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Podcast Pick: A16z

I have been enjoying the A16z podcast for the last couple of years. It’s regular, dense content on a wildly varying set of technical subjects. I love hearing Benedict Evans talk about, well, anything–I find him quite insightful. But the podcast is not so dense I can’t listen to it on 1.4x speed.

I tend to listen to the more software specific episodes on APIs and on B2B2C business models (which seems to have been deleted). But every so often it’s nice to be jarred out of my world and listen to an episode about product or space or investing.

You can listen to past episodes here and get the RSS feed here.

 

How to get a YouTube channel as a podcast for $15/month

Want to create a podcast from a YouTube channel, but don’t have access to the original video or don’t have the time to set up a podcast?

Here’s how to set this up, in 6 easy steps.

  1. Find the YouTube channel URL, something like: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsjtSWdw9t1XlBnyrV7mAOQ
  2. Note the part after channel: UCsjtSWdw9t1XlBnyrV7mAOQ
  3. Download and install YouCast.  This is a Windows only program, so if you don’t have access to Windows, or you want to have this accessible across the world without leaving your home PC on, I’d recommend signing up for Azure hosting.  You can have a decent server (an A0) for ~$15/month.  I just used a standard Windows 2008 server, but I did have to upgrade .NET.  This and this will be helpful for setup.
  4. Start up YouCast, and set the channel id to what you have above.  Select the audio output format, and generate the URL.  You’ll get a funky looking URL like http://hostname:22703/FeedService/GetUserFeed?userId=UCsjtSWdw9t1XlBnyrV7mAOQ&encoding=Audio&maxLength=0&isPopular=False
  5. Set YouCast up as a service.  I used NSSM.  Otherwise when your server reboots (as it occasionally will), you won’t have access to your podcast.
  6. Add the URL to your podcast catcher (I like Podcast Addict).

For bonus points, use a service like FeedBurner or RapidFeeds to capture stats about the podcast and make the URL nicer.speaker photo

I did this for one of my favorite YouTube channels, the Startup Therapist.  (I’ve asked Jeff at least once to start a podcast, and I hope he does soon.)

Not sure exactly what the issue is, but even though the podcast RSS feed has all the episodes in it, I can only download three podcasts per channel at a time.  I’ve no idea why–whether it is a limit of Podcast Addict, YouTube, YouCast or some combination.  But apart from that this solution works nicely.