YouTube is TV and radio: YouTube CEO Neal Mohan says the TV has overtaken mobile as the “primary device for YouTube viewing in the US”, indicating YouTube is “the new TV”. YouTube AI updates include auto dubbing expansion, age ID tech, and more. YouTube is also big in podcasting. More than 1 billion people are now watching podcasts on YouTube every month, so YouTube is forcing podcasters to become YouTubers, whether they like it or not.
TV market: Chinese makers have now pretty much taken over the global LCD TV market, as Chinese manufacturers of LCD TV panels, such as BOE, TCL CSOT and HKC, now control over 70% of global production capacity, up from 65% last year. LG Display officially sells off last LCD TV panel factory. Following Samsung Display, LG Display has officially sold its last remaining LCD TV panel factory to China’s TCL, marking the end of an era for LCD TV panel production in South Korea.
Projectors: Advancements in laser and LED projection are set to enhance brightness and color accuracy. While 4K is already a standard for premium projectors, 2025 could see 8K projectors enter the mainstream. By 2025, expect to see more ultra-portable projectors featuring foldable designs, integrated stands, and improved battery life. The rise of smart projectors equipped with built-in operating systems like Android TV and compatibility with popular streaming apps is expected. Time-of-Flight (ToF) technology and AI are set to revolutionize projector usability. Features like real-time autofocus, automatic keystone correction, and obstacle avoidance will start to become standard. LG’s latest projector is also a lamp and a Bluetooth speaker – and there’s a tiny new 4K projector too.
Camera sensors: Canon pushes the limits of 35mm with record 410-megapixel sensor 24,592 x 16,704 pixels. Canon develops CMOS sensor with 410 megapixels, the largest number of pixels ever achieved in a 35 mm full-frame sensor. Omnivision’s latest OV50X image sensor wot 50MP resolution is of the largest (~1 inch) type that can currently be integrated into a smartphone.
HDMI: HDMI 2.2 officially revealed at CES 2025. HDMI 2.2 can support up to 96Gbps bandwidth and 16K resolution. HDMI 2.2 is said to support a multitude of resolutions including 4K, 8K, 10K, 12K and even 16K, the latter two of which are new for HDMI 2.2. It will also have improved bandwidth, reaching 96gbps compared with HDMI 2.1′s 48gbps and DisplayPort’s 80gbps. HDMI 2.2 will also support 4K at 480Hz. HDMI also confirmed that the Ultra96 HDMI cable, which supports 96gbps and HDMI 2.2 features, will be available later in 2025. The first product supporting HDMI 2.2 are expected in first half of 2025.
GPMI: China launches HDMI and DisplayPort alternative called GPMI. China’s tech industry is pushing a new cable format called GPMI. It is to handle video, power, and data at once. New 480W and 192Gbps GPMI format signals China’s broader move beyond USB-C and western cable standards. There is a group of over 50 Chinese tech companies – including major TV makers like TCL, Hisense, and Skyworth – have come together to launch a new connector standard called GPMI (General Purpose Media Interface), so there is a possibility that it catches support in at least Chinese market. There are two versions: GPMI Type-C and GPMI Type-B. The Type-C version looks and works a lot like USB-C and already supports up to 96Gbps of data and 240W charging. The Type-C version of GPMI has already been licensed for use under the USB-IF (USB Implementers Forum), so it should be compatible with existing USB-C ports. The larger Type-B port can push up to 192Gbps and 480W. Existing competing standards are HDMI 2.1 (48Gbps with no power delivery) and DisplayPort 2.1 (80Gbps with up to 240W power). I don’t expect HDMI to go away any time soon in the light of GPMI.
Beyond RGB: A new compression format called Spectral JPEG XL might finally solve this growing problem in scientific visualization and computer graphics when working with special cameras that capture light your eyes can’t even see. Spectral imaging is imaging that uses multiple bands across the electromagnetic spectrum. Spectral JPEG XL compression is a new image file format that efficiently stores invisible light data. JPEG XL Image Coding System is a royalty-free open standard for a compressed raster image format that compresses extremely well (lossless, if you want) and, unlike JPEG, also allows storage of 16 bit (even up to 32 bit) image files. Major operating systems, web browsers, and image editing software are increasingly adopting support for this efficient compression technology.
Physical media: Physical Media Is Dead, Long Live Physical Media. Much has been written about the demise of physical media that was long considered the measure of technological progress in audiovisual and computing fields. Not all is well in this digital-only paradise, as the problems with having no physical copy of the item which you purportedly purchased are becoming increasingly more evident – increased service costs, privacy, items being removed or altered without your consent. Our movies, series, books, games and software will be more and more locked behind what are essentially leasing services. Off-line, physical media is once again increasing in appeal to a lot of users. The death and second life of physical media. All of which points to that the physical formats of the future will likely remain CDs, Blu-rays and even vinyl records and cassette tapes as the most popular formats. Digital media-as-a-service will not go away, as it has too many advantages. Especially in terms of low distribution cost.
The early 2000s were the halcyon days of physical media, but they are still here. One of the unexpected things to happen in the music industry is how an obsolete formats have came to be the great saviour of the music industry. Vinyl records, once consigned to the rubbish dumps, have become the format of choice among audiophiles and hipsters alike. Cassette tapes are also having a resurgence among some music fans. Why Are Cassette And CD Players So Big Now?
CD: Despite the ease and accessibility of apps like Spotify and Apple Music, over the past few years we’ve seen the humble CD make something of a comeback. CD outsells vinyl. There are several Reasons Why CDs Still Rule Over Streaming. But some of the new CDs are not everywhere like they used to. Your new CDs could be lighter, weaker, and worse. Certainly in Europe there has been no noticeable drop in disc manufacture quality. Also Everyone Thought the Loudness War Was Over, but They Were Dead Wrong
Cassette: Cassette tapes are clicking and clacking their way back to the trends. It’s Not Just Vinyl and CDs; Cassette Tapes Are Also Making a Quiet Comeback
Blue-Ray: Sony is killing off its blank Blu-ray discs. This effectively could mean that Sony discontinues recordable Blu-ray media with “no successor” planned. After 18 years, Sony’s recordable Blu-ray media production draws to a close. The company already ended the production of recordable consumer Blu-ray and optical disks in mid-2024. Verbatim and I-O Data have pledged to continue to support the recordable optical media market. Verbatim pledges ‘stable supply of optical disks’ after Sony Japan’s recordable Blu-ray exit. Also the pre-recorded Blue-Ray is fading out. Sony is also stopping to include Blue-Ray drive to their newest PS5 Pro gaming console because the popularity of physical disks have dropped.
Minidisc:MiniDiscs for recording, MD data for recording, and MiniDV cassettes will also be abandoned. Sony shuttered its last Japanese facility where it manufactured these data storage media.
Piracy: If you think streaming has killed music piracy, think again. Despite having more legal options than ever, fans are increasingly turning to illegal downloads and stream-ripping sites. Music piracy surged in 2024, with over 17 billion visits to piracy sites. The most used of which are stream-ripping sites, especially those that convert YouTube videos to MP3 files, which now make up almost 40% of all music piracy. This is not just about avoiding payment. It’s more about the users’ frustrations with a system that doesn’t meet their needs. Millions of Users Are Returning to Music Piracy and the Industry Only Has Itself to Blame.
MP3: Freed At Last From Patents, Does Anyone Still Care About MP3? The MP3 format, once the gold standard for digital audio files, is now free. The licensing and patents on MP3 encoders have expired, meaning you can now include them in your applications without paying royalties. The MP3 file format was always encumbered with patents, but as of 2017, the last patent finally expired. Although the format became synonymous with the digital music revolution that started in the late 90s, as an audio compression format there is an argument to be made that it has long since been superseded by better formats and other changes. The reality is that MP3, while still relevant in certain niche areas.
Wired headphones: The Headphone Jack Is Quietly Making a Comeback Nearly a Decade After Apple Tried to Kill It. Nine years after Apple boldly declared the death of the headphone jack, an unexpected shift is taking place in the tech world. There is still development n headphone tech: Unconventional headphones: Sonic response consistency, albeit cosmetically ungainly
136 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
What is the 3:2:1 rule in video editing?
Backup Strategies: Why the 3-2-1 Backup Strategy is the Best
The 3-2-1 backup rule is a simple, effective strategy for keeping your data safe. It advises that you keep three copies of your data on two different media with one copy off-site. Let’s break that down: Three copies of your data: Your three copies include your original or production data plus two more copies.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.openshot.org/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/15/why-lordes-clear-cd-has-so-many-playback-issues/
Tomi Engdahl says:
DAB+ etenee maailmalla
https://etn.fi/index.php/13-news/17783-dab-etenee-maailmalla
Digitaalinen radio etenee vauhdilla Euroopassa ja muualla maailmassa. Tuore esimerkki tästä on Belgian Flanderin ja Brysselin uusi DAB+ -lähetysverkko, jonka toteutti Rohde & Schwarz Cellnex Broadcast Partnersille ennätysajassa – alle kahdeksassa viikossa.
Verkko, joka tunnetaan nimellä 10D, koostuu 28:sta Rohden TMV9evo-lähettimestä, joiden keskimääräinen teho on 1,5 kilowattia. Ilmajäähdytteiset VHF-lähettimet hyödyntävät edistynyttä Doherty-teknologiaa, mikä nostaa hyötysuhteen jopa 50 prosenttiin ja pienentää energiakustannuksia. Verkkoon sisältyy moninkertainen redundanssi, automaattinen hyötysuhteen optimointi ja laaja etähallinta, mikä takaa luotettavan toiminnan ja pitkän käyttöiän.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Suoratoisto on kriisissä – Sisällöt muuttuvat jatkuvasti köyhemmiksi ja botit tekevät sisältöä boteille
Kaj Laaksonen17.8.202507:30ViihdeElokuvapalvelutSuoratoistopalvelutMusiikkiMusiikkipalvelut
Elokuvien ja tv-sarjojen suoratoistolla menee paremmin kuin koskaan. Miksi katsojista saattaa kuitenkin tuntua, että sisällöt ovat muuttuneet jatkuvasti köyhemmiksi?
https://www.iltalehti.fi/ilmiot/a/6bd0bf44-250b-40bc-9e93-27b8746bc3d7
Fyysinen media on kuollut. Elokuvissa käynti romahti koronapandemian myötä. Kaikki viihde striimataan, eikä kukaan enää ikinä poistu kotisohvalta.
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://variety.com/2022/music/news/bob-dylan-records-classic-tracks-t-bone-burnett-new-audio-analog-medium-1235241159/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Uusi HDMI alkaa tulla markkinoille
https://etn.fi/index.php/13-news/17810-uusi-hdmi-alkaa-tulla-markkinoille
HDMI-standardi ottaa jälleen askeleen eteenpäin, kun HDMI 2.2 on nyt virallisesti valmis ja alkaa vähitellen ilmestyä uutuustuotteiden teknisiin tietoihin. Uusi versio tuplaa edeltäjänsä eli 2.1-standardin siirtonopeuden 48 gigabitistä 96 gigabittiin sekunnissa, mikä mahdollistaa entistä tarkemmat kuvat, korkeammat virkistystaajuudet ja paremman äänenlaadun.
Käytännössä HDMI 2.2 tukee jopa 12K-resoluutiota 120 hertsin virkistystaajuudella ja 16K-resoluutiota 60 hertsin nopeudella. Lisäksi mukana on uusi Latency Indication Protocol (LIP), jonka avulla kuvan ja äänen synkronointi eri laitteiden välillä paranee. Samalla markkinoille tuodaan uusi Ultra96-kaapelityyppi, joka takaa täyden kaistanleveyden hyödyntämisen.
Kuluttajille tämä kaikki on toistaiseksi enemmän lupaus tulevasta kuin arjen välitön tarve. Suurin osa televisioista, tietokoneista ja pelikonsoleista ei vielä hyödynnä HDMI 2.2:n koko kapasiteettia, ja 8K-sisältökin on vasta vähitellen yleistymässä. Käytännössä HDMI 2.2 on siis tällä hetkellä monelle liikaa: ominaisuuksia riittää, mutta niille ei vielä ole selkeää käyttöä.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Eagles Started What Taylor Swift Perfected With Album Variants Today
https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/01/hate-album-variants-blame-eagles/?fbclid=IwQ0xDSwMWH3pjbGNrAxYfMGV4dG4DYWVtAjExAAEeeXD6E7hMUZcQcotZIDOSkrkQX_kd_eaurDEjpteOcCaHAV05LsBFzVDSibI_aem_31C415ew_csvAmiBKcpfIg
The Boom of Variant Culture
What started as retailer exclusives evolved into something more ambitious.
Labels realized they could release multiple versions of the same album through different channels. Each version could offer something unique with bonus tracks, special packaging, or exclusive merchandise.
This approach appealed to superfans who would buy every variant available.
When streaming took over and CD sales declined, labels noticed something interesting: physical album sales still had an outsized impact on chart positions.
Per the RIAA, 1,500 on-demand audio and/or video streams equal 10 track sales, which count as one album sale. Meanwhile, each physical album counts as one sale.
They embraced a new strategy: using variants to boost chart performance.
According to Luminate data, the average number of distinct physical products tied to Top 10 albums has been trending upward since 2019.
Billboard notes that Travis Scott released Utopia with 31 variants.
Taylor Swift’s latest album, The Tortured Poets Department, hit No. 1 with help from 859,000 first-week sales across six vinyl versions.
When she wanted another chart boost, she simply released more variants.
Online, opinions are mixed. Critics often label variant releases as a cynical marketing ploy. Billie Eilish famously called releasing variants wasteful.
Some customers, however, welcome the variety.
What began as a ploy to keep physical album sales alive has spiraled into a cultural phenomenon that feeds devoted collectors and corporate bottom lines.
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/08/audio-cables-affect-sound-audiophiles-survey/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/01/headphone-jacks-slowly-making-comeback/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/24/hackaday-links-august-24-2025/
“Emergency Law Enforcement Officer Hologram program activated. Please state the nature of your criminal or civil emergency.” Taking a cue from Star Trek: Voyager, the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency is testing a holographic police officer, with surprisingly — dare we say, suspiciously? — positive results. The virtual officer makes an appearance every two minutes in the evening hours in a public park, presumably one with a history of criminal activity. The projection is accompanied by a stern warning that the area is being monitored with cameras, and that should anything untoward transpire, meat-based officers, presumably wearing something other than the dapper but impractical full-dress uniform the hologram sports, will be dispatched to deal with the issue.
The projected police officer is the product of the South Korean firm Hologramica, which seems to be focused on bringing obsolete or metabolically challenged pop and sports stars back to life. The company uses one of two techniques for its 3D projection: the tried and true “Pepper’s Ghost” trick or a proprietary method they call “3D Holonet.” Given the conditions, we’d guess the police projection is using the latter, which uses a transparent screen with metallic silver embedded into it. Aside from the cool factor, we’re not sure how this is better than something as simple as a cardboard cutout with a cop printed on it, or even just some signs telling people to watch their step. Then again, maybe Starbucks will consider employing the holo-cops in their South Korean stores to deal with their cagonjok problem.
South Korea deploys hologram police officer to fight crime – and it’s working
https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/lifestyle-culture/article/3322654/south-korea-deploys-hologram-police-officer-fight-crime-and-its-working
Since its installation in a Seoul park, crimes reported during the hours the hologram is active have gone down by about 22 per cent, data shows
Tomi Engdahl says:
Eric Benson / Rolling Stone:
A look at the collapse of narrative podcasts, facing high production costs and limited ad revenue, despite overall podcast listenership reaching all-time highs
Who Killed the Narrative Podcast?
When a new longform medium sprung up in the mid-2010s, journalists flocked to it. Then almost as quickly as it appeared, it was gone
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/narrative-podcasts-gone-serial-over-my-dead-body-1235409945/
“I have a hook for your story,” a podcast producer told me as soon as I called her up earlier this summer. “Pineapple Street announced it’s going out of business today.”
I’d already been reporting on the collapse of the narrative podcast industry for several weeks, talking with executives and editors and producers. Everyone had pretty much the same thing to say: things were looking grim. But this news felt personal. I’d hosted and written two shows for Pineapple Street Studios. I had several close collaborators who were still on staff. Even when I was just a fan of podcasts, I knew the name Pineapple Street — it was a pioneering production company and industry leader. They’d made the mega-hit Missing Richard Simmons in 2017, then spent almost a decade churning out award-winning narrative shows like The Catch and Kill Podcast, Ghost Story, and Hysterical. A few years ago, Pineapple Street going out of business would have shocked me. But when I heard about its demise on that Thursday afternoon in June, it felt sad but inevitable.
If you haven’t been paying close attention, the idea that a segment of the podcast industry is existentially imperiled may seem counterintuitive. More people than ever are listening to podcasts and talking about podcasts and thinking about starting their own podcasts. Politicians trying to win elections are clamoring to go on podcasts. (When they lose, it is blamed, in part, on not going on the right podcasts.) A recent report from Edison Research estimates that 55 percent of Americans over the age of 12 consumed a podcast in the last month, an all-time high. But the podcasts that are thriving are talk shows — increasingly celebrity-driven talk shows — that are cheap to make, can easily be turned into streaming YouTube videos, and command big ad dollars. Narrative podcasts — the multi-episode, investigative journalism–fueled shows that boomed after the release of Serial in October 2014 — have followed an inverse trajectory.
For years, narrative podcasts were the buzziest segment of the industry. They were what many listeners thought of when they heard the word “podcast.” Many of these shows, following the lead of Serial, were true crime, while others, like Slow Burn, took a similar investigative approach to politics and history. But regardless of genre, most narrative shows shared a style — they were told through the perspective of a single reporter-host, who not only guided a listener through a story but invited them along on the reporting journey. Now, these shows seem increasingly like an artifact of history. Layoffs have hit nearly every organization that makes this kind of audio, from corporate behemoths like Spotify to successful start-ups like Pushkin Industries to the public-radio godfather of it all, This American Life. In early August, Amazon announced it was dismantling Wondery, one of the biggest and most commercially successful studios in the business, which had made its name on shows like Dr. Death and The Shrink Next Door. Amazon had acquired Wondery less than five years ago for $300 million. Now, the company was being broken up into parts and a reported 110 staffers were laid off.
“It feels like podcasts speed-ran the development of an industry to the decline of an industry,” the journalist and podcast host Evan Ratliff told me. “It went from people were making absolutely no money, to people were making fortunes big enough where they’d never have to work again, to ‘There’s not a budget for that’ in less than 10 years.” Now, even those reduced budgets have vanished.
The fall of the industry has been so vertiginous that it’s been hard to fully comprehend its decline. But in many ways, this collapse was baked into its spectacular rise, when a flood of dumb money, pollyannaish entrepreneurs, and hungry journalists rushed to build an industry that would soon turn into a house of cards.
YEARS BEFORE I STARTED MAKING podcasts, I thought I was already too late to get in on the craze. This was the mid-2010s, and after Serial, it felt like every other month brought another expertly crafted narrative series. There was the first season of In the Dark, and S-Town, and Missing Richard Simmons—podcasts that not only got millions of listeners but were covered in the mainstream media as events. They got picked over, debated on social media. They felt like they mattered. So when my friend Matthew Shaer asked me if I might be interested in making a podcast with him in the spring 2017, I leapt at the opportunity.
Matt told me he’d happened upon a story about a Florida State University law professor named Dan Markel who had been shot to death outside his home in Tallahassee in 2014. Two alleged hitmen had been charged in the case, but authorities believed the masterminds behind the murder were family members of Markel’s ex-wife. Matt had tried to pitch it xas a magazine story, but he’d struck out, which turned out to be a lucky break. The Markel case was convoluted, had tons of backstory, and there was hours of archival audio from police wiretaps and stings. In other words, it was perfect for a podcast.
Matt and I spent months developing the idea, then we pitched it to Wondery, which was fresh off its first big hit, Dirty John. Within a couple weeks, we’d signed a contract to make a six-episode show. We wanted to call it Tallahassee. Wondery’s CEO Hernan Lopez, a shrewd former television executive, opted instead for the crass but grabby Over My Dead Body. He said he liked titles that were phrases people actually said.
In mid-February 2019, the night before Over My Dead Body was released, Wondery hosted a launch party at the Ace Hotel in New York. They billed it as the “exclusive world premiere of 2019’s next blockbuster.” Lopez, Wondery’s CEO served as master of ceremonies, insisting that all the attendees blindfold themselves while listening to the first episode. Afterward, Matt and I went to dinner with Marshall Lewy, Wondery’s chief content officer, who told us about his attempt to court an Oscar-nominated screenwriter to adapt Over My Dead Body. That particular screenwriter had declined, but it hardly mattered. The show hit number one on the Apple podcast charts and stayed there for weeks. That summer, the actress and director Elizabeth Banks optioned the show for development. In 2019, the movie and TV industry just couldn’t resist a good podcast.
“My friends in Hollywood would be like, ‘People don’t care about books anymore, people don’t care about graphic novels or comic books, they just want to make podcasts into movies,’” Jenna Weiss-Berman, the co-founder of Pineapple Street, tells me. “Then everyone was like, cool, this is going to be an amazing business.”
In truth, narrative podcasts had always been a strange business. Requiring months (and sometimes years) of reporting and an exhaustive writing and editing process, they were expensive to produce and struggled to attract enough advertising to pay for their budgets. (Weekly chat shows, with their consistent audiences and parasocial relationships between host and listener, were always a safer bet.) The Hollywood money could help close the gap, and when a show struck big like Wondery’s The Shrink Next Door — which had a purchase price of $1.25 million and numerous associated bonus fees — narrative podcasts could turn a tidy profit. But podcasting still seemed like a relatively modest offshoot of magazines and public radio. Then Big Tech changed the math entirely.
A week before the Over My Dead Body launch party, Spotify announced that it was acquiring the podcast studio Gimlet for a reported $230 million. Spotify had been looking to reduce its dependency on record labels while also becoming a one-stop shop audio company, and Gimlet — which made highly produced shows — was a key plank in that strategy.
To most people in the industry, Spotify buying Gimlet made sense, but Spotify buying Gimlet for $230 million seemed, to quote one longtime producer, “totally insane.” (As Brian Reed, the host of S-Town, noted to me, Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for a similar sum in 2013. ”A five-year-old podcast company being valued at the same amount as one of the biggest legacy media brands ever — that, to me, encapsulates the bubble we were in,” Reed says.) Gimlet had routinely struggled with profitability. Now, their founders and investors had cashed out for a quarter-billion dollars. ”It was like Spotify dropped a wallet in the street and Gimlet picked it up — it could’ve been any of us,” one former podcast executive told me.
It wasn’t long before other wallets started dropping. In August 2019, Pineapple Street, a considerably smaller company than Gimlet, sold to Entercom (later rebranded Audacy) for $18 million. In July 2020, the New York Times bought Serial Productions for a reported $25 million. That December, Amazon announced its $300 million bet on Wondery. These companies weren’t buying narrative podcast shops because they thought narrative podcasts were a can’t-miss business. They saw them as part of their grand corporate maneuverings. One former Pineapple Street staffer tells me an Entercom executive had said during the acquisition, “We don’t need you to make money. We want you to make shows we can brag about.”
Soon, Sony, Apple TV+, and Amazon were aggressively commissioning narrative podcasts from independent producers, too. New companies like Campside Media (co-founded by my Over My Dead Body reporting partner Matthew Shaer) cropped up to feed the beast, churning out narrative series for the big players while hoping they might follow Pineapple Street and Serial Productions and get acquired for a spectacular fee.
As money swelled the ranks of the industry, it also gave it a sense of staying power. Narrative podcasts couldn’t be written off as a fad. They were a new medium, the savior of longform storytelling. A day after Spotify acquired Gimlet, the National Magazine Awards unveiled the finalists for their first-ever podcasting prize. Later that year, the Pulitzer Prizes announced they were adding an “audio reporting” category. Podcast hosts like Serial‘s Sarah Koenig and S-Town’s Brian Reed were going on late-night shows. Hulu was launching its Emmy-winning comedy series about true-crime podcasters, Only Murders in the Building. Big-time print journalists like The New Yorker’s Patrick Radden Keefe were jumping into the world of narrative podcasts and loving it. Keefe tells me that not only was making his show, Wind of Change, one of the “happiest, most creatively fulfilling experiences” of his career, but he saw audiences respond to it in a lasting way. “On book tour, there are always people who show up, having read none of my books, and want to talk about Wind of Change,” Keefe says.
I was feeling optimistic too. Over My Dead Body had been just the beginning for me. I made a campaign-trail podcast for Texas Monthly called Underdog: Beto v. Cruz; I was reporting and writing the investigative true-crime series Suspect and executive producing a story of drug-smuggling and police corruption called Witnessed: Borderlands. Then there was my show Project Unabom, about the 18-year manhunt to find Ted Kaczynski, which I’d gotten greenlit off a pitch that was barely a paragraph long. I was busier than I’d ever been, and I was already discussing new projects that would keep me occupied for the next 18 months. At the time, I was a staff writer for Texas Monthly, which had once seemed like a dream job. But in December 2020, I quit. I wanted to write and produce podcasts full time. I had caught the bug. I wasn’t the only one.
IN THE SUMMER OF 2016, Connie Walker was looking for a new way to tell stories. She was a television reporter at the CBC News in Toronto, where she specialized in covering indigenous issues. She had a big audience, but she also found that she was frustrated by the quick-hit nature of TV news. Walker is Cree and grew up in the Okanese First Nation in rural Saskatchewan, and she wanted to bring history and context into her stories. Almost always, she had to leave that on the cutting room floor.
Podcasts had been a revelation. She’d gotten hooked on Serial and was inspired by its immersive approach to storytelling. So she pitched her bosses on a podcast about the unsolved 1989 murder of Canadian woman from the Gitxsan nation. Walker’s bosses were television people. They’d never overseen a podcast before, but they cautiously agreed. She had a tight deadline and a tiny team, but plenty of editorial freedom to tell the story of an indigenous community in the way she wanted.
“I think for a long time there was just this feeling that our stories weren’t important or that Canadians wouldn’t care,” Walker tells me. “And it was finally our chance. So we just took it and ran with it.”
Missing & Murdered: Who Killed Alberta Williams? debuted that fall, and it quickly found an audience. Walker tracked the ins and outs of the case, but she was after something larger: “We started this story looking for answers about Alberta Williams’ unsolved murder, but the deeper we got into the story the more I thought about the bigger questions,” Walker says at the beginning of the fourth episode. “Why are there over 1,200 cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada? My hope in telling Alberta’s story is to begin to connect the dots.”
Within a couple months of the show’s release, Walker was connecting even more dots, reporting a new season that tracked her search for a long-ago missing Cree girl named Cleopatra Semaganis Nicotine. But midway through production, Walker’s manager told her that it would be her last podcast.
“She was like, ‘This takes too long. It’s too expensive. This is it,’” Walker says. And I was like, ‘it hasn’t even come out yet.’ And she said, ‘management doesn’t support it.’
Missing & Murdered: Finding Cleo was a breakout hit, but the CBC stuck to its decision. Walker went back to making television, but soon she was looking for a new employer. In the summer of 2019, she was invited to meet with a few executives at Gimlet, which had just been acquired by Spotify. As soon as she walked into their Brooklyn offices, she was wide-eyed. The CBC offices looked like what you’d expect from a public broadcaster — drab carpeting, dated computers, refrigerators full of sad office lunch. Gimlet’s offices were all start-up pizzazz — designer furniture, gleaming cutting-edge equipment, break rooms stocked with free sparkling water and a cornucopia of snacks. Even better, Gimlet offered Walker its full editorial backing.
“I was begging at the CBC, like ‘Please let me,’ and with Gimlet it was like, ‘What can we do to support you and your vision of the podcast?” Walker says. “It really was like a dream come true.”
Walker’s Gimlet show, Stolen, continued the work she’d started with Missing & Murdered. In the first season, she investigated the recent disappearance of a young mother named Jermain Charlo, but in the second season, Walker broke the mold, focusing on a mystery involving her own father, Howard Cameron, and the abuse he and his peers suffered at the St. Michael’s Residential School, which had been established as part of a government policy of forced assimilation. It was a dark, personal story, and Gimlet gave Walker the time and the team to pursue the most ambitious work of her career. Gimlet’s largesse was worth it. Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s won nearly every award for which it was nominated, including the Peabody and the Pulitzer.
Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s was one of the strongest cases imaginable for the existence of narrative podcasts. The resources at Gimlet had allowed a reporter to investigate a deeply personal story, then broaden the scope until she’d crafted a furious indictment of institutional abuse and racism. Just as importantly, the behind-the-scenes transparency of the medium had taken what could have been a dry exercise in accountability journalism and injected it with the sizzle and suspense of a police procedural. And the voices of the survivors themselves gave it an intimacy and force that would have been almost impossible in another medium. But when Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s was winning the biggest awards in audio journalism, Walker’s triumph was tempered by the fact that Gimlet itself was a husk of its former self.
The problems had burst into public view two years earlier with accusations that one of Gimlet’s flagship shows, Reply All, had created a hostile work environment for non-white staffers. That had led to a reckoning inside the company and, within a little over a year, the end of Reply All. Other longtime Gimlet shows, which were siloed as “Spotify exclusives” and unavailable on other platforms, started bleeding their audiences. New shows had trouble gaining traction. In October 2022, Spotify, under pressure from investors to reduce costs, began culling its original podcast offerings, cancelling several Gimlet shows and laying off dozens of staffers. By the end of that year, Gimlet’s managing director, Lydia Polgren, and its co-founders, Alex Blumberg and Matt Leiber, had all departed the company. Then in June 2023, less than a month after Walker’s Pulitzer and Peabody wins, Spotify shut down Gimlet and put its few remaining shows under the mantle of Spotify Studios. In just four years, Spotify had turned $230 million into zero dollars.
Spotify spared Stolen for a few months, but that December, it too was cancelled. The news wasn’t a surprise to Walker. “I feel like we knew kind of before we knew,” she says. She and her team were allowed to stay on and finish their third season, Stolen: Trouble in Sweetwater, but when its final episode was released in April 2024, they were all out of work.
In some ways, this was familiar terrain for Walker, echoing her experience with the CBC. But the podcast industry was in a vastly different place in the summer of 2024 than it had been in the summer of 2019. Gone were the days when studios like Gimlet were flush with cash and hungry to buy up new talent. When Spotify cancelled Stolen and another former Gimlet show, Heavyweight, a company spokesperson said they would “work with the show creators to ensure a smooth transition for wherever these series go next.” But there was nowhere to go next for Stolen. When Walker reached out to podcast studios and media companies, they didn’t try to woo her at their venture capital-funded offices. She couldn’t get anyone to make her an offer at all. Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s had felt like undeniable proof of what she’d been trying to convince people of for her entire career — “that these stories are important, that there’s an audience, and that they can have an impact.” But that moment had faded. Two months after Spotify cancelled Stolen, the company signed a new $250 million deal with Joe Rogan.
THE NARRATIVE PODCAST INDUSTRY HAD always been an awkward mash-up of characters — public-radio true believers, Hollywood producers, magazine refugees, and eventually tech executives — and it had always been a little unclear what the goal of making these shows really was. Were they entertainment or journalism? Should their success be measured in awards and social impact, or by their ability to turn a buck? Did these podcasts exist principally for their listening audiences, or were they really, when you got down to it, just proof of concept for film and television development? The different segments of the industry always had different answers to these questions, but for a time, while the money was flowing, it felt like podcasts could be everything to everyone. The precious journalists could strive for their Pulitzers, and the wannabe Ari Golds could have their Hollywood deals. The answer to every binary choice was “yes.”
But then the money started to go away. The tech and media giants that had funded the podcast boom had learned that narrative journalism was hard to scale. In 2019, it might have been enough for them to make shows that “we can brag about,” but a few years later, as recession fears grew, losing money on prestige programming no longer seemed like a good idea. “Podcasting has been a drag on the gross margin side,” Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said in January 2023, “Some shows worked, some didn’t perform as we expected. And that is a sign of maturing. You go for growth first and then you seek efficiency.” As 2023 went on, Ek and his competitors tacked hard toward efficiency.
“Places that were buying these shows for $1 million started to say, ‘How about $500,000?’” Weiss-Berman, the Pineapple Street co-founder, told me. “Then it was, ‘How about $400,000?’ Then, ‘How about $300,000?’”
For years, the industry had been building itself up on the premise that the demand would only grow for prestige TV-like narrative shows and budgets would remain robust. When the big tech companies cut back, the first solution for the production companies that depended on them was mass layoffs. The second was closing up shop entirely. For anyone making a living in podcasting, the future started to look like finding a new line of work.
At the beginning of this year, that’s how it was looking to me. I’d spent much of the previous two years writing and producing two shows that had both been killed by their commissioning companies. They weren’t bad. I’m pretty sure they were good. But they didn’t sound exactly like something that had come before, which meant they weren’t easily slotted into a pre-existing feed. By then, a conservatism had set in. The industry of “yes” was now beginning to resemble the worst of Hollywood. Creative executives, under pressure to churn out hits, were increasingly micromanaging the process, engaging in what one award-winning host described to me as a “firing line approach to editing.”
In February, I finished up a show that actually got released, the Wondery podcast Death County, PA, which had showcased the high-impact prison reporting of the journalist Joshua Vaughn. Then, for the first time since 2018, I faced a world in which I had no offers for new podcast work.
But I don’t know if I’m done with podcasts, even if a certain kind of corporate-backed, lavishly budgeted narrative show appears to be extinct. My favorite podcast from the last 12 months is called Shell Game, and in many ways it’s a playbook for what might come next. Hosted and reported by Evan Ratliff, a longtime tech journalist and one of the hosts of the Longform podcast, Shell Game is an experimental series about artificial intelligence, and in many ways, it’s a rejection of the compromises that had become baked into making shows for Big Podcast.
“I knew it was going to weird,” Ratliff says. “And I wanted to be as weird as possible. I didn’t want to be forced into analytic conclusions about AI, the kind of places you get pushed by people who are trying to sell your show.”
Of course, by the spring of 2024, when Ratliff started making Shell Game, he probably wouldn’t have found anyone to fund it anyway. But that was fine. Ratliff figured he could do it cheaply with a small team. He hired Sophie Bridges, a producer he’d worked with previously, and leaned on the expertise of his wife, Samantha Henig, who had founded and led the audio division of the New York Times.
The tiny team didn’t diminish the quality of the show. And part of what’s so wonderful about Shell Game is it’s a story that could only exist as a podcast. Ratliff created an AI voice clone of himself and set it loose in the world. In the show, we hear AI Evan interact on the phone, often hilariously, with a series of interlocutors, starting with customer service representatives and scammers and building to two sessions with an unwitting human therapist via the online platform Better Help.
Shell Game made several best-of-the-year lists, and Ratliff says it broke even. (The revenue came almost entirely from subscriptions to an affiliated Substack.) Then, it won a $50,000 prize from the Independent Media Initiative, which made it profitable. But breaking even is a tough business model, and prize money isn’t something you can count on. For Season Two of Shell Game, Ratliff is collaborating with the independent podcast studio Kaleidoscope, which has given him more a financial cushion while still allowing him to make the show he wants to make. “They’re into telling a story that sounds as far from any formula as possible and helping us try to do that,” Ratliff said. That’s how the future might look: smaller, more independent, more experimental, but also with fewer shows being made and basically no hope of striking rich.
But that future is hard to see from the present. At the moment, the narrative podcasts that are making it to the top of the Apple charts are tabloid-y true-crime, often affiliated with TV shows like Dateline and 20/20. Pineapple Street has vanished, Wondery has been gutted, and many of the surviving production companies are trying desperately to pivot to weekly chat shows. Nearly every producer and editor I worked with in podcasting — across seven years and 12 shows — is struggling to find work. Some are piecing together freelance gigs doing field reporting for news-radio outlets. A few are staffing chat shows. One talented producer I know is now working for a fly-fishing magazine. Another started a successful food Substack. An entire generation of journalists who started in podcasting are leaving and are unlikely to return. And many of the most respected and experienced producers, editors, and reporters in the industry are out in the cold too. Connie Walker is one of them.
When I spoke to Walker in late June, she was about to start a new job as a journalism professor at Toronto Metropolitan University. There, she’d be continuing the work she began in Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s, collecting the testimony of residential school survivors and building out an archive of the abuses that took place. That work is certainly worthwhile, but when we spoke, Walker was open about the fact that her “new dream” was to turn that work into another podcast.
In retrospect, the boom years of narrative podcasting were always a kind of dream. When she went to Gimlet, Connie Walker felt like she’d won the lottery. Sometimes I felt like I had, too. Now, that era is definitively over. A few people got rich. Many more came out the other side with no job, and if they were lucky, a few months severance. Whatever comes next will be built up in the shadow of that history — that it all looked so good and that so many of us bought into the mirage.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ashley Carman / Bloomberg:
How Spotify’s Discovery Mode has become the new normal in music marketing, five years after its 2020 launch when it faced a backlash and “payola” accusations
Music Industry’s Go-To Promotional Tool Went From ‘Payola’ Accusations to Widespread Use
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-08-21/music-industry-s-go-to-promotional-tool-went-from-payola-accusations-to-widespread-use?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc1NTkzMTYyMiwiZXhwIjoxNzU2NTM2NDIyLCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJUMUQxNThHUFdDSk0wMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiIwNEFGQkMxQkYyMTA0NUVEODg3MzQxQkQwQzIyNzRBMCJ9.jYkfjGETNHqq_JTjvp_FDxT5VuXmgzEAIv7OGycZero&leadSource=uverify%20wall
Spotify’s Discovery Mode allows rightsholders to boost their songs in exchange for a lower royalty rate. Most everyone is using it.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Alex Weprin / The Hollywood Reporter:
Fox warns customers that Fox News and other channels could be pulled from YouTube TV “unless Google engages in a meaningful way soon” in a carriage dispute — Fox began warning customers Monday that its channels could be pulled from YouTube TV unless they reach a new deal soon.
Google says Fox channels to go dark on YouTube TV if agreement isn’t reached
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/25/google-youtube-tv-to-lose-fox-channels-if-new-deal-isnt-reached.html
YouTube says Fox channels are at risk of going off of YouTube TV if the two companies don’t reach a deal by Wednesday evening.
The Alphabet company said Fox is asking for payments “far higher” than is what’s comparable.
The Fox standoff represents the latest contract dispute between content companies and delivery networks as viewers increasingly ditch cable.
Jennifer Elias / CNBC:
YouTube says that Fox is asking for payments “far higher than what partners with comparable content” receive; YouTube TV’s renewal date with Fox is Wednesday
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
YouTube rolls out Hype, which lets users boost creators with under 500K subscribers via a hype button that gives videos points, in the US and 38 other countries
YouTube’s ‘Hype’ feature that boosts smaller creators launches globally
https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/26/youtubes-hype-feature-that-boosts-smaller-creators-launches-globally/
YouTube’s “Hype” feature, which allows fans to help their favorite creators get discovered, is rolling out globally, the company announced Tuesday. First introduced at Google’s Made On YouTube event in 2024, the feature — a dedicated button that appears below the existing “like” button — will become available on videos from creators with fewer than 500,000 subscribers.
The feature is now available across 39 countries, including the U.S., U.K., Japan, Korea, Indonesia, and India.
Viewers have the opportunity to hype up to three videos per week for a favorite creator. This gives the video points, which helps it gain traction on a new, ranked leaderboard that YouTube users can find in the Explore menu. To make hyping fair, YouTube says it will give smaller creators a bigger boost. That means if a creator has fewer subscribers, they’ll get a bigger bonus when fans hype their video.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nokia haastoi mediayhtiö Paramountin oikeuteen patenttiloukkauksista
https://mobiili.fi/2025/08/23/nokia-haastoi-mediayhtio-paramountin-oikeuteen-patenttiloukkauksista/
Nokia on haastanut yhdysvaltalaisen mediayhtiön Paramount Skydancen oikeuteen patenttiloukkauksista.
Nokian mukaan mediayhtiö loukkaa jopa 13 Nokian patenttia, jotka liittyvät videoiden suoratoistoteknologiaan. Tarkemmin mediayhtiön palveluista Paramount+, Pluto TV, BET+ ja muut loukkaavat Nokian videoiden pakkaukseen liittyviä patentteja.
Nokia haastoi Paramountin oikeuteen Yhdysvaltojen lisäksi myös Brasiliassa.
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/01/why-some-songs-give-you-chills/
Tomi Engdahl says:
”No niin”, sanoi mies videolla ja miljoona ihmistä katsoi – näin Vilpe Oy nousi Tiktok-suosikiksi
Kattojen ilmastointiratkaisuja ja älykattoja tekevä Vilpe Oy löysi reseptin, jonka avulla Tiktok-videot muuttuvat kansainväliseksi bisnekseksi.
https://www.op-media.fi/yrittajyys/nain-vilpe-oy-nousi-tiktok-suosikiksi/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Let’s not celebrate the cassette revival just yet.
Full story: https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/02/reasons-cassette-comeback-never-huge-vinyl-cd/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/17KfMRdXXv/
VLC has quietly achieved an incredible milestone—6 billion downloads worldwide. What makes this feat even more remarkable is that it has done so without relying on ads, staying true to its promise of delivering a clean, user-first experience.
For years, the open-source media player has been praised for its simplicity, reliability, and ability to play just about any file format. Unlike many platforms that compromise usability for revenue, VLC has earned loyalty by keeping things ad-free and accessible to all.
It’s no wonder users call it a “true tech legend.” In a world where most apps chase profits, VLC stands out as proof that respect for users and powerful functionality can go hand in hand.
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1GBBfQ2TJb/
Major news from CES 2025:
VLC Media Player has introduced AI-powered subtitles and real-time translations for any video in any language.
The standout feature is that it works entirely offline. No cloud, no internet — just open-source AI running securely on your device.
This update has the potential to transform how people watch content worldwide, making movies, lectures, and streams accessible and easy to understand for audiences everywhere.
VLC is no longer just a media player — it has become a truly universal platform.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tiny, cheap, boring—yet it tricks your GPU into pulling full power on command.
https://www.xda-developers.com/hdmi-dummy-plug-smallest-cheapest-useful-pc-gadget/
Tomi Engdahl says:
VLC Media Player, developed by VideoLAN, is a highly versatile open-source media player that supports nearly all video and audio formats, including MP4, AVI, MKV, MOV, FLV, MP3, and more, using built-in FFmpeg libraries. It handles streaming, DVDs, damaged files, and subtitles, but may struggle with rare DRM-protected or proprietary formats.
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.xda-developers.com/hdmi-dummy-plug-smallest-cheapest-useful-pc-gadget/
Tomi Engdahl says:
More audiophiles are reporting hearing cracks, pops, and surface noise on some “Master” quality streams: https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/06/tidal-qobuz-busted-vinyl-high-res-audio/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Here are the 15 most beautiful speakers ever built, as ranked by thousands of audiophiles: https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/09/most-beautiful-speakers-ever-built-ranked-audiophiles/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dangerous errors from AI have already caused wiring mistakes that would instantly short an amp.
Full story: https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/09/audiophile-ruins-system-bad-ai-advice/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Spotifyyn saapui häviötön, “täydellinen” äänenlaatu
https://dawn.fi/uutiset/2025/09/10/spotify-havioton-lossless-musiikki-julkaistiin#google_vignette
Vuosien odotuksen jälkeen ruotsalaislähtöinen suoratoistojätti Spotify on vihdoin lisännyt palveluunsa mukaan häviöttömän äänenlaadun.
Häviötön äänenlaatu tarkoittaa sitä, että musiikki on pakattu siten, että se on toistettaessa täysin identtinen alkuperäisen lähdemateriaalin kanssa.
Häviöttömät pakkausmuodot, kuten vaikkapa MP3, hukkaavat osan alkuperäisen kappaleen laadusta, mutta pyrkivät minimoimaan kuulijan korvaan kuuluvan äänenlaadun menetyksen omilla algoritmeillaan. Mutta täydelliseen, alkuperäistä vastaavaan äänenlaatuun ne eivät pysty.
Häviötön äänenlaatu onkin ollut yksi Spotifyn kanssa kilpailevien suoratoistopalveluiden, etenkin Tidalin, myyntivalteista. Harrastajat taas ovat tehneet omista CD-levyistään usein häviöttömiä digitaalisia kopioita omaan käyttöönsä mm. häviötöntä FLAC-formaattia käyttäen.
Spotifykin käyttää FLAC-formaattia häviöttömän toiston formaattinaan. Tarkemmin sanottuna käytössä on 24-bittinen, 44,1 kHz näytteenottotaajuutta käyttävä FLAC.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Oliver ei osaa laulaa eikä soittaa mutta sai levytyssopimuksen – ”Minulla ei ole lainkaan musikaalista lahjakkuutta
https://muropaketti.com/tietotekniikka/tietotekniikkauutiset/oliver-ei-osaa-laulaa-eika-soittaa-mutta-sai-levytyssopimuksen-minulla-ei-ole-lainkaan-musikaalista-lahjakkuutta/#google_vignette
Tomi Engdahl says:
As AI Reigns, Students’ Math and Reading Scores Just Hit an All-Time Low
What a great time to shut down the Department of Education.
https://futurism.com/ai-students-math-reading-scores-all-time-low
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.alphalabsaudio.com/defeedback/?fbclid=IwT01FWAMtad1leHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHrmz7E9aAD5VeEn06C-ik9LIHCezgLgE-X0LCDa2MSwxNUHZEv4PEc0HyAFU_aem_r9WCt4qUePsAhdqCyKYXCA
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.stara.fi/2016/01/06/babypod-tuo-musiikin-kohtuun/#Echobox=1756889281
https://babypod.net/en/inicio/
https://www.ivfforyou.com/producto/babypod/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.newlyswissed.com/turntable-roundabout-in-switzerland/
Tomi Engdahl says:
People tend to choose open-back headphones not only for their vivid qualities and large soundstages, but also because high-end manufacturers tell them to.
Full story: https://www.headphonesty.com/2020/01/closed-back-or-open-back-headphones/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Two ways to look at it. Get your “distortion” in the beginning while recording and be as accurate as possible in playback or accept a certain amount of distortion in playback. Tubes and MOSFETs tend to add even harmonics when they go nonlinear. Even harmonics are much more pleasing to the ear. Odd harmonics that occur when bipolar transistors saturate, not so much.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Music Production ≠ Music Reproduction
Tubes only belong at the creation stage. They have absolutely no place at the listening end.
Both are determined by subjective impression of what sounds musical to the individual, beat the mastering engineer or the end listener