https://livewire.io/ Recent content from Livewire Labs Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Thu, 10 Apr 2025 17:58:00 -0400 https://livewire.io/hls-video-in-podcasts/ Wed, 11 Mar 2026 11:47:00 -0400 https://livewire.io/hls-video-in-podcasts/ Apple Podcasts recently announced they will be supporting HLS video, bringing a high-quality video option to their app for shows that want to do video episodes, including the ability to seamlessly switch between video and audio-only during playback. Publishers can make the same high-quality video experience available in all podcast apps simply by adding the same HLS multivariant playlist url to the podcast:alternateEnclosure tag at the episode-level in their existing audio podcast RSS feed. https://livewire.io/podcast-cdns-by-episode-share/ Mon, 02 Mar 2026 09:04:00 -0500 https://livewire.io/podcast-cdns-by-episode-share/#2026-02 In our third and final installment observing the current state of the podcast world, as measured by number of new episodes produced in February 2026, we wanted to take a look at which underlying CDNs serve which episodes, and which podcast hosting companies use which network. See our earlier analyses of podcast hosts by episode share and podcast trackers by episode share In general, every podcast episode has a single url that tells the podcast client app what to play. https://livewire.io/podcast-trackers-by-episode-share/ Sun, 01 Mar 2026 17:01:00 -0500 https://livewire.io/podcast-trackers-by-episode-share/#2026-02 Now that we have a good idea of which podcast hosts are producing new podcast episodes, let’s turn our attention to third-party podcast analytics services. These services are typically provided by a company that is not the podcast host, but can provide tracking and analytics by being specified as the underlying media file url, which then redirects back to the host. Sometimes, these services are implemented as custom prefixes (taking the original media url and adding a prefix to it), but not always. https://livewire.io/podcast-hosts-by-episode-share/ Sun, 01 Mar 2026 16:47:00 -0500 https://livewire.io/podcast-hosts-by-episode-share/#2026-02 One of the ways to measure the health of the current podcast ecosystem is to measure the number of new episodes published in a given period. We independently verify every single new podcast episode published (about 1.9 million in February 2026, up 9.1% from last month on a normalized basis) and identify which podcast hosting company it belongs to. Want this data before everyone else? Purchase a subscription to access month-to-date ranking data produced daily. https://livewire.io/transistor-stats-visualized/ Sun, 01 Mar 2026 09:12:00 -0500 https://livewire.io/transistor-stats-visualized/#2026-02 Transistor, the podcast hosting company, provides detailed data every month about the most common apps it sees when serving podcasts for its customers. We thought it might be fun to graph this data in order to visualize trends over time. https://livewire.io/buzzsprout-stats-visualized/ Sun, 01 Mar 2026 08:52:00 -0500 https://livewire.io/buzzsprout-stats-visualized/#2026-02 Buzzsprout, one of the largest podcast hosting companies by episode volume, provides detailed data every month about the most common apps it sees when serving podcasts for its customers, and various other breakdowns. We thought it might be fun to graph this data in order to visualize trends over time. https://livewire.io/libsyn-stats-visualized/ Wed, 22 Oct 2025 09:50:00 -0400 https://livewire.io/libsyn-stats-visualized/#304 Libsyn, one of the largest podcast hosting companies by episode volume, provides raw data every month (in their podcast The Feed) about the most common apps it sees when serving podcasts for its customers. We’ve listened to every episode since the switch over to their current stats system (Oct 2017) and collected the numbers in order to present them in visual form. Starting back in September 2022, these represent IAB-certified download numbers. https://livewire.io/spc/ Thu, 10 Apr 2025 17:58:00 -0400 https://livewire.io/spc/ Yes, your podcast episode was downloaded - but was it played? Subscribe for updates to all of our stories via our RSS feed At the Podcast Movement Evolutions conference in Chicago last week, the topic of podcast app consumption stats (i.e. “listens” vs downloads) came up multiple times. So often, in fact, that the idea of a standard definition for aggregate playback metrics was kicked around, and thoughts about how good-faith apps could securely let podcasters know how their podcast is doing on their platform. https://livewire.io/podcast-chapters-stats/ Sun, 19 May 2024 10:13:00 -0500 https://livewire.io/podcast-chapters-stats/#2024-04 Some podcast publishers choose to provide additional chapter information when they publish their podcast episodes, breaking down a single episode into multiple segments - each of which may have a title, link, image, etc. Right now, there are four mechanisms that podcasters can use to do this: Embed chapter information directly inside the MP3 audio file using standard ID3 tags, with tools such as Forecast. Embed chapter information directly inside the AAC/M4A audio file using MPEG-4 Chapter Lists. https://livewire.io/tracking-apple-podcasts-ios17-changes/ Fri, 24 Nov 2023 13:17:00 -0600 https://livewire.io/tracking-apple-podcasts-ios17-changes/ (Updated with data through 2024-01-31) Apple made a change to auto-downloading in Apple Podcasts in iOS 17, are we seeing a difference in downloads? Subscribe for updates to all of our stories via our RSS feed The change was made in the Apple Podcasts version that shipped with iOS 17, originally released to the public on September 18, 2023. Since we wouldn’t expect to see any effect on downloads until listeners have updated to iOS 17 or higher, the first thing that would be interesting to know is how quickly they are updating. https://livewire.io/apple-podcasts-vs-applecoremedia/ Sun, 18 Jun 2023 15:57:00 -0500 https://livewire.io/apple-podcasts-vs-applecoremedia/ Apple made a change under the hood, did it make a difference? Subscribe for updates to all of our stories via our RSS feed As of iOS 16.4, released on March 27th, 2023, the Apple Podcasts app now sends a User-Agent that looks like: Podcasts/4022.610.1 CFNetwork/1408.0.4 Darwin/22.5.0 …when streaming a podcast episode, instead of a more generic one that looked like: AppleCoreMedia/1.0.0.20D67 (iPhone; U; CPU OS 16_3_1 like Mac OS X; en_us) Since Apple Podcasts is responsible for the most podcast episode downloads, and downloads are still used across the industry to measure listenership for ad campaign purposes: any time Apple changes something, it’s worth measuring the impact. https://livewire.io/a-tale-of-two-bytes-prefix-vs-host-based-analytics/ Sun, 15 Jan 2023 18:32:00 -0600 https://livewire.io/a-tale-of-two-bytes-prefix-vs-host-based-analytics/ Why your podcast download stats from third-party analytics providers might differ from your hosting company’s stats. Downloads “Downloads” are currently the industry-standard for measuring a podcast’s audience, they are visible evidence on the server-side (can be observed by your hosting company and any analytics prefixes you’ve configured) without the need for any coordination or special APIs from every podcast player app. Of course, many podcast apps auto-download episodes ahead of time, so a Download does not necessarily mean someone actually started playing the episode, or indeed played very much of it - but it’s the best metric we currently have. https://livewire.io/podcast-index-stats-visualized/ Sat, 03 Dec 2022 15:42:00 -0600 https://livewire.io/podcast-index-stats-visualized/ The Podcast Index, an open index of all podcasts, provides summary statistics about how many feeds and episodes it has seen and stored in its database. Subscribe for updates to all of our stories via our RSS feed Here is a live look at the Podcast Index: We capture daily snapshots of these numbers, and make a tab-delimited data file available. Below are live charts to keep an eye on changes to these stats on a daily basis: https://livewire.io/podtrac-share-of-new-episodes-taking-off/ Sun, 18 Sep 2022 18:16:00 -0500 https://livewire.io/podtrac-share-of-new-episodes-taking-off/ We’ve noticed that Podtrac, one of the largest podcast episode analytics services, recently started appearing on many more new podcast episodes than usual… …as part of indexing every single new podcast episode published to track the pulse of the open podcasting ecosystem. So many, in fact, that Podtrac is likely to take the top spot in share of new episodes starting in September (teaser graph in a recent tweet). We saw this earlier in the month, and thought was interesting enough to report right away, before month-end. https://livewire.io/instant-websub-for-podpingers/ Mon, 08 Nov 2021 19:31:00 -0600 https://livewire.io/instant-websub-for-podpingers/ Why isn’t your new podcast episode showing up in Google Podcasts right away? It’s probably since your podcast’s RSS feed doesn’t support WebSub, which is a way to tell Google (and other apps) as soon as your episode becomes available. It’s not trivial to set up if your host doesn’t already support it, you’ll need to: add a few tags to your podcast feed find (or host) a hub, and notify it whenever your feed changes. https://livewire.io/podping-via-websockets/ Wed, 26 May 2021 17:05:00 -0500 https://livewire.io/podping-via-websockets/ Following on the heels of our free Podping syndication service over WebSub, we are also making Podpings available to client-side developers for free over standard Websockets. Simply point your client code to wss://api.livewire.io/ws/podping, it’s as simple as that - no need for callback servers. Live view of the latest Podpings: Example browser-side script: const ws = new WebSocket("wss://api.livewire.io/ws/podping"); ws.addEventListener("message", event => { const msg = JSON.parse(event.data); // see message format below if (msg. https://livewire.io/podping-via-websub/ Fri, 21 May 2021 11:08:57 -0500 https://livewire.io/podping-via-websub/ The Podcast Index project has recently created its own internal system for sending and receiving podcast feed notification updates, called Podping. Anyone can listen to these pings by polling the Hive blockchain on their own server. This sounded like a great use case for a subscribable dynamic subscription list to represent the logical list of feeds participating in the Podping system. So we’ve created a publicly-available subscribable list, which makes these pings available for free via standard WebSub for anyone who wants to receive these updates via http webhook-style callbacks. https://livewire.io/websub-tester/ Thu, 22 Apr 2021 17:32:00 -0500 https://livewire.io/websub-tester/ Writing a WebSub hub (publisher) can be tricky, especially since subscribers also need to have their own public callback urls. We’ve developed a testing site that any hub developer can use to run a few automated WebSub scenarios against their hub. The site serves as the subscriber side, allowing you to see the flow from both perspectives. https://test.livewire.io Hope that helps! Modify this page, Discuss this page https://livewire.io/new-podcast-reflections/ Mon, 12 Apr 2021 14:40:00 -0500 https://livewire.io/new-podcast-reflections/ There has been some talk recently (particularly from the podcast host Buzzsprout) that Spotify has overtaken Apple Podcasts in podcast downloads. One way they arrived at this was by excluding any “AppleCoreMedia” 1 user agent strings found in their backend analytics from attributing to the Apple Podcasts app. While it’s true that the AppleCoreMedia user agent string is not exclusive to Apple Podcasts, it is better thought of as applying equally to all podcast apps on Apple’s platforms. https://livewire.io/first-public-subscription-list/ Tue, 06 Apr 2021 17:56:00 -0500 https://livewire.io/first-public-subscription-list/ Here is the first known publicly-available working example of a WebSub static Subscription List, it contains a handful of podcast feeds that are known to update frequently: https://livewire.io/lists/often.json As described in the spec, any working WebSub subscriber can subscribe to this resource (using the hub specified in the resource itself), and not only receive updates of when it changes, but also when any of the underlying feeds change! https://livewire.io/aggregator-hubs/ Tue, 30 Mar 2021 16:01:41 -0500 https://livewire.io/aggregator-hubs/ Reduce feed polling, improve feed change notification reliability. Turn pollers into pushers! Modify this proposal, Discuss this proposal Current state Podcasters update their rss feed when new content is available, either directly, or via their podcast hosting provider. Aggregators (podcast apps, directories) periodically poll for changes to podcasts of interest, which may number in the millions. WebSub exists to let podcasters tell aggregators exactly when their feed changes, but suffers from problems in practice: Not widely used by podcasters Vast majority use Google’s hub - free to use, and best-effort, but not always timely or reliable Requires either the hosting CMS to send WebSub pings (not always available), or some other out-of-band process (not always reliable) Aggregators, therefore, fallback to aggressive polling of every feed.