A special edition of Office Hours explains why some Podcasters are seeing a 20% drop in downloads. Plus, Moritz from Alby joins us for a chat.

Special Guest: Moritz Kaminski.

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Links:

• ⚡ Alby: Your Boost companion for the web — Send a boost from the web; just Get Alby, top it off, and start boosting!
• 🎉 Office Hours on the Podcastindex.org — Boost from the Web. Once you have Alby topped off, you can Boost from our page on the Podcast Index.
• Moritz Kaminski — Contributing to an open value layer for the internet
• The company asking podcast directories for money — A copyright enforcement company is sending bills to podcast directories for reproducing thumbnail images from RSS feeds.
• Annual re-certification now required by IAB — The updated pricing is: Member: $12,500 (new) / $​6,250​ (renew); Non-Member: $17,500 (new) /$8,750 (renew)
• Notice: Updates to Automatic Downloads - Apple Podcasts for Creators — Before iOS 17, when a listener would unpause automatic downloads, the system would automatically download all unplayed episodes. With iOS 17, Apple Podcasts will not download previous episodes and will resume automatically downloading new episodes.
• Tracking the impact of the auto-downloading changes to Apple Podcasts in iOS 17 — Let’s take a look at the Apple Podcasts listeners to OP3, an open prefix service tracking over 10 million downloads a month from over 1000 shows of various types, so a nice small sample to work with.
• Faidr — Our technology removes those annoying interruptions and lets you replace them with the audio content you actually want to hear.
• Auddia Announces Commercial Free Podcasting Enabled by Proprietary New AI Technology to be Launched in the faidr App on January 15 — 200 top podcasts will be available for ad-free listening upon launch, representing upwards of 50,000 episodes.
• Auddia Announces Commercial Free Podcasting to be Launched in the faidr App on January 15 — In June of 2023, the Company announced that its engineers had successfully combined Natural Language Processing (NLP) and its proprietary AI audio-classification algorithm to create a new model that could be applied to podcasts.
• The Lightning Network Grew by 1212% in 2 Years — In this report, we show how the number of users, transactions, and volume have been accelerating significantly over the past years. We also share some River-specific insights and discuss significant growth accelerators for the Lightning Network.
• Kevin Rooke on X — The average public Lightning Network channel is approaching 8 million sats of capacity now.
• Coming in 2024 — V4V based, multiply redundant object store with decentralized CDN for PeerTube self-hosters. Removes 99% of the bandwidth costs of media hosting, as well as the storage costs of online hosting.
• SeaweedFS — SeaweedFS is a fast distributed storage system for blobs, objects, files, and data lake, for billions of files! Blob store has O(1) disk seek, cloud tiering. Filer supports Cloud Drive, cross-DC active-active replication, Kubernetes, POSIX FUSE mount, S3 API, S3 Gateway, Hadoop, WebDAV, encryption, Erasure Coding.
• V4V SHOW | Mere Mortals — What will digital content look like in 5 years time? In Ep#56 we're going to rehash everything we've learned this season, lay out my predictions for what is ahead of us and learn how you can help shape the future direction of this very podcast.
• Music: Santa's In Town - The Top Hats Orchestra
• Music: A Charlie Brown Christmas - The Top Hats Orchestra
• Music: Sleigh Ride - The Top Hats Orchestra