What Podcasting 2.0 means for you (in 2026, in plain English)
If you've read anything about the "open podcasting" fight in the last few years, you've probably seen the phrase Podcasting 2.0. And if you're like most listeners, it probably sounded like industry jargon — a slogan for people who care about specs.
It isn't a slogan. Podcasting 2.0 is a small set of additions to the RSS format that already ships real, useful features you can experience today in independent podcast apps. Transcripts you can search. Chapters you can jump between. Host and guest names attached to episodes. A way to tip a podcaster directly, no ad network involved. Live episodes alongside a regular feed.
This post walks through what's actually in the spec, what works right now, and what it means for you as a listener. In plain English.
The 30-second version
Podcasting 2.0 is an open standard — a public specification, maintained by Podcast Index and documented at podcasting2.org. It is not owned by any company. Any podcaster can adopt it. Any podcast app can support it. Any developer can implement it.
Structurally, it's a set of extra tags that podcasters can add to their RSS feed alongside the existing standard ones. If an app knows how to read those tags, it can offer features that older apps can't. If an app doesn't know how to read them, nothing breaks — the podcast still plays as normal.
That "nothing breaks" bit is the important part. Podcasting 2.0 is fully backwards-compatible. It layers on top of what already works. Which is why podcasters can adopt it without cutting off listeners on older apps.
The tags that matter to you as a listener
Here are the five that have the most direct impact on how you actually experience a podcast. There are dozens of others in the spec — chapters of a chapter, geographic tags, alternate audio streams — but these five are the ones you're most likely to notice.
podcast:transcript — episode transcripts
The podcaster provides a transcript file alongside the audio, and any app that supports the spec can display it, search it, or use it as a jumping-off point. The transcript tag documentation supports plain text, HTML, WebVTT (the same format subtitles use), and JSON.
What this feels like as a listener: you can Cmd-F the episode. You can jump to a specific quote. You can scan a summary to decide if the episode is for you. Apps that support this can also power search — you can find "which episode of Hard Fork covered Hugging Face" without listening to five of them to find out.
podcast:chapters — chapter markers
The podcaster (or a tool the podcaster uses) publishes a small chapters file that tells apps where each segment of the episode begins. The chapters tag documentation uses a JSON format, which means chapters can include images and links per segment — not just timestamps.
What this feels like as a listener: the interview episode you're on shows a clear "Introduction / Guest background / The main argument / Q&A" structure. You can skip the intro. You can jump to the segment you actually want. On a three-hour show, this is the difference between listening and hunting.
podcast:person — who's on the episode
Every episode carries structured information about the people involved — hosts, co-hosts, guests. Each entry has a role, an optional photo, and a link. The person tag documentation is straightforward: name, role, optional image, optional URL.
What this feels like as a listener: if you loved a guest on one show, you can see who they are and find other podcasts they've been on. You get proper attribution on interview shows. And if a show cycles through co-hosts, you know which one is on this episode before you press play.
podcast:value — value-for-value
This is the tag that lets you send a small payment directly to a podcaster while you listen, without going through an ad network or a subscription tier. The mechanism is usually Bitcoin Lightning micropayments (fractions of a cent per minute you listen), which sounds more complicated than it is — in practice, you fund a wallet in your app once and it handles the rest.
What this feels like as a listener: you can support the shows you actually listen to, in proportion to how much you listen. No ads. No paywall. Boostagrams (little messages attached to a tip) show up in the podcaster's dashboard, so they know it landed. Independent shows on independent apps have quietly been running on this model for a few years now.
If Value 4 Value isn't your thing, that's fine — nothing forces you to use it. But if you've ever wanted a way to say thanks with more than a review, this is it.
podcast:live — live episodes in the same feed
The show's regular RSS feed carries a marker when a live episode is happening now. Apps that support the tag can notify you or surface a "listen live" button on the show. When the live episode ends, the recording appears in the feed like any other episode.
What this feels like as a listener: live tapings show up in your podcast app instead of on a Twitch page. Same show, same subscription, live is just another mode of the feed. This is one of the more subtle Podcasting 2.0 features and it's still growing, but it removes a whole layer of "where is the live version streamed" friction.
Which apps actually support this
Support varies. Broadly:
- Independent apps have led on Podcasting 2.0 adoption. Podverse, Fountain, Podcast Guru, Podcast Addict, AntennaPod, and Podtastic all support significant subsets of the spec. Some (Podverse, Fountain) support most of it.
- Larger commercial apps have been slower. Apple Podcasts supports transcripts (implemented in its own way — not via
podcast:transcript, though the spec is compatible). Spotify does not use Podcasting 2.0. Amazon Music does not either. The apps that do are mostly the independent ones.
You can find a fuller directory at Save Open Podcasting's app list — every app on that page is independently developed and either supports Podcasting 2.0 or is aligned with the principles behind it.
Where Podtastic sits
Podtastic supports transcripts, chapters, and person tags. (For what transcripts are actually good for, see the complete guide to podcast transcripts.) Value 4 Value is not currently in the app — I've been focused on other features first. Live support ships as a straightforward addition once the tag becomes common enough that most shows can use it.
More broadly, the Smart Features in Podtastic — Smart Skip, Smart Summaries, Smart Topics — are additive on top of what Podcasting 2.0 provides, not a replacement for it. Where the show provides a transcript, we use it. Where the show doesn't, our on-device transcription produces one anyway. Podcasting 2.0 gives listeners a baseline; Smart Features try to raise the ceiling.
Why any of this matters
Podcasting is one of the last widely-used consumer media formats where the underlying technology is genuinely open. You can start a podcast today, host it wherever you want, and every podcast app in the world can subscribe to it via an RSS feed nobody controls but you. That is the direct opposite of how modern video, music, and social media work.
Podcasting 2.0 is what keeps that true as the medium matures. Without a modernised open standard, the pressure to add "transcripts, chapters, structured people data, monetisation" would come from the biggest apps building it into their walled systems. And the incentive for podcasters to lock into one of those apps — and only that app — would grow every year.
The tags above are what stops that. Adopted by the podcaster's RSS feed, honoured by the app the listener picks. No middleman. No exclusive deals. Everyone reading the same spec.
That is what "open podcasting" actually means in 2026. Not a slogan. A shipping set of RSS tags, in feeds today, working in your podcast app if it's built to read them.
If you're new to Podtastic, it's an independent podcast app built for listeners, not for advertising companies. It supports the parts of Podcasting 2.0 that most directly help listeners today — transcripts, chapters, host info — and pairs them with our Smart Features. Download now to try it, or read more about the open podcasting fight at Save Open Podcasting.
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