Podcasting 2.0 July 24th 2026 Episode 266 - "Research Velocity"
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FROM PREP.md — Adam's PC20 items
Pod News — podcast app revenue (source for 'cut the apps into the money')
Pod News — the ad-skipping player
Board Q (Adam): "If you go to another chapter, is that a new play?" — for the AMP play=30s definition.
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00 - DAVE'S WORLD: THE ALTERNATE ENCLOSURE FINALLY GETS PICKED UP + HLS-IN-RSS SURGE
Take the lap: Podbean and Buzzsprout are now testing/supporting the alternate enclosure — letting other apps (Pocket Casts, Amazon Music, iHeart, TrueFans) reach the video/alt versions instead of everything vanishing into the Apple-only void. Lead the boardroom with the namespace win.
HLS video in RSS is accelerating: @js — "the rate of podcast hosts publishing high-quality video in podcast feeds using HLS has gone up quite a bit, thanks mostly to Transistor and Flightcast." The open path is winning adoption; watch it live.
Namespace repo status: attribution bylines merged for the block and alternate enclosure tags (PRs #772/#773). Quiet week on commits — the plumbing is holding.
Dave in the wild: on the LLM-vs-tags thread — "A 'weight' is just a form of heuristic. Regression is literally built into the LLM at a fundamental level. Re-weighting a model will always regress other weights." (Continues the on-device-AI vs authored-tags fight from 265.) Also: Hover auto-renews domains 2 days out — @genebean's alert script gets a Dave thumbs-up.
HLS-in-RSS tracker (livewire)
Dave Winer — distributable is not distributed
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BM - FROM THE TIMELINE — podcastindex.social this week (JS & Dave)
@js: "the rate of podcast hosts publishing high-quality video in podcast feeds using HLS has gone up quite a bit — thanks mostly to Transistor and Flightcast." (tracker: hls.livewire.io)
@js: "Waves of new podcast listeners may exist, but they aren't downloading episodes via RSS, no matter how many podcast apps are being vibe-coded."
@js shared Castro's "Podcast apps: a framework for dying" — his read: "well thought-out, but a bit too pessimistic imo — the next few years are going to be interesting." (Steven B: "anyone interested in the PC2.0 namespace read and consider this.")
@js on Patreon's "painful update" (Conte, layoffs): "I'd love to know what change Patreon's operational market has undergone in the last six months."
@js on the scraping wars: a court ruled aggregated search data (URLs, snippets, index facts) are "publicly accessible facts," not copyrightable — relevant to index/crawler rights.
@js (amplifying Dave Winer): "Threads and Bluesky are not distributed. Distributable is not the same as being distributed."
@dave: "A 'weight' is just a form of heuristic. Regression is literally built into the LLM at a fundamental level… one slider." — the on-device-abstraction vs authored-tags thread, continued from 265.
@dave, namespace repo: merged the block-tag + alternate-enclosure attribution PRs (mid-May); no new commits this week — the action is in adoption, not spec.
