Send James and Sam a message or voicemail

A personal “podcast robot” that knows what you care about, searches the live stream of new episodes, reads transcripts, and drops surprisingly good recommendations straight into your favourite app sounds like science fiction until you hear Adam Curry walk through what he built. We dig into his Podcast Index Robot, why an MCP server is basically a bridge between AI agents and real podcast data, and how this could finally tackle the podcast discovery problem that pushed so many creators toward YouTube.

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• Email: weekly@podnews.net
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Send James and Sam a message or voicemail

James is back from Europe; and we chat about why podcast ad spend is rising. Plus...

• Libsyn RSS namespace for ad slot availability and why it feels odd in public feeds
• Goalhanger’s newsletter strategy as a membership product and audience data hub
• smart TV growth for podcast consumption and why smart speakers still fail discovery
• Canadian in car listening data plus listener resistance to AI hosts
• AI agents clipping shows, MCP servers, and how micropayments could change access
• blocking scrapers with WAF rules and the limits of user agent based controls
• Spotify audiobooks expansion and the attention competition inside major apps
• human written certification for books and the wider provenance problem
• bot driven streaming fraud as a warning for future podcast monetisation
• app and hosting updates including transcripts, video tools, and evolving person tags

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Support the show

Connect With Us:

• Email: weekly@podnews.net
• Fediverse: @james@bne.social and @samsethi@podcastindex.social
• Support us: www.buzzsprout.com/1538779/support
• Get Podnews: podnews.net

Send James and Sam a message or voicemail

Sam and James talk about a new podcast interview with Inception Point AI; and Sam discusses with Dave Jones of Podcast Index about the future of podcasting.

• Patreon removing per creation memberships and what that breaks for seasonal creators
• Reddit RSS shutdown, public API restrictions, and the economics of selling data to AI companies
• Real-world costs of AI scrapers, bot traffic, and why caching is essential
• How Podping replaces constant polling with near real-time feed update pings
• Why the new Podping peer-to-peer gossip mesh reduces single points of failure
• How podping.cloud publishing works today and why token signup must become scalable
• The origin story of the Podcast Index and the case for an open directory
• A decentralised future where the index database can be rebuilt from distributed updates
• Why the Podcasting 2.0 namespace exists and how new RSS tags get adopted
• Live tag friction, host responsibilities, and what would make live podcasting simpler
• Micropayments reality check, regulation hurdles, and why stablecoins may be next
• The risk of over-marketing features versus letting builders discover and succeed organically

Support the show

Connect With Us:

• Email: weekly@podnews.net
• Fediverse: @james@bne.social and @samsethi@podcastindex.social
• Support us: www.buzzsprout.com/1538779/support
• Get Podnews: podnews.net