On this episode I chat with Todd Cochrane, CEO and founder of Blubrry Podcasting about their podcast mirror service that takes an RSS feed and mirrors it to help with speed, uptime and now has the ability to add podcasting 2.0 tags like value tag, live, and so much more.

So if you're a listener of a podcast, if you want that podcast to continue, you want that podcast to stay motivated, email, boost, make comments wherever you can, give that content creator that positive feedback or negative.

And the feedback is more valuable than $100 bill.

Welcome to podcast answers, the show where I help people start and grow their podcasts answering any podcasting questions along the way.

That's right. If you want to start your podcast, I am here to help you.

I love helping people work on their podcasts and just enjoy the process of doing podcasting.

So if that's you, you were in the right place. You may have caught the last episode last week or two weeks ago, actually where I was talking with Dave Jones of the podcast index and just talking about some really awesome things.

Some ways new podcasters can get value for value with their podcast, getting small bits of Bitcoin. It's amazing.

And the cool thing about that was I saw lots of income come in and part of that went to Dave because he was on the interview.

So he got paid to do my interview because anytime people were sending boosts, that was also going to Dave Jones.

I want to read some of the boosts that came in from the last episode with Dave Jones.

Adam Curry sent 10,000 sats and said, boosting is loving.

Chad F sent 2100 sats. Great episode guys. It's a lot to squeeze into an hour, but it's always nice to remember how far we come in just three years and four, four, four, four sats from the tone record.

Unleash the experimental sats setting sats per syllable. Enjoyed this conversation. Thank you both.

And then 2500 from Ainsley Costello. Great episode and it's gate breaking.

And then 1111 sats from Kyron Downs. He said, I've heard the backstory many times over, but I still find it inspirational.

So cool that a project like this not only exists, but has found the way into self sustaining via community support. So cool.

And we had lots of other streaming sats come into and again, those went to both Dave and myself. So thank you so much for those.

Now today we have somebody on, we have Todd Cochran on from a blueberry podcasting and they're doing some really cool things with value for value also.

So we will get into that shortly. But if you've not checked out the episode with Dave Jones, I would suggest go up ahead and go back and do that because this episode does build on that.

So without further ado, let's go with me today. I have Todd Cochran of blueberry, the founder and CEO. Welcome to the show, Todd.

Hey, thanks for having me, Andy. Glad to be here.

So we've gone back and forth a little bit throughout the years with the podcasting 2.0 community. I did some addition to the blueberry plug-in.

I had like an additional plug-in that before you guys went gangbusters and added a bunch of features. I was adding some in there because I wanted to get into it and play with it.

And I had been a blueberry power press user for forever. But I wanted to give them their newsies. So that's how we've kind of, we've come to know each other a little bit.

So, but I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the service that you have. So you not only do podcast hosting, but you also have a power or a WordPress plug-in that allows anybody anywhere, not even hosting on blueberry to create a feed to create their podcast and do their podcast and show like that.

But you also have a service called podcast mirror. Can you talk to me a little bit about that?

Yeah, first of all, thanks for, by the way, thanks for doing that plug-in for a while. I was using it. I was doing it before we got all in too.

You know, the podcast mirror has been around, I think, seven or eight years. And there's kind of a little bit of a story behind it.

And what was going on was a certain hosting company was basically saying, hey, if you host your own RSS feeds on a $1.99 hosting account, you might be overloaded.

And it's that way you shouldn't use your own.com. And you should, you should come over here and host on our platform so that you can.

And it's kind of like, okay. And I asked the support team how many issues it comes up with people that have challenges serving their own RSS feed on.com. It was very few.

But it usually was someone that was on a fly by night hosting and they just, you know, the show got popular and, you know, there was more reasons than just the RSS feed for them having challenges with their web host.

So, so when we created podcast mirror, it was also a replacement for feed burner.

Feed burner had not been updated in years, literally, the Google team had not touched it. And I said, there's still a lot of podcasters on feed, feed burner.

I said, when we create podcast mirror, let's go ahead and, you know, make it an easy migration for folks on feed burner.

Podcasts will have a place where it's kept updated. And the, the Frank of it was is this, the feeds are like lightning fast because we basically put it on great, great infrastructure on Amazon.

And so we had a lot of podcasters come over and use it in some big, big podcasts that don't even host with us, which is kind of interesting because, you know, they're a show that maybe have a million listeners.

And you can imagine that feed when it gets hit when they produce a new episode, you know, their, their sites are falling over.

Sure.

So folks came over and we're using it and it's, it's exactly as it sounds. It takes an exact mirror of your current feed, copies it, paste it, puts a podcast mirror, you are a lot of it.

You know, that's essentially what it does.

So we made that available free and for many, many years we thought, what can we do with this thing?

And be honest with you, it, it become a little bit of a financial suck because again, the biggest shows and podcasts and we're coming over and using it.

Sure.

And, you know, so that, you know, we're driving a lot of traffic.

And when the podcasting 2.0 stuff came out, I, and basically I think I heard something on one of the podcasting 2.0 shows with Adam and Dave and I thought we could put podcasting 2.0 tags, inject them into feeds that maybe come from SoundCloud or come from a non participating podcast 2.0 host.

Primarily the one that was always, you know, digging on me for sure, you know, you need to have the RSS feeds over here because they hadn't adopted it and you thought, I hear this little get back.

So we put a number of podcasting 2.0 tags into the channel level of the, of the feeds.

So it's an optional thing.

Most can turn those on and if you have them are let's say you already have the tags.

And we'll get technical here.

If they, if you have value for value or funding or OP three, we don't, we will use yours versus using ours.

So we look to see if the tags there, if it's there, then we don't, we don't do anything on our site.

Even if you fill out the information, your feed is still master.

Gotcha.

And then if you don't have podcasting 2.0 tags and you set the medium feature for a podcast or music or whatever, then we'll, we'll inject it at the channel level.

So, so far we're seeing some SoundCloud shows come over and use this.

You know, it's early days yet because the words not fully out unless you're completely tied into podcasting 2.0, you may not even know about it.

Yeah. And that's, I had originally used feed burner for that, for that same reason. I was kind of using a cheaper web host and I didn't really want to, to have my feet go away if it was hit too much.

And so that's why I was originally using feed burner.

And then I don't even remember when I found podcast mirror, but I switched over to using, to using that just for the, for the same reason.

And I knew that you guys, you know, you guys were updating things as well as, you know, feed burner was not feed burner had been stale for, for years.

And, and I don't like trusting Google with anything because, because you never know when they're going to kill it.

I mean, look at Google podcasts that they're, you know, what they're doing with that.

But such a disaster.

Yeah. Yeah. So I, I had moved over and I have really appreciated using the podcast mirror for, for that.

So can you, now that you've added these extra tags, can you explain a little bit about what tags you did, you did put in there?

Yeah. So we added the live. So live is in there.

The ability to pending live and all those features.

I've got the get Albi integration for value for value.

So, and you can put your own funding points in there.

So it's the value for value pieces in there.

The medium tag is in so you can set podcast music, video, film, whatever the funding tag.

And you can also do credits credits is there at the channel level.

Okay.

So you can document role, co-host, guest producers, etc.

But again, well, actually, we make a note in it.

Don't do guests because it's going to be at the channel level.

It's not going to be at the episode level.

And we also obviously support redirect.

So soon wants to use OP three or pod track or whoever for a redirect, they can enter their, their redirect.

Yeah. So essentially what you've done is you've taken any, any of the new tags that feet that hosts don't support yet and add it, not any of them, but a lot of them and added them in so people can easily go in and just add those.

And it just add those into their feed.

Yeah.

And we're going to add some more.

Again, whenever something makes sense from a channel standpoint to put it in now, we've been asked to do this at the episode level as well.

It gets more difficult.

It's real easy to kind of put that code in at the channel level.

Because, you know, there's a good place to drop and put it all in one place and insert it.

And when it comes down to episodes, then it's the whole nother level of logic.

And part of the problem too is this week, it almost has to be done in post because if when you update your when you post an episode and we update the mirror feed, we won't know what to stick into the episode area until after we get the actual mirror feedback.

So the episode piece is hard, really, really hard.

So at this point, we're going to watch and see the adoption on the channel level.

We did make a switch from free to paid.

We put the service at $60 a year.

And, you know, that transition is happening now.

Everyone's doesn't have to pay until sometime in January.

But we're letting people know that we're moving to a paid service.

And, you know, and those folks that are using, you know, a million page loads or million feed loads, you know, every couple of days, you know, still a great value for what we've offered.

And at the same point, it'll give us the, I guess, better words, the motivation to continue to support it and grow it.

So, you know, we weren't about to abandon it.

But we wanted to, you know, it was, you know, it was a bottom line number.

I could see that growing, you know, year after year.

Well, and I think that, I mean, that makes sense.

Because if you're, I mean, if you're willing to pay for, for hosting or whatever, like this is just another, another addition to that.

And it is a few dollars more a month.

But at the same time, you get those assurance that your feed is not going to go down because like you said, you've built it on great infrastructure.

It's not going to go down like it would if you were using a fly by night web host.

But then you also get those features, the new tag features that, that podcasting 2.0 is putting in there.

And so really it is, it is a great, a great thing.

And especially if you're, you know, there are a lot of podcasts hosts, you know, that are adding tags some faster than others.

You know, blueberry is definitely one of the, one of the faster ones now for adding things.

I think you guys have a good majority of the tags in, in power press.

But you guys have a lot to update because you know, you have the power press plugin.

You also have your publisher on your hosting side.

But so, and now if, if things with feed burner are not feed burner podcast mirror, you got to add those in there too.

So, but I, I appreciate that you guys are moving so fast with that.

You know, luckily, and I talked to the devs about this, I'm like, how much work, you know, am I creating you?

You know, so they basically said the back end work is some of the thing code is just reused.

And some of the design work can be reused.

So it isn't like we're having to do three separate builds of dev work.

It is actually because it's three different polls into three different platforms.

But the, once you get one adopted, then moving to the other two is pretty easy.

So, you know, we're about ready to do remote item.

And we're going to, so we might, a remote item will support pod role at the channel.

Sure.

But the problem is I won't be able to remote item at the episode level.

So value time splits, we'll see how that all fits in.

But I don't think I can do value time splits on podcast mirror.

I just thinking at the top of my head.

I don't think so.

I think that that would be a tough one to do is again, you're at that.

You're, you'd be at the item level.

So that would be a tough one.

But so for those of our listeners who don't know, you know, I talked last week with Dave,

or last episode with Dave Jones about value for value is a lot of the stuff we talked about during that episode.

So not only can you do that with podcast mirror and with any of your hosts or any,

any hosts that you're hosting on now, if they've just, you know, add their podcast mirror to it.

But, but you can do, you'd mentioned live.

Can you talk just a little bit about what live, live is?

Yeah.

So, you know, a lot of podcasters are doing live today.

They're doing YouTube, Facebook, Twitch, Twitter, wherever or X order we're calling it now.

So they're, you know, they're, they're, they're live streaming across a lot of different platforms.

And with the podcasting 2.0 apps at podcast apps.com, a number of them have supported the function.

And I guess the best way to describe it is for the listeners, if you're listening to a,

one of your favorite podcast and, and they have it implemented this live function.

And that app supports that when they go live, what really happens is there's a signal that sent out.

It's a podping that says, Hey, I'm live, or I'm going to go live.

And then I am live.

And the apps then can change the consumption experience from on demand to actually watching or listening to the show live.

So today, the implementation on that is a little bit technical, but if you're going to stream audio, a lot of the podcasters are doing like shoutcast or that type of a stream and doing an audio stream.

For my show, when I do video, I, it's very difficult to get an HLV output, which is basically a video live format to get an HLV out of most services.

So Restream.io is a company that I use to restream to multiple locations, but they don't support an HLV output.

But the service I used to use called Wauser Cloud Wauser does.

So what I basically do is I send a video stream over to Wauser.

They create an HLV.

And what that ultimately does is allows people in the apps to watch the video version of the show.

They don't have to go on Facebook no more or Twitter or YouTube.

They can actually watch within the podcast app.

And the live piece really is in the end goal for the listeners.

So we want them to know that whatever app, podcast 2.0 app, they listen to a show on on demand that for those that are alive, they can either listen live as it's being streamed or they can watch live as it's being video streamed.

So it can go both ways.

And some do one to do.

I do both because I have two RSS feeds, one for my audio show, one for my video show.

And so they they they picked a poison on which way they want to engage.

Now, it's still small numbers.

Oh, yeah.

I was watching on the, I think about a week ago, I got my biggest live audience on a podcast 2.0 app with about 20 people on an app.

That was watching it.

Whereas the audio stream, which was kind of surprisingly was lower than the video stream, it averages eight or nine.

But again, depends on the type of day.

So, you know, I do the new media show at three o'clock Eastern.

Most people are still at work.

Right.

So they can't really watch.

And whereas the my tech show is in the evening and they can often tune in when it's in the evening after work.

So again, it's just it's just a fun way now to integrate into a podcasting app, something that was once purely just on demand, which is still beautiful.

I, you know, that's how I listen 99% of the shows, but still the ability to get it up.

They say, hey, this show's live and click a button in the screen flips and you're either watching or listening to the live recording of the show.

And one of the things that I found that I really like, so I do stream to YouTube normally when I'm recording this, but I also do a live item also with a shop cast server for the audio.

But one of the things that I've liked about, especially listening to the shows like podcasting 2.0, when they go live, it's they usually go live a few minutes before they actually start the podcast episode.

So in essence, you get a behind the scenes, you get, you know, Adam and Dave chatting about what's happening and testing things and singing and whatever, whatever else that they're doing.

But it, it, it's cool because you kind of feel like you're part of the club. If you will, you know, you get that behind the scenes, which you don't get at the pre, you know, the produced episode.

So a lot of times, and then there's also, you know, chat rooms that you can attach to that and things like that.

So you can be a, with that and also booster grams, you can be part of the live show. You know, if you're, I know, like when you and you and Rob do your new media show, you guys are reading off booster grams that come in while people are, while you're recording.

And so it provides the interaction that hasn't been there in the past.

And you know, to be honest with you, if we go all the way back to when I started doing video, which was more than now than 10 years ago, I mean, I think we're using blip or can't remember who we were using this as long before anyone else was doing live streaming.

I did it for one purpose. I was in Hawaii recording at 8pm Hawaiian Standard Time, which was literally two o'clock in the morning, Eastern, 11 Pacific.

And so I had Australians and people from New Zealand and Asia coming and hanging out with the live show, giving me feedback.

So for me as a solo podcaster doing that tech show where I didn't have a co-host, it gave me a little bit of a feedback.

And it was, it became exciting because someone would say something in chat and I would be able to make a comment on it while we were recording the on demand show that 99.99% of the people subscribed or followed.

And that's the beauty of it too, is, is someone told me, well, you don't have many people watching your live show on YouTube.

And I'm like, I don't care.

If it's just one or two, cool, I'm happy because usually they'll say something and it just gives a little engagement.

And it's a little bit of a feedback loop. Whereas now with the ability to get boosted in and people are watching on the app, actual podcast and they can boost live.

And that live boost comes in here, you know, it comes in and you hear it over your headset.

That's what that really does for a creator.

And again, I'm kind of, okay, so I'll just take it from a business standpoint.

It keeps the podcaster motivated to do another episode because, oh, someone's listening.

I'm, I'm what, what I'm saying matters. I'm getting feedback, positive, negative in between. I'm getting feedback.

Right.

So I think that's what's missing so often in what makes a lot of podcasters, pod fade is they do these episodes, they put them out, and it's crickets.

They don't hear nothing from the audience.

And they're like, who am I, am I talking to a wall?

So if you're a listener of a podcast, if you want that podcast to continue, you want that podcaster staying motivated, email boost, make comments wherever you can.

Give that content creator that positive feedback or negative, you know, give back his feedback.

Yeah.

And the feedback is more valuable than a hundred dollar bill.

Yeah. I know for, for my podcast, when, when you're not live and there's not people interacting live, yeah, you're, you're kind of waiting for feedback.

You may or may not hear something because it may take, you know, who gets out email client and writes an email right away.

But if you're in an app and you can send a boost or even live and have them talk about your feedback right there live, they're more likely to interact.

And as a podcaster, that's a great reward.

So I'm getting ready to go overseas for three weeks, leaving middle of next week.

So I will not be, Rob and I are still going to do the new media show live, but my tech show, I'm going to record probably while everyone's sleeping.

And I'm not going to do live from Asia.

And I know from my experience when I traveled to the Caribbean this spring and spent a month in the Caribbean hanging out on beach that I get through my show actually quicker when I don't have an audience there and doing all this stuff.

So there's extra, there is extra overhead getting all prep, make sure all the buttons are pushed.

Whereas sometimes just like it is three weeks for me, the six shows I'll do while I'm on the road.

They'll actually be easier to produce than the show that when I'm in the studio because all I got to do is put the headset on, grab the microphone, do my little show prep, hit record and go.

And probably I'll say myself an hour in, but that's what being on travel and vacations about is really to not have as much as complicated.

So I can go back to just doing podcast for a couple of weeks.

And then I come back, then we'll get back in the studio and do live again.

Yeah, definitely.

So any, so the other tags you said you mentioned the medium tag, which is something new.

It's not a new tag. It's a newer tag, but it's nice because you can say that you have a music show or not a music show, but music.

This is music.

And that's nice because, you know, we've seen a lot of these artists that over the years aren't able to make hardly any money, right?

And so what they've done now is you can say music equals medium and they can post their album up on a podcast host of sort and have an RSS feed with it, just like a podcast.

But instead of podcast, you know, talking episodes, it's just the, the audio tracks.

And then what that allows us to do with things like the value time split is have a music show.

Like we've seen Adam do and with doing that, then they can pay the artists as they play it as people boost.

And that's really cool.

And so you said currently right now you don't have value time split in any of your interfaces.

Is that something that you're looking to do?

Well, it's, it'll be in power press and in blueberry soon.

That's the last piece in this next dev development cycle that I'm waiting on.

I got everything else demoed.

We showed remote item, pod roll, the block tag and then one other.

And then that way a valid times was coming to blueberry and to power press.

So working through, you know, because that's a little bit of a complicated deal with the lookups and everything that's involved there.

But the beauty about podcast mirror going back to that is an artist that's on SoundCloud today.

They can't or any other platform, they can still put in their value for value.

Get I'll be account or whatever they're using for lightning.

And what will happen then is a platform like blueberry or power press that does support value time split will be able to use a podcast mirror feed to know where those satoshis go for that artist.

And to me, I'm excited beyond music to be honest with you.

I think that the audiobook piece is going to be big films because you just think if people think about podcasts and the thing to remember is in the original days, mostly we'll knew this, but now today most don't.

You can actually attach a PDF to a podcast to an episode as an enclosure.

It's really not a podcast anymore, but the closer will support a PDF.

So you could put a newsletter as an as an actual episode.

It could be an audio then again, an audiobook, an actual chapter in an audiobook film that could be one feed one video file could be for film.

So and again, you can put in those value data and get paid value for value.

So I think this is where most folks that think just traditionally just about podcasts being.

Even there's audio and video podcast.

Now we've got the ability to have these new genres, music, film, audiobook.

I think there's a huge opportunity for for, let's say you're a writer.

And you know, the thing is the actual people that produce books and sell them on Amazon or wherever they sell their books.

They get to set the price of the book.

They know what the cut is of the vendor they're working with.

They pretty much know what their revenue is going to be from sales from a book.

Music artists get screwed.

I mean, they just they just, you know, they never know what their checks going to be.

Yeah, they're going to get paid a penny a listen or whatever it may be.

But but where this I always say I'd rather have as much of my money as possible come to me and not anyone else get a split.

So an audiobook person can put up an audiobook, make it value for value.

And they'll get essentially 99.95, 99.9% of any boost that comes in via crypto.

And they don't have to give a 20 or 15 or 10% cut.

Now there might be like us, we put a 3% fee on our fee will use our stuff, but the fee is above and beyond.

So the podcast or they're still going to get their full amount.

So or the audiobook.

So I think though, when you look at credit card processing fees and or PayPal and how much they take on those micro transactions.

If they're sending you $100 on PayPal, you don't care about the transaction, they send you a dollar.

Then it doesn't work.

Right. You lose most of that money or all of that money.

Right. Yeah.

So where the crypto piece and I know some people I call it a crypto stigmatism.

I think if people get used to think quit thinking about crypto and think about these as tokens.

As a listener, say, OK, you're going to you're going to go to the arcade.

You're going to put 50 bucks in a machine.

You're going to get so many tokens.

And then you're going to go play the games with your tokens that you're going to that they've been issued.

Most times they've now put them on a car.

Yeah.

But what now in podcasting, it's the same.

I use that same analogy because you let's say you purchase 100,000 tokens, which are would be 100,000 Satoshi.

You buy 100,000 Satoshi's and you love a show so much.

You say, I'm going to give my all of my tokens or I'm going to give them 50,000 tokens or let's say just go ahead and get your credit card out or your debit card and buy $100 worth of Satoshi's.

And then you can spread that around.

You know, you say, oh, 25,000 for you, 50,000 for you, 100,000 for you.

And then you can you can divide and spread the well and support these creators.

You know, we've been I've been astonished.

We talked about about a month ago that blueberry creators have earned.

And we because we can back the number out because we take the three percent so I can basically do the reverse math.

10 grand.

That's awesome.

And you convert it.

Yeah, it is awesome.

You know, and it's spread about, you know, a couple of hundred shows.

And I'm like, that's 10 grand.

They would not have gotten had we not implemented this.

Absolutely.

And so for me, it's exciting.

And I think if listeners think about Satoshi's tokens, quit thinking about the crypto.

If you're just buying them to give them away, it doesn't matter, right?

You're not going to convert it back to dollars.

You're just going to you're just going to give the tokens away.

This is the analogy I'm trying to use with listeners to make them understand that you love a show, love a content, love what the producer is giving this to give this value back.

So it works.

And again, for the podcast, it's usually not about the money when a thousand Satoshi's come in, you know, what is that two and a half cents?

Yeah, right.

It's not a lot.

You know, I don't think about the, I don't, I don't think about the money and think about the engagement.

Yeah, definitely.

That's key.

Yeah, it is.

It is.

And like you said, it helps keep podcasters doing what they do because they're getting engaged.

Yeah.

One of the last things that I really liked about this, about podcast mirror, and this is even before you updated it.

But as a podcaster, it makes it really easy to switch hosts if you want, because you don't need to go out and update.

You don't need to put a 301 redirect in.

You just go ahead and go into podcast mirror and update the feed that you were checking for, you know, for podcast mirror updates everywhere else.

And so that, that was, you know, crucial for me.

I, you know, I moved hosts not that long ago and it was, it was great because I was able to literally just go and put my new feed in and it worked great.

And so I think that's, that's a really important thing.

And so I think that's a really important thing.

And so I think that's a really important thing.