June 12, 2024 • 27 mins
In today's episode, we dive into the seasons feature. We discuss everything from the introduction of seasons by Apple Podcasts back in 2017 to the latest proposal enhancements, such as adding decimal numbers and unique images for each season. Listen in as we explore how these new features can simplify podcast organization and enhance the listener experience, making your podcast look more visually appealing in apps.
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https://github.com/Podcastindex-org/podcast-namespace/discussions/638
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(00:00):
Better seasons with podcasting 2.0.
Daniel, future of podcasting episode number 45.
(00:22):
We're gonna ramp up. We're gonna pimp out our seasons. Now that'll be
awesome. Maybe get some flames on the side, some nice
spoke tires, something. I don't know. But, we had super
chapters last week. Are these gonna be super seasons or just
They're more like seasons 2.0, but they do bring some pretty
handy features to it. So do you remember
(00:45):
when Apple Podcasts actually, back then, it was called iTunes
still. Do you remember when they launched Seasons? Yeah.
Vaguely because it was for me, I was like, oh, that's a cool feature that
I'll never use. But I can see where
people, like, back in the day I think it was probably invented for
cereal because that show is so popular, and that's one of those shows where they
(01:07):
announce about 34 people at the end of their show that worked on
it, and they fly all over the world doing these interviews. And
so those people need to take a break when their their season is over. And
I was like, well, that makes sense. And ever since then, they've they take
I mean, I know they just released, I think, a new season of Serial.
I thought I heard rumors or something like that, maybe. But,
(01:29):
any any of those big shows or or somebody who just like, I need a
break, and they wanna they'll break it off in the season.
So, but I just remember they came out, and I was like, I don't
know. What about you? What what was your initial thought? Yeah. It was in 2017
when they came out with it. And I thought it was great because, already,
seasonal podcasts existed. And Podcasts would
(01:51):
talk about what season they were in. And I'm a proponent for making
the seasons actually make sense to your audience. If it doesn't make
sense months from now, then you probably don't need
seasons. In other words, if it's a schedule based thing, you
probably don't need it. But if it's thematic, then it's a good idea. And,
like, I was hosting a TV show fan podcast at that time for
(02:14):
the TV show Once Upon a Time, And the TV show has seasons.
Each season would have a story arc. So I liked the introduction of
season and episode number. And, by the way, this came out
when Apple had done nothing with their podcast
spec for years. And then, they dropped all of these new
features like episode numbers, the season numbers, the
(02:36):
specific iTunes title tag, and some of these other features, and also more
categories. So this was fantastic that they brought new
features to their spec, and then other apps followed suit.
And this was all before podcasting 2.0 when we let Apple
decide what goes into a podcast feed. Well, I loved
it because it meant, like, for my podcast about the TV show,
(02:58):
I could divide my episodes into seasons
because my episodes match the seasons of the TV
show as well. And I think that works
great for when you have chronological seasons
like a TV show would have. But
a show like Serial, does season 2
(03:20):
have anything whatsoever to do with season
1? Yeah. That would be no. Right.
It's completely different. Now, yes, it is a different
season. So it's fine that they use a season tag. But
to call it season 2, when
I see something that says season 2, you know what I'm thinking
(03:42):
immediately? I need to go back and listen to season 1 first.
Right. Otherwise, I'm going to be completely lost. So
it was someone who used to be with NPR who came up with this
idea and proposed it and everyone jumped on board of how
about we allow seasons to have 2 new features
in podcasting 2 point o. So they could still be numbered
(04:04):
seasons like Apple Podcast supports with the Itunes namespace
spec. But the Apple spec is limited to
whole numbers. So you can only have season 1, 2, 3, 4,
like that. So with podcasting 2.0 seasons, we can
have decimals in that. So we could have season 1.5,
1.6 if you wanted to or whatever. So you can do that. But the
(04:28):
other cool thing, and this was the more exciting thing about it,
is that you could give your seasons a name. And I think that
makes a lot more sense than a number. I'm a
name, not with a number. Well, I know,
Colin Gray from the podcast host does seasons,
and I remember there was one season where they just talked
(04:51):
about microphones and then another season where they just talked about
they were all all podcasting related, but they separated their chapters
by topic. And so that would be great if you could name that differently.
And then I think you said, is there something in the spec about having a
different picture? That's the new proposal. And this is
something that I think is a fantastic idea. We'll link to more
(05:13):
information, like, both from podcasting2.org about the
season tag as it exists right now. And, also, the
idea here that it was Dave Jones who wrote this up, and I I can't
remember if someone else actually came up with this idea, and he's just
writing it up to start the conversation. But the
idea is that you have your seasons as you do with the
(05:35):
numbers and a name and you could add an image to
it. Just like we can have images on
individual episodes and images in individual chapters if
you want, You could potentially have images for the
whole season. And I think that
helps to enhance the experience
(05:58):
and potentially enhance how that podcast is displayed in a
podcast app. Because you could think of it this particular way. As imagine,
you're looking at a podcast, a seasonal podcast that already has multiple
seasons in your podcast app. And as you're scrolling through the
episodes, this episodes that are in
particular seasons have a different background image
(06:19):
to them. And maybe some color scheme thing around that just
like we see how color schemes are changing for chapters artwork and
episode artwork. You could do that same kind of thing. So
in a way, a season might be the blue season, then there's the red
season, then the green season. Just based on assuming that those are the
primary colors used in the cover art. You could do that kind of thing to
(06:42):
really enhance the experience and make
a podcast app look more visually
interesting, kind of like you would see in Netflix
or Amazon Prime, Hulu, and places like that where you see that
every time you visit a show, it looks like you're on a
page that was designed for that show, Not
(07:04):
just data fed in from text and a couple images here
and there, but actually built to look beautifully branded for
that show. Yeah. That's interesting. I was trying to figure out
how that would work in the back end of most media
hosts Because right now, you just put your season number and
your episode number, and so somewhere you'd either have to
(07:26):
make the season, and then maybe
you say this is season 1 JSON. And then later, when you go into an
episode, you just have a drop down of which season is this for or
something of that nature. I was just trying to figure out the the fun thing
about adding all these features. It's, you know, it can definitely
improve the experience. But the more features we add, the
(07:48):
the fun part of that is adding it on the back end of the the,
you still wanna make it easy to make an episode in that whole 9 yards,
but it's, that could be a tricky one. Yeah. And Thomas Rhine in
the GitHub that we'll link to for this episode where this is being discussed,
he brought up a good point that we're starting to complicate
a tag that will be pretty much just
(08:11):
duplicated across several episodes. And that's
unnecessary bloat Because you really don't need
like, even right now with the podcasting 2 point o tag, it has the
title for the season in that season tag.
And you really don't need to repeat the season title
across every episode. And whenever you do have to repeat
(08:33):
something like that across
capitalization that's off could
confuse podcast app and make it treat that one
episode as a different season. If it's capitalized or spelled differently or
(08:53):
there's an extra space in it or anything is one character off
about the name, it could trigger some
confusion in that. And besides that, as long as the
information is the same across the whole season,
it's not all that necessary to repeat it. So
Right. When you start to add then an image on top of
(09:16):
that, well then you have to add that same image to every
episode that is in that season and it starts to get
unnecessarily bloated. So one
proposal that I put out literally minutes before we
recorded this episode So this is just one idea, and then I'm
not sticking to this as saying this is the best idea. And there will be
(09:37):
other ideas, and we'd love for you to contribute on the GitHub too. If that
doesn't scare you off, you just write something if you have an idea of how
this could be structured. But, an idea that I had for this
is we re simplify the individual episode
season tag. That all it contains is a number.
And that number becomes an index number of a
(09:58):
sort. And then at the top of the RSS
feed before all the episodes, then you have a sort of
index of the seasons where then you can have the season tag
up there. But this season tag includes the number and
the name and the image and maybe
someday further down the line, we decide to add more to the
(10:20):
season tag and it could include that there too. So then you
very easily get a table of contents
for the seasons as well as
having one place to maintain this stuff so you don't have
to ensure that you're getting everything exactly right
from episode to episode. You just have this one place. So
(10:42):
then in the publishing systems, the
interface could be something like how you create a
new episode. You just click create new season, it adds the
season to your RSS feed and then when you're creating your
episodes, you could either manually
type in the season number or just pick
(11:05):
from one of the seasons you've already created. So that could make it very
easy on the user interface side too. So even, like, for
the podcasters, they don't have to worry about copying and pasting the title. They don't
have to worry about typing it correctly the same time. They just
see these are the seasons I've already created. I want to add it to one
of these seasons. Yeah. Because I've seen people do that.
(11:26):
They will have no seasons and then they'll add
1 or if they do have a season, they'll type in the wrong
number And depending on how things are set up, in some cases, it'll go
way to the bottom of your your RSS feed. And you're
like, hey. I published this episode. I don't see it anywhere. And
they'll, like, in in the case of Libsyn, they'll try to upload the file again,
(11:48):
and they can't because it's already there. But they're like, but it's not here. And
that's where you have to go in and you do a search, and you're like,
oh, you put season, you know, 11 when you
really meant number 11 in your episode title or whatever. You just
get the wrong number in the wrong place, and it messes everything up. So, yeah,
I I like that idea. Build it once and then just pull from some sort
(12:08):
of down, drop down list would be great. And I think, yeah, that
simplifies it for the user. That makes it less likely that they would
make a mistake. Makes it easier for them. And it moves away
from the dependence on numbers. I'm kind
of against episode numbers in most cases. And the same
thing now that we have the ability, we've had this ability with podcasting
(12:30):
2.0 to give seasons names. I think that's so much
better so that, like with, Colin in
his podcast, The Podcast Host, that they could name the
season the microphone season. Or the first time that I saw
a season used in a really good way in a
podcast was a web design podcast I listened to many, many years ago. I'm not
(12:52):
sure if this podcast is even still going. It was called the BOAG World Podcast,
and they did that same thing where for one season, it was all
about best tools. And then another season, they interviewed
website owners to talk about the experience of running websites. Another
season, it was just top ten things. So every episode was
a top ten of something. And that was really clever. It was
(13:14):
thematic. You knew what you were getting into. And they could then name those
seasons something like that. This is the top 10 season. This
is the website owner interview season.
And that's a lot better than season 1,
season 2, season 3. There's nothing
compelling about a season number.
(13:36):
Yay. I was hoping I could listen to season 3 today of
something that I don't know, and it would be great if you if if this
all makes them more obvious. I remember somebody told me there
was a a podcast about a local radio station here
in Ohio called WMMS, and it broke Bruce
Springsteen and Rush and all these other bands. And so I
(13:58):
went to the podcast, and it was, like, episode
or season 1, but they were on, like, season 3. And so
I click on it, and they're talking about this amusement park
in Ohio. And I'm like, this isn't about WMMS. And it wasn't
till later that I scrolled down and I was like, oh, it's way down
here. So I I have to go back and look at it. But if there
(14:21):
was something that just really made it obvious that, hey, this is season 3.
This is season 2. This is season 1. Because I think what they were
doing where they were changing, they were adding the tagline
to their show. So it'd be like future of podcasting
dash season talk or something like that. And then they would
do 5 or 6 episodes on seasons, and then they'd be like
(14:44):
future of podcasting dash, you know, whatever
the next thing was. And so it was kind of confusing because you're like, wait,
this says this, but the thing I want. So
it's just anything that would make it more obvious that this is a chapters,
and you wouldn't have to hack the name of your show, anything like that. And
I just wonder, I'd have to go back and look at the show. They might
(15:05):
not have even known that, you know, seasons 1.0
were available. They might have just missed the whole boat. But I just remember being
very frustrated when I was like, I've been lied to. And then I was like,
oh, wait. No. I haven't. It's down here. So that's always fun.
Yeah. And then you can even look at this further as we're thinking of
ways that we could add images to seasons.
(15:27):
What size, what dimension should that image be? Should it be
a square image just like the cover art is and the episode artwork is and
the chapter artwork is. They're all square images. So should
the season artwork be square? Or just like there have
been some proposals for other images that you could include with your podcast,
should we maybe say season should be a
(15:49):
wide image? Like a wide screen, 16 by 9
ratio. Something like that that might be a little more interesting to
integrate into a podcast app. Or would we allow people to
add multiple images? I would be a bigger fan
of that actually. I like having the options to optimize it as
I'd like. So being able to give it a square image and
(16:12):
a 16 by 9 widescreen image. So that then the
podcast app can display that in a way that
works well. And we could put certain
guidelines around these things also to say something like, keep the
bottom 10% clean of text. So that way, if there's
any kind of fading going on, we could get into that, but the best thing
(16:34):
really is not to have to define margins
and colors and that kind of thing and the requirements for what kind of image
you can put in there. Just focus on the technical aspects of it of
this is the kind of format it needs to be. These are the dimensions or
the the ratio that it needs to be. So
at this point, you said the 2 point o spec, they have a number which
(16:56):
can have decimals because I I forget what there was a pretty popular show
that released their whole season in chunks. Like, they gave you, like, the
first five episodes, and it was like a TV show of some sort.
Or it might have been Game of Thrones where they really like their
last season was like, here's the first 6 episodes. And then they were still recording
it. There was and here's the last 5 or whatever it was. But,
(17:19):
so I could see people wanting to do that. Maybe, again,
depending on the content, maybe you want to have a big cliffhanger half the way
through to get people talking about your show, and then they're ready for, you know,
bring us part 2 of the season. So but right now, you have
season names and season numbers that include decimals. That's what we have
available now. And then the proposal is for
(17:42):
the ability to add images. And then what else am I
missing that we're Well, my fix for
the proposal, and I'm not stuck on this, but is a way to maybe
restructure this to make it easier on the RSS feed and
easier on the users. And this is totally open to someone else
to suggest something better as well, but it's just an idea of a way to
(18:05):
simplify it of breaking out like an index, a season index,
basically. As you are the man that loves stats,
do we have any clue or is there any way to figure out
what percentage of podcasts are using season numbers? If
I'm a person that's making an app or from a
media host or whatever, and you're like, hey. We got this new thing. You should
(18:27):
code into your system. I could see where they might go,
wait. Hold on. Before we go adding all this extra work and
redoing our interface, they might wonder, you know,
exactly how many people are using seasons. I know a lot of the the bigger
shows, you know, the the NPR style shows and things like that
and true crime and all those people with the the teams of
(18:50):
18. Right. Where the first season is great, but
not so much after that. Yeah. I haven't been tracking
what number of podcasts used seasons, and it looks like John Spurlock, the other guy
who loves tracking data and some of the other people haven't been tracking it either.
One of the reasons that it's more complicated is because it means you need to
look at the RSS feed. And, realistically, you have to look at every
(19:11):
episode in the RSS feed to know if a podcast uses seasons.
You could maybe assume it by their latest episode.
But still that means evaluating every single RSS feed out
there. But I would guess, just pure guess based
on what I see out there, I would guess
maybe 4 or 5% of podcasts,
(19:33):
active podcasts right now. Maybe 4 or 5% are using
that is purely conjecture just based on my observation of
podcast. So don't cite me on that. I could be way off.
That's just a guess. And I'm sure those people, that 5% are
sitting there going, oh my god. That'd be amazing if we could have seasons that
were all sorts of pretty and things like that. So,
(19:56):
I I could see you know, we'll see what happens. It's I like the idea.
And what I really like from this, since I come from a design background, I
am a web designer, is that this gives
podcasters the opportunity to more beautifully
brand their experience inside the podcast
app. Because for years, all that
(20:17):
you could do to brand your podcast listing
inside an app or a directory was text
and your main image JSON that was it. And the one
main image. Nothing else. You couldn't influence the
colors. You couldn't give it any kind of background image or
extra images like widescreen or anything like that.
(20:40):
So some of this stuff and there are other proposals too for branding guidelines
and certain things like that. But some of this stuff is bringing it closer
to making it really easy for podcasters to make their
podcast listing look beautiful. Like, if you look in Apple
Podcasts, it's some of the most popular podcast. In fact, probably,
if you click on almost any podcast that's on the front page of Apple
(21:02):
Podcasts, you will probably see a custom designed page. And
I see pretty frequently, maybe every couple of weeks,
someone will ask, how do I get my podcast listing to look
like this in Apple Podcasts? And the way you get that
is to be invited by Apple to submit artwork to
them because it's not something that you can influence. But now in
(21:24):
podcasting 2.0, we've got things like the person tag, which gives you the
opportunity to give credits in your podcast. So you can have pictures
of everyone who participates in your podcast. That can now be included with your
listing powered by your RSS feed. And this
proposal gives it the opportunity to have the
season branded in a particular way that's visual without
(21:47):
having to rely on the episode artwork
or do something like only pull the latest episode artwork
or have to display every episodes
artwork something like that. And then you just end up with the same image
multiple times if you change your cover art for every season.
And even that, that's the other thing too. Is if you think
(22:09):
about now the only podcast I know of that does this is No
Agenda where they change their podcast cover art.
Their top level podcast cover art. They change it
for every episode. So that's an extreme example of
this. But that is a good example of the idea of
if you're changing your cover art for
(22:31):
every episode or for every season, more specifically, relevant to
this context. Your old seasons
will still get the branding from your current cover
art. So this proposal to be able to give a
season an image would allow you to lock those
episodes with a particular overall
(22:54):
visual branding in addition to their potential individual
episode branding if you change that. Yeah. That would, again, make it
easy to identify what's what,
because the older seasons would have the
older branding, you know, potentially. Yeah. That'd be
interesting. Well, that, I I think this is the end of the season
(23:16):
about seasons then. So, how about, how do we do in the
old land of boostograms? We got a bunch.
Alright. So big thanks to everyone here. We've gotten
4 BoosterGrams in addition to the streaming Satoshis, and so we're very grateful
for this. We got 16,000 sats
from Eric, r dash podcast. He said, hello, Dave
(23:39):
and Daniel, longtime listener and first time booster to your show. I'm a huge fan
of John Spurlock's o p three project, and it would be great to see the
principles behind the project set a trend for others to join the
space of transparent metrics and analysis. As part of
my quest to contribute my data science skills to podcasting
2.0. Dude, that's awesome. I just created a
(24:01):
new r package. R is a statistical programming
language called 0p3r as a front
end to the 0p3 API. Lots of
letters here. Yeah. I consider that a small demonstration of
value for value in action linked to my package, and it's
rpodcast.github.io/0p3r.
(24:23):
And we might have that link in the notes for this. So Yeah. Huge thanks,
Eric, for that boostagram. Yeah. Very very cool. Thanks, buddy.
Appreciate it. We also got 2 boostagrams from Brian
from relaxedmail.com. 1 for 5,000 sats and another for
10000 sats. His first message, Dave,
you might be able to read this one better. Yeah. Brian said
(24:46):
poo you at the same time. What is that? I
believe he is referring to, I believe the show the
movie is called Scent of a Woman featuring, Al
Pacino, who is this,
snarky old military guy that's blind.
And every time somebody says something that kind of a zinger, he'll just go,
(25:08):
hooah. And so I think that's where he's getting that from.
Okay. And then Maybe. And then he sent a
10,000 SAP boost saying thanks for sharing the info on super chapters.
Gets my brain moving. Good. That's what we wanted it to do. That's
it. And 2,222 sats. That's
a row of rubber duckies as I like to call it. Marching ducks, rubber duckies,
(25:30):
whatever you wanna call it. From Andrew Gromit.
And my apologies there. I think of Wallace and Gromit, so that's why I
pronounce it that way. He said, thanks for explaining chapters.
I've seen it mentioned but didn't know how they worked.
Now, I do. Yeah. Andrew is OG
podcaster. He goes back to the days of pod show for those
(25:52):
of, of us that remember that. So, Andrew, great to hear from
you. And did we ever figure out what we're calling the
purely positive Peter Piper Peck
something, whatever it was? Peter Piper picked a peck of podcast praise
report. That's it. I wanna praise,
John Spurlock because I decided to put my money where my mouth is
(26:15):
and went over because you can there's, like, two levels of sponsorship,
and then there's the I'm just a poor podcaster level, which I think is like
something like $10 a month that I'm like, look, I I added another
show to OP 3 and was like, you know, I'm using
this now on 2 or 3 of my shows. I'm like, I should probably again,
value for value should give something back. And so
(26:37):
I, thank you, John. And I he was very nice. He said, hey, I just
noticed you signed up. Thanks so much. I'm like, well, again, I've only
been using this for a year and a half now. Maybe I should pay something
for it. So that would be my particular
positive praise. Well, thanks so much for listening to
the future of podcasting. If you know somebody else who's nerdy
(26:58):
and is into this, definitely tell them to go over to future podcasting.net/follow,
and you'll never miss another episode because that's gonna wrap it up
for, this episode of the future of podcasting. Keep boosting and keep
podcasting.
Better seasons with podcasting 2.0.
Daniel, future of podcasting episode number 45.
(00:22):
We're gonna ramp up. We're gonna pimp out our seasons. Now that'll be
awesome. Maybe get some flames on the side, some nice
spoke tires, something. I don't know. But, we had super
chapters last week. Are these gonna be super seasons or just
They're more like seasons 2.0, but they do bring some pretty
handy features to it. So do you remember
(00:45):
when Apple Podcasts actually, back then, it was called iTunes
still. Do you remember when they launched Seasons? Yeah.
Vaguely because it was for me, I was like, oh, that's a cool feature that
I'll never use. But I can see where
people, like, back in the day I think it was probably invented for
cereal because that show is so popular, and that's one of those shows where they
(01:07):
announce about 34 people at the end of their show that worked on
it, and they fly all over the world doing these interviews. And
so those people need to take a break when their their season is over. And
I was like, well, that makes sense. And ever since then, they've they take
I mean, I know they just released, I think, a new season of Serial.
I thought I heard rumors or something like that, maybe. But,
(01:29):
any any of those big shows or or somebody who just like, I need a
break, and they wanna they'll break it off in the season.
So, but I just remember they came out, and I was like, I don't
know. What about you? What what was your initial thought? Yeah. It was in 2017
when they came out with it. And I thought it was great because, already,
seasonal podcasts existed. And Podcasts would
(01:51):
talk about what season they were in. And I'm a proponent for making
the seasons actually make sense to your audience. If it doesn't make
sense months from now, then you probably don't need
seasons. In other words, if it's a schedule based thing, you
probably don't need it. But if it's thematic, then it's a good idea. And,
like, I was hosting a TV show fan podcast at that time for
(02:14):
the TV show Once Upon a Time, And the TV show has seasons.
Each season would have a story arc. So I liked the introduction of
season and episode number. And, by the way, this came out
when Apple had done nothing with their podcast
spec for years. And then, they dropped all of these new
features like episode numbers, the season numbers, the
(02:36):
specific iTunes title tag, and some of these other features, and also more
categories. So this was fantastic that they brought new
features to their spec, and then other apps followed suit.
And this was all before podcasting 2.0 when we let Apple
decide what goes into a podcast feed. Well, I loved
it because it meant, like, for my podcast about the TV show,
(02:58):
I could divide my episodes into seasons
because my episodes match the seasons of the TV
show as well. And I think that works
great for when you have chronological seasons
like a TV show would have. But
a show like Serial, does season 2
(03:20):
have anything whatsoever to do with season
1? Yeah. That would be no. Right.
It's completely different. Now, yes, it is a different
season. So it's fine that they use a season tag. But
to call it season 2, when
I see something that says season 2, you know what I'm thinking
(03:42):
immediately? I need to go back and listen to season 1 first.
Right. Otherwise, I'm going to be completely lost. So
it was someone who used to be with NPR who came up with this
idea and proposed it and everyone jumped on board of how
about we allow seasons to have 2 new features
in podcasting 2 point o. So they could still be numbered
(04:04):
seasons like Apple Podcast supports with the Itunes namespace
spec. But the Apple spec is limited to
whole numbers. So you can only have season 1, 2, 3, 4,
like that. So with podcasting 2.0 seasons, we can
have decimals in that. So we could have season 1.5,
1.6 if you wanted to or whatever. So you can do that. But the
(04:28):
other cool thing, and this was the more exciting thing about it,
is that you could give your seasons a name. And I think that
makes a lot more sense than a number. I'm a
name, not with a number. Well, I know,
Colin Gray from the podcast host does seasons,
and I remember there was one season where they just talked
(04:51):
about microphones and then another season where they just talked about
they were all all podcasting related, but they separated their chapters
by topic. And so that would be great if you could name that differently.
And then I think you said, is there something in the spec about having a
different picture? That's the new proposal. And this is
something that I think is a fantastic idea. We'll link to more
(05:13):
information, like, both from podcasting2.org about the
season tag as it exists right now. And, also, the
idea here that it was Dave Jones who wrote this up, and I I can't
remember if someone else actually came up with this idea, and he's just
writing it up to start the conversation. But the
idea is that you have your seasons as you do with the
(05:35):
numbers and a name and you could add an image to
it. Just like we can have images on
individual episodes and images in individual chapters if
you want, You could potentially have images for the
whole season. And I think that
helps to enhance the experience
(05:58):
and potentially enhance how that podcast is displayed in a
podcast app. Because you could think of it this particular way. As imagine,
you're looking at a podcast, a seasonal podcast that already has multiple
seasons in your podcast app. And as you're scrolling through the
episodes, this episodes that are in
particular seasons have a different background image
(06:19):
to them. And maybe some color scheme thing around that just
like we see how color schemes are changing for chapters artwork and
episode artwork. You could do that same kind of thing. So
in a way, a season might be the blue season, then there's the red
season, then the green season. Just based on assuming that those are the
primary colors used in the cover art. You could do that kind of thing to
(06:42):
really enhance the experience and make
a podcast app look more visually
interesting, kind of like you would see in Netflix
or Amazon Prime, Hulu, and places like that where you see that
every time you visit a show, it looks like you're on a
page that was designed for that show, Not
(07:04):
just data fed in from text and a couple images here
and there, but actually built to look beautifully branded for
that show. Yeah. That's interesting. I was trying to figure out
how that would work in the back end of most media
hosts Because right now, you just put your season number and
your episode number, and so somewhere you'd either have to
(07:26):
make the season, and then maybe
you say this is season 1 JSON. And then later, when you go into an
episode, you just have a drop down of which season is this for or
something of that nature. I was just trying to figure out the the fun thing
about adding all these features. It's, you know, it can definitely
improve the experience. But the more features we add, the
(07:48):
the fun part of that is adding it on the back end of the the,
you still wanna make it easy to make an episode in that whole 9 yards,
but it's, that could be a tricky one. Yeah. And Thomas Rhine in
the GitHub that we'll link to for this episode where this is being discussed,
he brought up a good point that we're starting to complicate
a tag that will be pretty much just
(08:11):
duplicated across several episodes. And that's
unnecessary bloat Because you really don't need
like, even right now with the podcasting 2 point o tag, it has the
title for the season in that season tag.
And you really don't need to repeat the season title
across every episode. And whenever you do have to repeat
(08:33):
something like that across
capitalization that's off could
confuse podcast app and make it treat that one
episode as a different season. If it's capitalized or spelled differently or
(08:53):
there's an extra space in it or anything is one character off
about the name, it could trigger some
confusion in that. And besides that, as long as the
information is the same across the whole season,
it's not all that necessary to repeat it. So
Right. When you start to add then an image on top of
(09:16):
that, well then you have to add that same image to every
episode that is in that season and it starts to get
unnecessarily bloated. So one
proposal that I put out literally minutes before we
recorded this episode So this is just one idea, and then I'm
not sticking to this as saying this is the best idea. And there will be
(09:37):
other ideas, and we'd love for you to contribute on the GitHub too. If that
doesn't scare you off, you just write something if you have an idea of how
this could be structured. But, an idea that I had for this
is we re simplify the individual episode
season tag. That all it contains is a number.
And that number becomes an index number of a
(09:58):
sort. And then at the top of the RSS
feed before all the episodes, then you have a sort of
index of the seasons where then you can have the season tag
up there. But this season tag includes the number and
the name and the image and maybe
someday further down the line, we decide to add more to the
(10:20):
season tag and it could include that there too. So then you
very easily get a table of contents
for the seasons as well as
having one place to maintain this stuff so you don't have
to ensure that you're getting everything exactly right
from episode to episode. You just have this one place. So
(10:42):
then in the publishing systems, the
interface could be something like how you create a
new episode. You just click create new season, it adds the
season to your RSS feed and then when you're creating your
episodes, you could either manually
type in the season number or just pick
(11:05):
from one of the seasons you've already created. So that could make it very
easy on the user interface side too. So even, like, for
the podcasters, they don't have to worry about copying and pasting the title. They don't
have to worry about typing it correctly the same time. They just
see these are the seasons I've already created. I want to add it to one
of these seasons. Yeah. Because I've seen people do that.
(11:26):
They will have no seasons and then they'll add
1 or if they do have a season, they'll type in the wrong
number And depending on how things are set up, in some cases, it'll go
way to the bottom of your your RSS feed. And you're
like, hey. I published this episode. I don't see it anywhere. And
they'll, like, in in the case of Libsyn, they'll try to upload the file again,
(11:48):
and they can't because it's already there. But they're like, but it's not here. And
that's where you have to go in and you do a search, and you're like,
oh, you put season, you know, 11 when you
really meant number 11 in your episode title or whatever. You just
get the wrong number in the wrong place, and it messes everything up. So, yeah,
I I like that idea. Build it once and then just pull from some sort
(12:08):
of down, drop down list would be great. And I think, yeah, that
simplifies it for the user. That makes it less likely that they would
make a mistake. Makes it easier for them. And it moves away
from the dependence on numbers. I'm kind
of against episode numbers in most cases. And the same
thing now that we have the ability, we've had this ability with podcasting
(12:30):
2.0 to give seasons names. I think that's so much
better so that, like with, Colin in
his podcast, The Podcast Host, that they could name the
season the microphone season. Or the first time that I saw
a season used in a really good way in a
podcast was a web design podcast I listened to many, many years ago. I'm not
(12:52):
sure if this podcast is even still going. It was called the BOAG World Podcast,
and they did that same thing where for one season, it was all
about best tools. And then another season, they interviewed
website owners to talk about the experience of running websites. Another
season, it was just top ten things. So every episode was
a top ten of something. And that was really clever. It was
(13:14):
thematic. You knew what you were getting into. And they could then name those
seasons something like that. This is the top 10 season. This
is the website owner interview season.
And that's a lot better than season 1,
season 2, season 3. There's nothing
compelling about a season number.
(13:36):
Yay. I was hoping I could listen to season 3 today of
something that I don't know, and it would be great if you if if this
all makes them more obvious. I remember somebody told me there
was a a podcast about a local radio station here
in Ohio called WMMS, and it broke Bruce
Springsteen and Rush and all these other bands. And so I
(13:58):
went to the podcast, and it was, like, episode
or season 1, but they were on, like, season 3. And so
I click on it, and they're talking about this amusement park
in Ohio. And I'm like, this isn't about WMMS. And it wasn't
till later that I scrolled down and I was like, oh, it's way down
here. So I I have to go back and look at it. But if there
(14:21):
was something that just really made it obvious that, hey, this is season 3.
This is season 2. This is season 1. Because I think what they were
doing where they were changing, they were adding the tagline
to their show. So it'd be like future of podcasting
dash season talk or something like that. And then they would
do 5 or 6 episodes on seasons, and then they'd be like
(14:44):
future of podcasting dash, you know, whatever
the next thing was. And so it was kind of confusing because you're like, wait,
this says this, but the thing I want. So
it's just anything that would make it more obvious that this is a chapters,
and you wouldn't have to hack the name of your show, anything like that. And
I just wonder, I'd have to go back and look at the show. They might
(15:05):
not have even known that, you know, seasons 1.0
were available. They might have just missed the whole boat. But I just remember being
very frustrated when I was like, I've been lied to. And then I was like,
oh, wait. No. I haven't. It's down here. So that's always fun.
Yeah. And then you can even look at this further as we're thinking of
ways that we could add images to seasons.
(15:27):
What size, what dimension should that image be? Should it be
a square image just like the cover art is and the episode artwork is and
the chapter artwork is. They're all square images. So should
the season artwork be square? Or just like there have
been some proposals for other images that you could include with your podcast,
should we maybe say season should be a
(15:49):
wide image? Like a wide screen, 16 by 9
ratio. Something like that that might be a little more interesting to
integrate into a podcast app. Or would we allow people to
add multiple images? I would be a bigger fan
of that actually. I like having the options to optimize it as
I'd like. So being able to give it a square image and
(16:12):
a 16 by 9 widescreen image. So that then the
podcast app can display that in a way that
works well. And we could put certain
guidelines around these things also to say something like, keep the
bottom 10% clean of text. So that way, if there's
any kind of fading going on, we could get into that, but the best thing
(16:34):
really is not to have to define margins
and colors and that kind of thing and the requirements for what kind of image
you can put in there. Just focus on the technical aspects of it of
this is the kind of format it needs to be. These are the dimensions or
the the ratio that it needs to be. So
at this point, you said the 2 point o spec, they have a number which
(16:56):
can have decimals because I I forget what there was a pretty popular show
that released their whole season in chunks. Like, they gave you, like, the
first five episodes, and it was like a TV show of some sort.
Or it might have been Game of Thrones where they really like their
last season was like, here's the first 6 episodes. And then they were still recording
it. There was and here's the last 5 or whatever it was. But,
(17:19):
so I could see people wanting to do that. Maybe, again,
depending on the content, maybe you want to have a big cliffhanger half the way
through to get people talking about your show, and then they're ready for, you know,
bring us part 2 of the season. So but right now, you have
season names and season numbers that include decimals. That's what we have
available now. And then the proposal is for
(17:42):
the ability to add images. And then what else am I
missing that we're Well, my fix for
the proposal, and I'm not stuck on this, but is a way to maybe
restructure this to make it easier on the RSS feed and
easier on the users. And this is totally open to someone else
to suggest something better as well, but it's just an idea of a way to
(18:05):
simplify it of breaking out like an index, a season index,
basically. As you are the man that loves stats,
do we have any clue or is there any way to figure out
what percentage of podcasts are using season numbers? If
I'm a person that's making an app or from a
media host or whatever, and you're like, hey. We got this new thing. You should
(18:27):
code into your system. I could see where they might go,
wait. Hold on. Before we go adding all this extra work and
redoing our interface, they might wonder, you know,
exactly how many people are using seasons. I know a lot of the the bigger
shows, you know, the the NPR style shows and things like that
and true crime and all those people with the the teams of
(18:50):
18. Right. Where the first season is great, but
not so much after that. Yeah. I haven't been tracking
what number of podcasts used seasons, and it looks like John Spurlock, the other guy
who loves tracking data and some of the other people haven't been tracking it either.
One of the reasons that it's more complicated is because it means you need to
look at the RSS feed. And, realistically, you have to look at every
(19:11):
episode in the RSS feed to know if a podcast uses seasons.
You could maybe assume it by their latest episode.
But still that means evaluating every single RSS feed out
there. But I would guess, just pure guess based
on what I see out there, I would guess
maybe 4 or 5% of podcasts,
(19:33):
active podcasts right now. Maybe 4 or 5% are using
that is purely conjecture just based on my observation of
podcast. So don't cite me on that. I could be way off.
That's just a guess. And I'm sure those people, that 5% are
sitting there going, oh my god. That'd be amazing if we could have seasons that
were all sorts of pretty and things like that. So,
(19:56):
I I could see you know, we'll see what happens. It's I like the idea.
And what I really like from this, since I come from a design background, I
am a web designer, is that this gives
podcasters the opportunity to more beautifully
brand their experience inside the podcast
app. Because for years, all that
(20:17):
you could do to brand your podcast listing
inside an app or a directory was text
and your main image JSON that was it. And the one
main image. Nothing else. You couldn't influence the
colors. You couldn't give it any kind of background image or
extra images like widescreen or anything like that.
(20:40):
So some of this stuff and there are other proposals too for branding guidelines
and certain things like that. But some of this stuff is bringing it closer
to making it really easy for podcasters to make their
podcast listing look beautiful. Like, if you look in Apple
Podcasts, it's some of the most popular podcast. In fact, probably,
if you click on almost any podcast that's on the front page of Apple
(21:02):
Podcasts, you will probably see a custom designed page. And
I see pretty frequently, maybe every couple of weeks,
someone will ask, how do I get my podcast listing to look
like this in Apple Podcasts? And the way you get that
is to be invited by Apple to submit artwork to
them because it's not something that you can influence. But now in
(21:24):
podcasting 2.0, we've got things like the person tag, which gives you the
opportunity to give credits in your podcast. So you can have pictures
of everyone who participates in your podcast. That can now be included with your
listing powered by your RSS feed. And this
proposal gives it the opportunity to have the
season branded in a particular way that's visual without
(21:47):
having to rely on the episode artwork
or do something like only pull the latest episode artwork
or have to display every episodes
artwork something like that. And then you just end up with the same image
multiple times if you change your cover art for every season.
And even that, that's the other thing too. Is if you think
(22:09):
about now the only podcast I know of that does this is No
Agenda where they change their podcast cover art.
Their top level podcast cover art. They change it
for every episode. So that's an extreme example of
this. But that is a good example of the idea of
if you're changing your cover art for
(22:31):
every episode or for every season, more specifically, relevant to
this context. Your old seasons
will still get the branding from your current cover
art. So this proposal to be able to give a
season an image would allow you to lock those
episodes with a particular overall
(22:54):
visual branding in addition to their potential individual
episode branding if you change that. Yeah. That would, again, make it
easy to identify what's what,
because the older seasons would have the
older branding, you know, potentially. Yeah. That'd be
interesting. Well, that, I I think this is the end of the season
(23:16):
about seasons then. So, how about, how do we do in the
old land of boostograms? We got a bunch.
Alright. So big thanks to everyone here. We've gotten
4 BoosterGrams in addition to the streaming Satoshis, and so we're very grateful
for this. We got 16,000 sats
from Eric, r dash podcast. He said, hello, Dave
(23:39):
and Daniel, longtime listener and first time booster to your show. I'm a huge fan
of John Spurlock's o p three project, and it would be great to see the
principles behind the project set a trend for others to join the
space of transparent metrics and analysis. As part of
my quest to contribute my data science skills to podcasting
2.0. Dude, that's awesome. I just created a
(24:01):
new r package. R is a statistical programming
language called 0p3r as a front
end to the 0p3 API. Lots of
letters here. Yeah. I consider that a small demonstration of
value for value in action linked to my package, and it's
rpodcast.github.io/0p3r.
(24:23):
And we might have that link in the notes for this. So Yeah. Huge thanks,
Eric, for that boostagram. Yeah. Very very cool. Thanks, buddy.
Appreciate it. We also got 2 boostagrams from Brian
from relaxedmail.com. 1 for 5,000 sats and another for
10000 sats. His first message, Dave,
you might be able to read this one better. Yeah. Brian said
(24:46):
poo you at the same time. What is that? I
believe he is referring to, I believe the show the
movie is called Scent of a Woman featuring, Al
Pacino, who is this,
snarky old military guy that's blind.
And every time somebody says something that kind of a zinger, he'll just go,
(25:08):
hooah. And so I think that's where he's getting that from.
Okay. And then Maybe. And then he sent a
10,000 SAP boost saying thanks for sharing the info on super chapters.
Gets my brain moving. Good. That's what we wanted it to do. That's
it. And 2,222 sats. That's
a row of rubber duckies as I like to call it. Marching ducks, rubber duckies,
(25:30):
whatever you wanna call it. From Andrew Gromit.
And my apologies there. I think of Wallace and Gromit, so that's why I
pronounce it that way. He said, thanks for explaining chapters.
I've seen it mentioned but didn't know how they worked.
Now, I do. Yeah. Andrew is OG
podcaster. He goes back to the days of pod show for those
(25:52):
of, of us that remember that. So, Andrew, great to hear from
you. And did we ever figure out what we're calling the
purely positive Peter Piper Peck
something, whatever it was? Peter Piper picked a peck of podcast praise
report. That's it. I wanna praise,
John Spurlock because I decided to put my money where my mouth is
(26:15):
and went over because you can there's, like, two levels of sponsorship,
and then there's the I'm just a poor podcaster level, which I think is like
something like $10 a month that I'm like, look, I I added another
show to OP 3 and was like, you know, I'm using
this now on 2 or 3 of my shows. I'm like, I should probably again,
value for value should give something back. And so
(26:37):
I, thank you, John. And I he was very nice. He said, hey, I just
noticed you signed up. Thanks so much. I'm like, well, again, I've only
been using this for a year and a half now. Maybe I should pay something
for it. So that would be my particular
positive praise. Well, thanks so much for listening to
the future of podcasting. If you know somebody else who's nerdy
(26:58):
and is into this, definitely tell them to go over to future podcasting.net/follow,
and you'll never miss another episode because that's gonna wrap it up
for, this episode of the future of podcasting. Keep boosting and keep
podcasting.
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