Category: Misc
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HBO Max and Paramount+: What It Might Mean For Sports
Today the deal was done, and Paramount took over Warner Bros. Discovery in a massive deal that has much of Hollywood quaking. There were some last minute wrinkles with a deal being struck a couple of weeks ago with a group of US Attorneys General, with the general view being that they folded and didn’t…
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Visiting The Bayeux Tapestry at The British Museum
5 October UPDATE: This was originally written before The British Museum announced some changes in how you can view The Bayeaux Tapestry. Starting 5 October 2026, there is an audio guide, more signage and more seating amongst other things. But much of the below still stands. I thought that it might be useful to document…
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Ofcom Podcast Survey and Audio Report 2026
Sorry – this year’s version of this summary is a little late coming out! At this year’s Podcast Show in London, Ofcom launched the results of their 2026 Podcast Survey and Audio Report. Once again Mark Pearson, Senior Analyst at Ofcom presented some of the findings in a session at The Podcast Show alongside Francesca…
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Are Podcasts on Netflix Working?
As mentioned in Podnews today, there have been a few stories about whether podcasts on Netflix are actually doing the business for the streamer. This is a subject that I’m very interested in, and covered a little in my recent Signals in the Static presentation at The Podcast Show. In essence, my argument was that…
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Signals in the Static from The Podcast Show 2026
This year was the fifth edition of The Podcast Show in London, and I have been to all of them. In fact, I have spoken at three of them, including this year when the subject of my talk was Signals in the Static: A Data-Driven Guide to the Podcast Landscape. The objective of the talk…
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RAJAR “MIDAS” Winter 2025
A couple of weeks after the regular RAJAR release, and we now have the most recent MIDAS release from RAJAR. First, a reminder that this uses a different methodology to the regular RAJAR release, based on a sample of 1,538 former RAJAR diarists who completed a 7-day online diary. 96% of the population consume some…
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Media Mergers/Takeovers
There are three different media mergers or takeovers happening right now that could seismically upset the existing media ecosystem to a greater or lesser extent. These are: While each of these three is different, in scale, and importance, whether they go ahead seems to me to rest on how you define the markets they operate…
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Spotify’s Top 50 UK Podcasts
Spotify Unwrapped is the company’s big promotional push at the end of each year, which dutifully allows listeners across the world to share their listening habits from the previous year (well – 11 months). As well as providing listeners with their own personal lists, Spotify also publishes a lot of cumulative data. Here’s what Spotify…
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“Half the people on the planet will be AI…”
Huh? This is a quote from the CEO of a new podcast company in a piece in the Hollywood Reporter. Jeanine Wright was formerly Chief Operating Officer at Wondery and is now heading up Inception Point AI which basically plans to flood the market with AI generated podcasts which might be produced for less than…
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Ice Road: Vengeance
I have watched this so that you don’t have to. Ice Road: Vengeance is one of those films that once upon a time would have been on the shelves of Blockbuster as you quizzically looked at the box, trying to remember whether you could recall the film’s cinema release. You couldn’t, because it didn’t get…
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What Is Adobe Doing About Audio?
I can’t help thinking that Adobe isn’t giving audio as much attention as it might. More specifically, the software giant is not giving its audio products as much attention as it should. Adobe makes a lot of software, and much of it is available to subscribers of their Creative Cloud bundle. I’ve been paying for…
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Archiving Podcasts
This week, it was announced that WTF with Marc Maron would be ending its run after 16 years. The show will end sometime in the autumn (aka ‘fall’) having produced more than 1,600 episodes over that time. Maron’s podcast was one of the big early titles, and it’s fair to say that although Maron was…