PodLP launches on Cloud Phone

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Cloud Phone is a brand new extra inexpensive cellular working system for the billions of people that can’t afford a smartphone: and it now has a podcast participant with the launch of PodLP on CloudPhone. Celebrating its fourth birthday this month, PodLP has now been put in greater than ten million occasions on KaiOS and the JioPhone, different smartphone options: the app helps quite a few new podcast options together with transcripts.

The transcription feature in Apple Podcasts will get a full-feature article in The Guardian: higher identify recognition is on the way in which, the article says, additionally including that Spotify has “did not ship”.

In Australia, the Digital News Report: Australia 2024 has been launched, exhibiting progress in podcast listening (particularly with Gen Z girls). 40% of all Australians now hear, the information says. It’s a part of a wider survey.

Suggestions and tips – with Memberful

A saving bandwidth particular!

Noticed by Tom Rossi of Buzzsprout, Spotify has applied “conditional GET requests” for RSS feeds utilizing Etags. Based on Tom Rossi of Buzzsprout, this has already resulted in 87% much less RSS bandwidth being consumed for Spotify and Buzzsprout.
- Many podcast hosts help an Etag in RSS headers, which solely adjustments when the file itself has modified. In our RSS feed, it’s labored out utilizing the final replace time. Spotify sends the final Etag it noticed in an if-none-match request; if it’s the identical as the present Etag we see, we simply give them a “304” code (“not modified”) in return, and don’t generate and ship the entire RSS feed. This protects processing energy for each of us, in addition to important bandwidth: we get 206 checks a day from Spotify to our 32KB RSS feed, however solely publish as soon as a day. This transformation will end in financial savings for us of 99.5% of the 6.5MB RSS bandwidth we use to Spotify alone. (That’s only for one present!)
- Not each podcast listing helps if-none-match. AntennaPod, PodcastRepublic, Gaana, Amazon, Slack, PodcastAddict and plenty of others don’t ship that header, leading to considerably extra bandwidth for us (and for them). We’re grateful for Spotify for turning it on.

One other strategy to save bandwidth on RSS feeds is to make sure they use gzip or brotli compression. RSS feeds are extremely compressible, and compressing our podcast feeds ought to save 89% of our RSS bandwidth invoice. Surprisingly, not each podcast host helps compression; however most do. If you happen to’re a podcast host, you may check over here with the URL of considered one of your RSS feeds.
- Podnews wasn’t supporting Gzip for our RSS feed (a mistake); it was accounting for 3.86GB of information per day. We turned it on final week; our bandwidth invoice for our RSS feed has greater than halved, and is now 1.22GB. We additionally now fetch feeds with gzip the place we are able to.
- Brotli is healthier than Gzip. As of in the present day, Podnews helps each Brotli and Gzip compression. Cloudfront supports both.

A 3rd strategy to save bandwidth is to make use of the alternateEnclosure in Podcasting 2.0 RSS feeds to supply a lower-bitrate model of audio to podcast gamers that help it. PodLP does; by default, it makes use of the Opus model of our audio (762KB) quite than our mp3 (7.1MB). Which means we (and listeners in creating nations) get an 89% saving in audio bandwidth, until they select to get the MP3 model.
- You’ll have to generate the extra low-bitrate model, in fact. We do this mechanically on publishing.

Elsewhere – in case you’re a podcast internet hosting firm, to measure plays on Cloud Phone correctly, you could use the X-Forwarded-For header, and (for PodLP) look ahead to PodLP/1.0 within the user-agent. If you happen to’re not utilizing the X-Forwarded-For header because the originating IP deal with, you’ll doubtless discard quite a few legitimate downloads.

Need to get an OPML feed out of your Apple Podcasts subscriptions? Possibly you need to give one other podcast app a go? Whereas an OPML export isn’t built-in to Apple Podcasts, this shortcut will add that functionality.