James Cridland: Wondery scores another goal! From Munich in Germany, the latest from podnews.net with
CoHost, podcast analytics and audience insights.
Another place to find new podcasts? Wondery is adding some of its sports podcasts to
Amazon Prime Video starting today. Wondery Chief Content Officer, Marshall Louis, says
that being on Prime Video will allow them to connect with even more sports fans. The
shows continue on YouTube, Wandery Plus and OpenRSS.
Kast Media has filed for bankruptcy. The hearing will be on April 30. In July last year, we
covered accusations that Kast Media wasn't paying creators. In September, the story was
covered by investigative YouTuber Coffeezilla. In part of the company's bankruptcy filing,
which we carry in full in our show notes and our newsletter at podnews.net, Page 11 and
on shows that Kast owes Theo von $456,000. According to the filing, Jim Cornette and
Brian Last appeared to be owed $250,000 and in total, the company owns $6.3 million.
"We are losing our network to ad tech": writing on X. Lisa Laporte explains why podcasting
is struggling. One reason she says, advertisers are requiring an ever-wider set of technologies
in podcast feeds, leading to unreliability and privacy issues.
Radio Days Europe held a podcasting summit yesterday. The opening speaker was Maria
Lopenz Bockelberg, CEO of podcast production company Pool Artists. "Podcasting is a once-in-a-century
opportunity. We are the first generation of a completely new medium," she said. "Let's
make it like we want it to be." Other speakers included Descript's Ariel Nissenblatt, City
University's Brett Spencer and me. The BBC has reached an agreement with Amazon Music
to add its podcasts outside the UK. Subscribers to Amazon Prime will get more than 50 of the
shows ad-free. An Italian lifestyle podcast network is to launch next month. Sentire Media,
which launches in April, is dedicated to producing high-quality podcasts with an Italian lifestyle
focus. And Wondercraft AI now has emotions and accents. It's time for some tech stuff:
and building your own custom AI-generated podcast is "easy" with Amazon's AWS Generative
AI. An Amazon employee has posted code that takes an RSS feed from AWS's news releases
and makes it into a co-hosted podcast with two AI personalities. How do you measure how
good a transcript is? Apple suggests that the current measure, which is word error rate,
isn't good enough, treating all words identically even "um" and "er." And Apple proposes a new
metric called "HEWER - Human Evaluation Word Error Metric." TrueFans has now shared more
than $10,000 with podcasters and artists. The web app uses value for value to share
money directly from the listener to the creator. And do you want new shows to listen to? Ryan
Buening uses the power of OPML files and ChatGPT to get suggestions of new shows to listen
to. And he shows us how to do that in a blog post, which we link to today from our show
notes and our newsletter at podnews.net. In People News, Tim Clark, Audacy's SVP of
digital audio content, is leaving the company at the end of the month. He won't be replaced.
And in podcast news, the biggest English-language podcast in Saudi Arabia has been signed by
Podeo for hosting distribution and monetization. The Mo Show has interviewed more than a hundred
guests from across the kingdom. NDA is a new German-language podcast from Der Spiegel with
the first season called the Kasia Lenhardt Files. She was known for her participation
in Germany's next top model, but she took her own life at the age of 25. And shortly
before her death, she'd signed an NDA that prohibited her from speaking publicly about
her relationship with a soccer world champion.
Behind the mic with AudioFile magazine has hit episode 1500 today. The podcast, which
recommends the best in audio book listening, will have a week's set of special episodes,
introducing the show's five rotating hosts. And what's it like trekking through 12,000
miles of the Canadian Arctic for a hundred days? Polar explorer Mark Wood is currently
there and radio solo 100 has his telephone number. Every day, travel writer Joe Sills
and professional podcaster Meredith Hackwith Edwards will call him to learn more as he
attempts to set a world record. Trailers for selected shows are in our podcast called New
Podcast Trailers and we're sponsored by CoHost. Understand listeners' social media habits,
interests and employment with CoHost. You can find a link in the show notes. And that's
the latest from our newsletter. To read all the stories and subscribe we're at podnews.net.