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December 20, 2024 16 mins

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Russell Harrower, CEO of PodToo, introduces Secure RSS, a new technology addressing a key challenge in podcast monetization. The system adds a payment layer between users and premium content, allowing creators to securely sell audiobooks, TV shows, movies, and bonus podcast episodes while preventing unauthorized access and AI scraping.

The technology offers flexibility in payment methods, supporting both cryptocurrency micropayments and traditional currencies. Creators can set fixed prices or offer rental options, and notably, they keep 100% of their recommended retail price when sales occur through participating podcast players. PodToo's first audiobook using this system is set to launch in January.

The conversation also explores the ongoing challenge of cross-app comments in podcasting. Multiple solutions are discussed, including Boostagram Live for handling longer comments and media attachments, the Social Interact tag, and a potential return to standard RSS comment tags. This technical discussion reveals how the podcasting community is working to create interoperable systems outside of major platforms like Spotify and Apple.

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Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Sam Sethi (00:12):
Hello and welcome back to Pot News Weekly. I'm
joined today by a friend of theshow. His name's Russell Harrah.
He's the CEO of Pod two and he'salso the co-founder of a radio
station down in Perth inAustralia called Dream One.
Russell. Hello, how are you?

Russell Harrower (00:27):
I'm very well, Sam.

Sam Sethi (00:28):
We've had you on the show before. We've talked about
various things, so we'll comeback to talk about the pod fund
in a minute. But one of thethings you've been working on is
a new piece of RSS technologycalled Secure RSS. That sounds
very exciting. One is secure RSS.

Russell Harrower (00:44):
So we love open RSS, but there's a
fundamental problem with thattechnology, and that is if I'm a
podcast that wants to do a bonusepisode and charge for that
bonus episode, we've made it alittle bit too easy to access
that free file. So what's secureRSS does is we put a layer of

(01:05):
like a payment method in betweenaccessing that amp three file.
So we use a technology called Lfor O2. You can get information
about that at L four O2 dot org.
And it basically in a nutshellis a macaroon and that invoice
that goes to the podcast player,you pay that through the podcast

(01:26):
player, they get the unlock andthen they send that unlock back
to us and voila, you have accessto that employee file.

Sam Sethi (01:36):
Okay, Now, apart from that macaroon, it sounds very
simple. So it's standard RSSthat's delivered to a podcast
player from a host and I canthen pick on the buy button, I
guess, or some sort of buttonthat then sends a token back to
you that there's a confirmedpayment and you then unlock that

(01:56):
file for me to play and listento. Now is that going to work
for what type of content?
Audiobooks, I guess is one, butis that the only type of content?

Russell Harrower (02:07):
No, absolutely not, Sam. It's not just
audiobooks. We're looking atdoing TV shows, movies, music,
and also you've got podcasterswho want to do that bonus
episode. So that's one of thebeautiful things about Pod two
is once they develop a productand technology, we will roll it
out to all of our clients.

Sam Sethi (02:27):
But we we already have a model called Value for
Value that's been introduced topodcasting, and that's the idea
of the user paying what theywant for the content that they
receive, the value they receive.
Now can't we just continue withthe V for V model with audio
books and films? Isn't that justthe easiest way without having
to put all this extra technicalsecure our sets on top of it all?

Russell Harrower (02:52):
As much as I would love to say yes to that
question, they have a has itsplace. I'm not saying it doesn't.
However, a TV show cost a littlebit more than $0.50 to make and
an audio book as well. When Ipitched the idea to some
publishers, they were like, Aslong as I get to charge what I
want to charge and I still makemy money, then I'm fine. So

(03:16):
there is the one out there fromthe community of creators who
want to be paid fairly for theirwork. And I think that's the
difference, though. You forvalue is a gift, a donation. For
us, it's about paying for artand that is what we all do. At
the end of the day, we createart and one of the biggest

(03:39):
things that we've noticed too isthere's a lot of AI bots
scraping out data and scrapingout creators data. So we will be
really advocating to ourcreators to go secure and use
secure RSS technology. It mayalso mean that they don't charge
for we've got F for AI too,which is a method that we use

(04:03):
with a select number of playersthat they can unlock content and
there's really actually no realtime currency coming to us, but
they can unlock the K that way.
So there is technology stillgoing, developed and worked out,
but for it was designed for, foryet transactions where let's say
true fans for example someonepays for an audio book for,

(04:27):
let's say it's 20 bucks theywould pay in their fate and then
30 days later three fans wouldpay us our commission part of
that. So it's delayed payment.
Unfortunately, we can't get forit to be real time, which we
could, but we can't.

Sam Sethi (04:45):
What you're saying is users can pay either in a
micropayment Bitcoin format,which is what the podcasting
community has been working on asa way of making small donation
payments or they can pay intraditional currencies like
dollars, pounds, euros, etc..
And I think that's great becauseI think when it's a sizable item
like an audio book or a film ora music track, the creators

(05:09):
should have the option ofchoosing whether they want their
fans to pay as they go on adonation basis. You know, I
value and therefore this is theamount I want to pay you or the
creator can say, Look, know,I've put a lot of time and
effort into this. This is thevalue I'm setting and I don't
want anything less than that. SoI think it comes to a point

(05:31):
where the creator chooses howthey want to be commended, and
that's the right thing to do,really.

Russell Harrower (05:40):
I think it is interesting because, Sam, you've
got a feature on for fans whereyou can stream an episode and
you get charged for streaming.
Unfortunately, though, I can getaround that system by just going
to podcast index, for example,and finding the podcast on there
and then listening to that andpay file. So we actually enforce
what three fans is doing bysaying, Well, if you want to

(06:01):
earn streaming money, then youcan put your content behind
secure RSS.

Sam Sethi (06:11):
Cool. When's this going to come out? When can we
start to see some of this stuff?

Russell Harrower (06:14):
Then show what we got. Our very first audio
book that will be released inJanuary when we were in the
studio last Sunday and thisSunday recording it. So it's up
to me to edit this great book byScott Patrick Michael. It's
called Clean. It's by our veryfirst publisher that signed with

(06:35):
us called Upswell Publishing.
They're based here in Perth andit was such a pleasure to work
with them. They came into thestudio, they recorded it and
pretty much one take. Sohopefully some slight more
editing and we should get it outin the second half of January.

Sam Sethi (06:53):
And just to remind everyone, so that will be
available from Potter. So it'llbe in an RSS format. Podcasting
apps that support Secure RSSwill then be able to add a buy
button to the page on their app.
The use will click the buybutton. It'll tell them the
price in both stats and fit, andthen the user chooses. Once

(07:15):
they've chosen that, then sendsa confirm payment token back to
pod two who then unlock theaudio file for you to use. Now I
think you're also extending itwith an option for buy or rent.
Explain that to me.

Russell Harrower (07:33):
So we know that people want to be able to
rent a book for 24 hours ormaybe seven days. So we do have
the option. It is up to thecreator of the audio book or
whatever it is. It could be a TVshow, for example. They will
have that available in theirdashboard on Pod two to say
whether they want to buy optionor rent option. The advantage of

(07:54):
going through a podcast playeris that the creator gets to keep
100% of their recommended retailprice. That is really important
because Terry and the owner ofactual publishing, she said to
me on Sunday, there's too manypeople taking money from the

(08:14):
middle and if I can get aroundthat, I will. So that's one of
the really good things with Podtwo and true fans is everyone
wins. Clearly true fans get tokeep back, the creator gets to
keep 100% of their earnings andthat's what it's about. If we as
a community can solve a hugeproblem where publishers don't

(08:35):
feel like they're getting rippedoff, then what a great community
to be part of.

Sam Sethi (08:39):
Indeed, as much as I love the fact with my CEO of
true fans, I have to be alsovery clear. Other apps like
Fountain Pod First podcast Guruand others will be playing in
this secure RSS game. So otherpodcasts that will be using
secure RSS as well. So that'simportant.

Russell Harrower (08:59):
Yes. You say that the only app yet to confirm
that they're using it is truefans. We've sent documentation
over to Oscar at Fountain. Wehaven't heard whether he's
implementing it. He's got a lotof stuff happening over at
Fountain so it may not be on theto do list, but with Tesla,
we're true fans. It works ontrue fans. So that's why when I

(09:23):
am speaking, I'm going to speakabout true fans at the moment.
But that's not the only placethat we can get audiobooks where
the very first podcast hostingprovide a tour. So partner with
Kobo Books. So all of ourauthors and publishers that
publish on Pod two, they've gotthe option to do a deal with
Kobo and get it out on theirplatforms as well. And clearly

(09:45):
that goes to many otherretailers.

Sam Sethi (09:48):
Sir Russell Moving on now, looking into the future, is
this whole idea of cross upcomments again, the unicorn
that's been within the industryfor a little while. The idea
that I can leave a comment onone podcasting app and it will
appear in another podcasting appunder the same episode, and

(10:08):
that's really one of the waysthat I think the podcasting to,
to oh, community wants toaggregate our efforts together,
which is something that Spotifyand Apple and YouTube will ever
do. So we've got the fabledCross App Commons. Russell Now
you've proposed one solution.
There are several solutions outthere. One of those solutions is
something called a booster.

(10:31):
Graham Live once booster grablive shows.

Russell Harrower (10:34):
So it's a open source app that you can run in
your server and think of it likean SMS. So back in the old days,
believe it or not, SMS used tohave a character limit where it
was 160 characters to send amessage. Now unfortunately, the
new Elon address, or Lightningwallet's the provider of those

(10:59):
lightning wallets may have alimit. Most limits are about 250
to 500. So the problem with thatis I can't do my really long
paragraph comments and thecreator can't see them. So what
we did was we caught the commentin a local database and then we

(11:22):
still allowed the payment to bemade. And once the payments made,
the creator can say the comment.
Then from an app side, all theapp needs to do is pull the
comment from the comment sectionof the RSS feed and voila,
you've got plus comments workingon everyone app.

Sam Sethi (11:43):
Okay, so I like the idea of cross out comments. I
can send it to a central serverthat you have and then other
apps can do the same and we canthen through technical methods,
pull those comments in and matchthem up from each app. Do we
need longer comments? I mean,seriously, it wasn't Twitter.
The idea of limiting content to140 characters and everyone went

(12:07):
that makes it so much lessworthy. I mean, there's enough
rubbish put out in the worldwithout it having 5000 character
word comments.

Russell Harrower (12:16):
Well, it's not just text comments. We might
want voicemails or videomessages. Now, the Lightning
Network, I don't think it canstore a video message in the
comments section, so it needs tobe done elsewhere. So that's one
of the advantages of theHistogram Graham system.

Sam Sethi (12:35):
Okay. Now, James Cridland, my co-host over the
weekend, also proposed a coupleof things. One was using
something called the SocialInteract tag. Now I was on the
30 mile walk, so I have no ideawhat was being said other than
picking up messages. So what hadJames suggested?

Russell Harrower (12:52):
Okay, so the social Interact tag is a very
smart tag. Unfortunately, appshaven't really embraced it and
neither have podcasters. Theidea of the social interact tag
was that it would be a placewhere the creator of that
podcast could say For thisepisode, all of my comments live

(13:15):
here. Now that could be aMastodon server, it could be a
nostalgic event server, it couldbe a WordPress website. The
problem with that is that thereason why app developers didn't
want to develop for it isbecause it's too hard to get
that data and feed it in.
There's no standardized way ofsaying, Oh, this is a comment.

(13:37):
Now fast forward a little bit totoday what James has really
thought about it. He has lookedat the RSS 2.0 community. They
have a comment tag in their RSSspecs. It's called comment and
it is an example standardisedfeed of the comments. So each

(13:59):
item has title descriptionsource. For example, and is a
already existing standard thatis used by news organizations
and other companies out there.

Sam Sethi (14:14):
So basically we started off with bootstrap life,
we then went to social interacttags and now we're saying that
we can all loop back to RSScomments that already exist
within the standard RSS spec.

Russell Harrower (14:29):
Correct? Now, I'm not saying that we're losing
Bruce the ground live or socialinteract or or any of that kind
of stuff because they allactually work together. So one
of the unique things is as apodcaster I can say, okay, well
my comment section is only goingto show people that boost to my
server, so people who donate tome are going to be able to be

(14:52):
featured as my comment section.
Another person might say, Well,I'm a developer and I use
Activity Pub or Twitter, so I'mgoing to create a system that
takes loads, tweets and andtweets and show them in in my
system. So it really allows thepodcaster or the creator to pick

(15:13):
and choose what they want.
Someone might say, Well, I don'tcare where the comments come
from, I want every single typeof comment in my comment RSS
feed. So if they can code itgood on them, like it's
literally as long as you stickto the standards which has
already been existing by the RSStwo point I specs, then it makes

(15:38):
it super duper easy for an app.

Sam Sethi (15:40):
We will see what happens because it sounds like
there's a lot of flux in thesystem about which way to go.
It's still the fabled cross appcomment and we're not quite
there yet. I think. Look,Russell, we could talk for ages.
We better cut it short there.
Russell Remind everyone if theywant to find out more about
secure RSS, where would they go?

Russell Harrower (15:59):
Sure. So you can head over to pod two. That's
potato dot com. You can jumponto LinkedIn or search me.
Russell Parallel search pod tosend us a message and we'll jump
on to Matt along I'm on there aswell.

Sam Sethi (16:16):
Lovely Russell thank you so much look forward to
seeing secure our space out inthe wild.

Russell Harrower (16:21):
Thanks Sam.
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