that is actually the word helps define a little bit in terms of what I podcast is in that the pod bit talks about portability, talks about being able to take that audio with you and a large amount of podcast listening happens in a mobile environment, whether that happened to be on a car or public transport um or going out walking the dog. So I think that that is useful to have that word. But I think that, that word is becoming less and less light.

By the way, the word radio is becoming less and less about the technology and more and more about the type of programing that IT happens to be. A podcast is very clearly a different thing to live radio, but it's certainly also very different thing to a music track. And so I think the word podcast, whoever invented IT, whether IT was benham's ley or whether IT was danny j.

Greg well or both or neither, I think that it's still a very useful thing first to have. And there are lots of weird and wonderful words in the in the english language, which which don't really mean what they what they earn anymore. And I think that that's just fine.

I mean, media is changing so so quickly now. And you know the fact that you can't even go out and buy an ipod anymore, I don't think is a real issue. So yeah, now I think it's all good creed that said basic.

bring back the ipod. But that's .

a whole separate thing at the U. I likes that one.

right? We've got to take one more break and then we're going to do a question from the verge test highline. We will be right back.

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Welcome back, right? Let's get to the hot line. And before we do, I should confess something I was supposed to ask all of you a couple of weeks ago for hot line questions about two thousand four. I don't know what those would have been.

Maybe you would have like a twenty year old ipod you're trying to repair pose for something really cool or you're are now trying to, like, get all the files of your old spinning hard drive and having trouble. I don't know. I'm sure I could have been fun.

And still, if you have two thousand and four questions that came up reading our package or listening to this podcast, I wanted hear him all the number is eight, six, six, verge one one. The email is verge cast at the verge that come send them on my way. Give me your two thousand and four questions i'll but put on my time machine hat and what we'll see what we can do for now we have something completely unrelated.

It's about ipad. Here we go. Hey, shares I was honoring uh like seven I get like twenty six like fish about IT ah I will go to switch that have been playing to any oxymoron a bit and I just thought like, well, if they put H I am shift and I have any seven, what I would will be like a seam that kind competitor or are we not there yet? Was gaming on the IP yet? I don't know.

Let me think, thanks. This is a super fun question and is actually really timely right now because I think we're about to get a new set of ipad potentially as soon as like this week because there's spent about reporting that the new mini is coming. There's spent a bn reporting that is going to be early november, like is this is the time that would be if it's gonna start shipping in early november.

I also love the ipad mini and desperately would love IT to be and intend to switch. Its the right size IT does all the other stuff like if that could be the thing I Carried around with me all the time, i'd be supreme to IT. I think there are two ways to look at this question, and I want to get them both.

One is just a question of, like would ARM compatibility make the ipad a more useful gaming machine? And I think to something send the answer to that is yes, right? Like if IT, we're easier to take some of the games that run on other chips and just run them on an ipad.

sure. That would be fine. I don't think in any way to perform. That is the main problem here, right? Like for one thing, the the m serious chips inside the ipads or ARM chips, they're very good ARM ships, they are vastly more powerful arms chips than the stuff that's currently running inside of the switch lake.

I was actually just looking at these benchMarks today after I heard this question. Uh, if you go back then, intendo switch on geek bench six, which is just one sort of Normal benchmark of what it's like to use this system under a little bit of load. The intendo switch scores seven hundred and two on geek bench six.

Again, none of these are perfect benchMarks, but they're just useful illustrations, right? So the switch seven or two, the m four and the ipad pro scores of fourteen thousand six hundred and twenty one like day that the n four is actually closer in score to like high power gaming pcs. Then IT is to the switch.

And yet the switch is awesome rate. The processing power is not the problem. One, it's availability of games, which is, I think, the ipad main problem.

Uh, there are lots of structural reasons for that over the years. Apple only until very recently didn't want you to use gaming emulators. For instance, there was no way to have games streaming services inside of the APP store.

Apple went to court with epic over whether fortnight was allowed to be in the APP store. That's been a whole thing, and I think will continue to be a whole thing. Apple loved games and has had lots of games in the abstract, but particularly on the iphone.

These are just not the games by and large people anna play. And so apple hasn't really focused on them on the ipad. To be honest, I don't know exactly what IT is.

I have been surprised over the years to see apple not make a bigger push into trying to make this a really great gaming machine. And I think it's possible that as gaming emulators become more important and as games streaming services grow and come on to this, IT will start to happen. But it's just a lot of work to make a game available on a new platform.

And you just don't see you by oft being like our game is now available on playstation and x box and PC and ipad like IT doesn't happen. IT does not work on mac either. And an apple has been desperately trying to change that for years to make the mac, which again is very powerful, into a genuinely competitive gaming platform.

It's really hard to do that because supporting any new platform is a ton of work and these companies buy in large, just don't get on board with a new one until there is vast evidence that IT is going to be a good business and no apple products has provided that evidence. There is also the way that apple, please, is the up store and the way that IT oversees things like in game transactions and the way that IT wants its cut. There's a business side of that, that is very real, I think, that starting to get stripped away a little bit what you think might make apple products in general, but especially the ipad of more interesting gaming platform.

But all of that said, I think the thing missing from the ipad mini in particular is not a really great chip or even a really compatible chip. It's a controller. Then this is kind of a weird thing to say. But I think if you look at the steam deck and you look at the switch and you look at even some of these other games streaming devices, they have dedicated controllers for a reason, right?

If you're building a game for the intendo switch, you know exactly what people are going to be doing, whether they're using a controller or the joy cons, whether the joy ons are detach or attached, you know the controls that are available, right? And you see a lot of games use those things in a way that makes there is an assumption that, like, you're playing this game with the controller, and I can do that. You can do that with the ipad.

Most people using an ipad, I would say virtually everyone music ipad is not using a controller. And the ipds technical controller support is actually got very good over time. Uh, you can connect a play station controller, you can connect x box controller.

There are also a really good third party controllers that there. I have a uh, steel serious one that I really like, but no developer can build one of those games on the assumption that you're using a controller. And so not only do they have to build their games differently to work with a touch Green, they have to build different kinds of games.

You just can't build a game as successfully into a controller less ecosystem as you can into a controller one. You're just, by definition, when to build different kinds of games for A T screen is why you see games that are much more sweep based and they're about tapping things and inventories become really important than less turn the stuff as opposed to the kind of quick witch controller stuff. There's some of that out there and more of that all the time.

And especially as products like the backbone get more popular on the iphone in particular, you'll start to see that stuff kind of grow. I think backbone is actually done really interesting work growing the gaming ecosystem on the iphone just by being something like a target table default controller. But in the broad scheme of things, and again, especially the ipad, that doesn't exist.

I think if apple were to make its own controller, that would go a really long way towards solving tss because then you say, okay, this is the default thing, and accessories makers would build to something like that spec. There will be away for developers to say, okay, this is probably what people with controllers will be using. They can start to target the one thing in the way that if you're an intended developer, you can target the switches, control set.

The amazing thing obviously would be if apple, like, built a gaming handheld and actually just gave me an ipad with detached joy. Kn s, like, that's the dream. I would like that very badly.

That is a device I would use for many hours every single day and would upgrade alarmingly quickly all the time. I cannot, don't see that happening. I think if apple we're going to build a dedicated gaming device, IT probably would have by now. So I think there is a great gaming device inside of the ipad.

But I think because IT spent so long and hasn't existed yet because of the way apple runs the apple store and because of the pieces of what makes a great gaming console around the chip don't exist, I just don't see that happening, but I hope i'm wrong. And if you have an awesome gaming set up for your ipad, I would love to hear about IT, whether you figured out the wire controller that set up that works, are you found the thing that plugs into the ipad mini and makes you feel like a switch? I want to hear all of your ipad gaming setups because there is an amazing game console in there.

And I want to figure out how to make IT work. I have a backbone from my iphone. I love IT, but the mini should be the one.

So if you have a set up, let me know. I am all years, but for now, I hope that helps. Chips are in everything, but they do.

All right, that is that for the verge cast today. Thank you to everybody who came on the show to talk about the history and the future of power guests. And thank you, as always, for listening. There's lots more on all of this stuff at the verge dot com.

You should read pod means that net, if you care about this stuff, i'll link to a bunch of the stuff that we used to get all of this research and all of these people in the shown that there's a ton of fun history to mind through there. Also check out two thousand four week. Our team worked incredibly hard on trying to figure out the legacy and history and future.

Frankly, of two thousand four, you could make an argument that the internet is headed back to where we were twenty years ago. Tons of fun stories all over the site this week. Make sure you go check them out, watch the videos, look at the photos, so, so much cool stuff.

Cannot recommend IT highly enough. As always, if you have thoughts, feelings, questions or other really old, outdated test that you totally think, wish this do, you can always, always at verge, cast at the verge 点 com， call a hotline, six, six one. There's an innovation for you.

There are a lot of people I talk to you, by the way, who want call in podcasts to figure out how to really become a thing. Big fan, keep all your questions coming. This shows produced by liam James will poor and eric costs the verge casts is a verge production in part of the box media podcast anywhere.

Me, I know we back on friday to talk about all kinds of news. We got a bunch of tesla stuff to catch up on, lots of tragedy, things going on this week, some apple news, lots to do. We'll see then broken role.

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