Is Video Podcasting Hard? What We Learned After One Month

After a month of publishing Buzzcast as a video podcast, we have some real stats, workflow notes, and one very painful mistake to talk about.

In this episode, we check in on our video podcasting experiment: how many people are actually watching, what Apple Podcasts video stats seem to tell us, and what surprised us most.

We talk through what happened when a full video recording failed, why editing video is so much harder than audio, how difficult video files are to transfer, and why an audio setup is much easier than a video setup.

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Transcript

Is It Clap On Three?

Jordan 0:00

One, two, three. I'm sorry. I had this moment of like, is it one, two, clap or one, two, three clap? Welcome back to Buzzcast, the podcast about all things podcasting from the people at Buzzsprout. So we've been experimenting with video podcasting for about a month now with Buzzcast. And I thought we'd kind of loop around and revisit how we're feeling about video podcasting now that we've been doing it for a while. What do you guys think?

Alban 0:37

I I

Early Video Stats

Alban 0:38

love this idea. I was looking at our stats and I don't know. What do you what do you guys think? Um is this surprising or not? We've done five episodes. And pretty much since the beginning, we fluctuated between seven and almost 13% of all of our plays. Is this the right way to say it, Kevin? Plays have been video plays. I mean, we still call them, we still call them downloads.

Kevin 1:04

10% of our downloads are video plays. I mean, it is a more accurate representation to say plays, probably when you're talking about HLS video than it would be if you were talking about downloading an MP3 file. Well, I say it this way: it's not uncommon for podcasting apps to download the entire MP3 file when you're just doing audio podcasting and have it queued up for you. Whether it does that the second that you hit play and it just like downloads the whole thing for the first time and then it sits there and it doesn't really matter if you listen to it or not, or if it does a background download, typically it grabs the whole file. With HLS video, it only grabs like bytes as you're watching the video. So I'm not aware, unless you go into like the Apple Podcast app and switch the default preference to kind of like play on demand to download the video, it won't download the video. And that setting is actually pretty buried. So for the most part, at least right now, we have a pretty high confidence that if we actually track a video play through the Apple Podcast app, that it was because people were actually watching it.

Alban 2:07

So what do you think of these numbers? Between seven and thirteen percent, and about on average, it's ten percent of all of the downloads do play some of the video. And so it'll be somebody who flips over to video for some portion of it, and so we would then characterize it as a video stat. What do you think? Does that seem surprising to you? I don't think it's surprising.

Kevin 2:26

I don't look at our stats all that often. So I don't know. On a like before we started doing video at all, was Apple like I'm guessing like 40%? Is that a pretty good memory of kind of our total all of our plays in Apple Podcast App was representing about 40% of our downloads, is that right?

Jordan 2:42

Yeah, I think it's about that.

Alban 2:44

From the last five episodes, it was fifty-eight percent. Okay. And so if it's fifty-eight percent and ten percent in total is video, it's really something like half of them are just audio plays on Apple Podcasts, and ten percent are Apple Podcasts video plays, somewhere in that range.

Kevin 3:03

So are you saying half of the people who listen to Apple Podcasts are watching some video? No, no, no.

Alban 3:09

About one in six. Half of the people who listen to this show only are listening and they are listening on Apple Podcasts. You know, when we cut out Spotify, I think that it's a pretty it just makes us very Apple heavy. Oh, wait, what's that?

Kevin 3:25

Breaking news? We have never made an announcement, but I the show is actually on Spotify now.

unknown 3:32

Yeah.

Alban 3:33

It is, which after after years and years of debate, what caused us to get it put into Spotify, Kevin?

Kevin 3:40

Well, we I I think that's an interesting topic for a later time. Some of our views and opinions have changed on Spotify, so we should probably cover that at some point. But but the biggest thing, like like what why did we just change randomly like out of the blue, was because we've been working on the spotio spot spotio, the spotify video integration. And we needed a feed to test. And we hate testing with customer feeds because god forbid something goes wrong. So we often test with our own stuff because like we break it. Well, I don't know. We break it, we buy it. We already own it. So we already own it.

Jordan 4:14

But yeah, I thought you were saying we break it well.

Kevin 4:16

If we're gonna break something, it better be ours and not somebody else's.

Alban 4:19

So we test with our stuff. Well, 46 people have listened to this podcast on Spotify. So if you want to be in the first 50, you can hop over to the Spotify app and check it out.

Kevin 4:30

Yeah, slow growth over there right now. Again,

Some Video Podcasting Struggles

Kevin 4:33

you guys are gonna shoot me if I go off outline, but I'm not looking at the outline, so I don't know what we're supposed to be talking about. But I think the bigger story is what happened last week. And I I I want to share that with everybody.

Alban 4:42

This is right on outline, Kevin. Oh, is it? I I put where what where did we hit hiccups and then number one recording? Yeah. So why don't you start us there?

Kevin 4:51

Well, last week we did an entire episode. We did it twice. Our our episode about finding a co-host, we actually recorded twice. So if you liked last week's episode, it was because we got so good at it because we had to do the entire thing twice.

Jordan 5:08

It was funny because I think it was one of our stronger episodes that we've had.

Alban 5:11

It was definitely better the second time. I think we got a bit, we were all on the same page. We kind of have an idea of the flow of the episode. There's a few things that we ended up having lots of opinions and thoughts on, and other things that didn't really work the first time. So we kind of moved past them.

Kevin 5:28

We record video and we do it remotely, and you rely on software to do that, and the software that we used glitched out. And so it wasn't a quality issue in terms of the content. Although I think I agree with you guys that the second time we did it, we did it better. But none of us wanted to do it again. Like we were happy enough with the first take, but um, for whatever reason, the software glitched out and Alban's uh audio and video was not usable. And so we recorded an entire episode on Tuesday, and then Wednesday morning we did it all again. So that's a bummer. And and I could see that being like a showstopper for people who it's not your job to be able to do that. Like at Buzzsprout, we do this as part of our job, so we're able to justify taking in another two hours the next day and you know moving other work around because this is a very important part of what we do. But if you just you know only have a couple hours a week to do a podcast and then you lost that completely, that could be a big deal. And and it's not that it's never happened to us before in the audio-only world. We have had problems in the audio-only world. They're easier to recover, the higher probability of being able to recover. It's easier to cover up mistakes or little audio glitches or audio artifacts and stuff like that. Like you can just cut that stuff out. But when you're on video, it can get very difficult to do that.

Alban 6:45

Yeah, we've had at least three times where we've had reasonable issues on audio, you know, a little garbled audio, or I had one time I had an AirPods case and I was kind of like just flicking it in my hand, and Jordan's like, I don't know what it is, but there's this weird clicking sound the whole episode I'm editing out. Uh, we had an episode where my roadcaster kind of just fell apart mid-recording. So all of those we were able to recover enough that we said we're happy with the way this episode turned out. When video starts dropping frame rates and now it's like a garbled video that you can't, it's not smooth. You're just gonna have to edit out every bit of me being on camera. Uh, or there it would there was no video really that was gonna be usable besides like still frames, and I would have looked like a Ken Burns documentary.

Jordan 7:40

I definitely stand by our original statements, like in the past, that adding video just makes things so much more complicated, even just if we're looking at it from an editing perspective. Because when we do have those moments of like garbled audio or something like that, it is so easy for me to clip a similar word or something like that, or do a pickup later, like just record like maybe that sentence again later and then just slap it into the original recording. And no one's any the wiser. But with video, you can't do that because you know, your positions change, the lightings change. And so we can't just like clip a word from a single other sentence and then put it earlier in the episode because then it would just be like this like flash of a different image and it would be really weird. Like it's it's so much harder, and you have to get such a cleaner take when you're recording with video.

Alban 8:34

Yeah. What about other editing things you've been doing, Jordan? This last episode, if I'm right, we actually recorded that on Thursday. And so you kind of speed edited that to get it out on Friday. What is the editing looking like now?

Jordan 8:48

Um, editing, I'm getting a lot better with it. I'm I'm finding like plugins and things that'll make it a lot easier. So there's this great plugin that I found called Autopod, and you just like run it through and it just finds who is speaking in the track and then we'll just cut to that person. So it's just this automatic cut. But then it's like, well, we want three up. We want to see three of you on screen at the same time so we can see all of you reacting at the same thing. And it's like, okay, so that's gonna be now a fourth track because we have Jordan, we have Alban, and we have Kevin. And now I'm gonna have all three of them on a new video. And so I have to like place the faces and then have that cut in as an extra one. And then it's sometimes like, well, I want both of our reactions, but I don't want someone else's reactions. And so it's like, I almost want to add like three extra tracks where it's just uh Jordan and Kevin and it's just Alban and Kevin, and it's Jordan and Alban. Like, you know, it's just, and so then all of a sudden you're working with like six tracks instead of just three. It's so much more complicated when you allow it to get more complicated. So I don't know if I'm gonna be going up from like just the three people. I think I don't know if I'm gonna do more than that. I'm not good at that yet.

Kevin 10:06

Yeah. It's like anything else. You get lured in, right? Like uh oftentimes people in the video podcasting space have made arguments that it doesn't have to be super difficult, but it's hard to resist the temptation because this stuff is it's fun and everybody wants to, I don't know, always like be learning and always be making things better and leveling up. And before you know it, you know, to edit an hour-long podcast used to take you probably a couple hours, roughly. You've probably gotten to that point. Tell me now. I mean, I I think that you're probably at well beyond a couple hours. And it doesn't seem to be, I'm I'm guessing, again, I'm trying to put words in your mouth here as best as possible, but it doesn't seem to be like, um, oh, I'm getting faster so that time is coming down. It's like as you're getting faster, you're also adding complexity to your edit. So it's like it might take a good amount of time before you actually start to see a reduction.

Jordan 10:54

Yeah, just cutting all the corners and letting any sense of perfection go for last week's episode, like just saying, you know what, it is what it is, and we're just gonna leave these mistakes in, and I don't have time to fix this. So we're just gonna like bulldoze through it and hopefully people are just gracious about it. It took me seven hours to get that episode edited. That does not include the time that it took for us to get the file transfers of our like 4K video, which took, you know, forever. And like then uploading it and like having the video process or exporting the video, like that that kind of stuff took forever. Like it took my entire day, literally. Like I ate lunch and came back or ate dinner and came back and then like returned to working on it. Yeah. Like it just took forever. And that was me going, I'm gonna do the fastest edit I've ever done in my entire life.

Alban 11:49

That's right. You had some edit issue or some upload issues, Kevin, because you're on the company or the office Wi-Fi, which has just been slow lately. And so you're trying to upload this big old 4K video. What did you end up doing there?

Kevin 12:05

Uh, I just plugged into the router. Okay. To be able to do it. Yeah, our internet's not super slow here at the office, but we have a lot of people on the Wi-Fi. And so if you have a lot of people sharing your Wi-Fi, regardless of how fast it is, it's all kind of going through the same bottleneck. And so I had to get around that bottleneck by plugging straight into the router. Because when we uh do an hour-long episode and I'm recording 1080p video, my file at the end of the day, at the end of the recording, is about 20 gigabytes. Ooh, unnecessary zoom there. Did you see that? I did. Look at that. Oh, it's like reacting to my hands. That's the other thing. You get weird things that your cameras do. And do you keep it in? Do you edit it out? Sorry for audio only people. Let me explain what's happening. The camera's doing like an unnecessary zoom on my face as I move my hands around.

Jordan 12:48

Yeah.

Alban 12:48

The other thing I wanted to ask about was the Apple setup. Jordan, have we had a single issue with Apple or getting the videos in?

Jordan 12:55

No, no, not a single issue. It's been great.

Alban 12:58

Yeah.

Jordan 12:58

That's been the smoothest part.

Alban 13:00

Brand new. I would have thought this was the one thing that we would have had a problem with. None of the Buzzsprout HLS stuff has had an issue, and none of the Apple stuff has had an issue.

Kevin 13:09

Yeah. Apple's been rock solid. And I think the Apple, the uh Buzzsprout integration with Apple has been rock solid. So that's been that's been really good.

Jordan 13:15

Yeah, it's funny. Like, that's the easiest part. Like once I get to like upload into Buzzsprout, like I'm like, oh thank God. My work here is done.

Alban 13:24

Yeah. And last, is there anything else? I just put something else. Is there anything else we've run into that we'd wish we'd kind of been thinking about when we were starting video?

Kevin 13:33

I I would say that who knows what's going to happen with this show and where we record week to week. And so if Alban's in his home studio, if I'm in my home studio and and Jordan's in her home studio, then like we kind of got those set up before we started doing our first video episode, and everything's good to go. It's not that big of a deal. Like you kind of know the lighting in your space, you have your mic set up and everything. But on any given week, we might be in different places. So this week, I'm here in this little like uh, we call it a phone booth in the office, but it was not set up to do video. So we were scrambling last week to get this set up to be able to do video because Jordan's in the office this week. So she's in our real podcast studio. And Alban had to, he should be in the office today, but he's actually from home. And as soon as he gets done, he's gonna come in here because we don't just need microphones anymore. We need cameras and we need lighting and all this kind of stuff. So it just makes that environment more difficult. Uh in the past, if we travel or if we're gonna be in a different setup, like it's super easy to grab a USB microphone and just take that. You know, you can set it on your desk, you can just plug it into your computer, you don't need an interface, you don't the ability to do a low-tech audio setup, the it's so easy compared to video. There's there's never a really great way to do a simple video setup. At a minimum, you're talking about some sort of camera, and I guess you could try to use your phone. We haven't become experts at that yet, and some sort of decent lighting. So you could get in front of a window or something, but it's not easy, not nearly as easy as if we were just like, oh, no big deal. I'm on vacation this week. I still want to do the show. I'm gonna throw a uh Q2U or a 2100 in my bag, and that's all I need.

Jordan 15:12

Kevin, that's the exact thing that I was thinking about because I'm here in Jacksonville, away from home. I almost plu I almost uh brought my ATR 2100X with me. And because I was just gonna catch up on some recordings like in the hotel room, and then I looked at the schedule and I didn't have time. But that's the nice thing about like having an audio first podcast is like if I'm in a hotel room, I can just like get it on the comforter and record something real quick and do a USB microphone and it's not a big deal. But I was thinking about when we go to like Podfest or or something like that. And and you know, that episode that I did where I went around and I interviewed everyone um at the the conference. And I was thinking, like, man, if I do that again and we have like a video version of this, now I gotta have like either a selfie stick or someone follow me around with like a little camera.

Alban 16:01

Yeah, you're gonna be one of those people.

Jordan 16:03

Yeah. And it's it's just like, oh, I don't really want to do that.

Alban 16:08

Uh another way that the show has changed is it does feel a little bit more self-conscious where you're trying to look at the camera. You kind of notice yourself when you're watching your own video. Um, do either of you feel that?

Kevin 16:22

I can let go of it once we start recording. And once we start recording, I go right back into the the mode that I've kind of always been, whether it's audio or not. But at least in the uh like the initial setup, getting it to try to like look halfway decent is something you definitely think about. I think our setup time, we always chitter chatter a little bit before we start recording anyway, but that's probably at least 2x or 3x. So maybe we used to talk for like 10 minutes before we hit record and start going. Now it's like probably the first 10 minutes or so is just like, oh, do we have the right camera selected? Do we have the right microphone selected? How's the lighting? How's this angle? Yada, yada, yada. And we get all that. Then we still chat for 10 minutes, then we start recording. So I mean, everything is a little bit more, a little bit longer.

Jordan 17:04

I'm a little bit more self-aware of when I mess up. And instead of it being audio only, and I can pause mid-sentence, take a breath, think about what I want to say, and then start up again. I know I can't do that. I have to start from the beginning or I have to like redo the whole thing. Or, you know, if like one of us is talking and then we, you know, have a sneeze or like a cough or something, you can't just like continue with the thing. We have to just like start over again and I have to like get and do like a creative cut sort of thing. And it's it's just um, it's so interesting. And and one of the things that I'm trying to do is to like not get frustrated with it because I know that if I mess up on camera, it's so much harder to recover from than it is with audio. And so I get very like flustered easily if I am like stumbling over a word. Like, I mean, you guys have seen it where I can't get a sentence out and I'm just like, and then I have to like take a breath to calm down so I can like look like a normal person again and then start the phrasing over again. So that's been like my thing with the it hasn't been so much like self-consciousness. It's more just like keeping it cool and not getting flustered if I screw up on the camera.

Alban 18:17

All right. So to wrap up, I want to think about just what are we excited about doing with video in the future? We're we've this is episode six. I think we're committed to continuing for a bit longer. What I would really like to do is I'm excited to get this show onto YouTube and Spotify because the promise of Apple isn't hey, Apple's gonna massively skyrocket your numbers. It's that Apple is giving you a reliable way of getting video in front of your audience, um, no matter what. And so I'm really impressed one out of six people are watching the video. That is pretty good numbers for a show that's been around for years. YouTube, we're not on YouTube, Spotify, we just added, and we'll add video to Spotify relatively soon. I think we could see those numbers go up quite a bit. And even for you know, a relatively small audience show, I think there's an opportunity for BuzzCast to continue to grow. So I'm gonna be interested to see once we have those hooked up, what does the workflow look like and what does the growth look like?

Kevin 19:21

I don't know if it's anything I would change. I I think it's something I'm interested in working on, is that we continue as we continue to do video, we're learning more about what it takes to produce video and edit video. And I'm interested in trying to make that as easy as possible for any BuzzBrock customers that want to give video a shot themselves. So how can we make the recording experience as easy as possible? And how can we make the editing experience as easy as possible? Whether it's through education, whether it's through software, whether it's through integrations or any of that stuff. Like all options are open at this point, but we're learning so much every time we do an episode that I want to incorporate that into what we teach and what we provide.

Jordan 19:58

Yeah, I think mine is in like a similar vein because I want to better understand like the equipment and the software and specs and things like that because I don't I have a very, very basic understanding of that. I focused all my attention on audio first. And so I feel like I'm learning all this stuff again. And so I want to learn it again and understand it so that I can help other podcasters that, you know, are in like the online communities and stuff like that. Like that's that's a big one because I sometimes I see questions around like video podcasting. I'm just like, I can't even answer this. Like, I don't even know.

Alban 20:30

Yeah, we, I mean, that's what we ran into last episode, where I'm using a different camera and you know, we're all using slightly different setups, and there's just going to be a few things you don't really remember, don't really understand about each of the setups. So using something you know is really valuable. And I think we need to learn more about different setups so that we're able to teach people them.

Jordan 20:52

Yeah. And if you have any questions about video podcasting that maybe we can look into or answer for you, go ahead and tap the Send Us Famile link in the show notes. And until next time, thanks for listening and keep podcasting.