Should You Start a Video Podcast?

Dave Jackson [00:00:00]:
Should you start a video podcast?

Mike Russell [00:00:10]:
Welcome to your podcast consultant. Small lessons with big value. Now he wants to work with you. He's your podcast consultant, Dave Jackson.

Dave Jackson [00:00:24]:
You're thinking of starting a podcast and then you go, wait, what? You can actually podcast a video? Actually, you can. Technically, a podcast can be an audio file, typically an MP3 file, a video file, typically something like an M4A and a could also, if you wanted to be a PDF. And so the thing to think about, though, is an audio file is much, much smaller than a video file, especially if we're talking like 4K, which is just insane. And the other thing you have to ask yourself, is your video something that you have to watch? Is this a cooking show where you're showing how to cut up things? Is this a show for, you know, construction where you're showing how to put the nail in and things like that, Things that people have to watch? If it is, then keep it a video. If it's not, if it's you interviewing somebody else and you don't really need to see this to get the information, then I would recommend not putting that out as a video. Why? Well, number one, as I just said, the files are ginormous compared to an audio file. Hence, it takes longer to create a video file. It takes more equipment to make a video file.

Dave Jackson [00:01:45]:
You have to have lighting along with your microphone. The actual process of rendering a video is by far probably five times as long to render a video as it is an audio file. So if you don't have to make a video, don't. The other thing you have to think about is now, when somebody subscribes to your show, that video is going to download to their phone in most cases. And you have to ask yourself, is your audience going to be happy when instead of downloading a 40 megabyte audio file, they're downloading a 400 megabyte video file? And that leads me to something else. So what I do, if people say, hey, I'm thinking of starting a video podcast, by all means you can. Like I said, maybe it's something that's very visual. What I would do is I would create the HD version of it and upload that to YouTube.

Dave Jackson [00:02:43]:
Why? Because it's free. And so far, YouTube's not going anywhere. Normally I don't recommend free things because they don't stay in business, but YouTube has a good model with all their advertising. So upload that on YouTube and go ahead and put that on your website. So if somebody comes to your website, they can see the HD version, you'll get the play count on YouTube and all as well. But what about the podcast? I would purposely, in your software, create a smaller version. Realize that this is going to be seen maybe on somebody's tablet. I would actually make it for the phone because most people are going to watch this on your phone.

Dave Jackson [00:03:22]:
So consequently, because the screen size is smaller, you can actually make the file size smaller. And that way it won't take up quite as much room, it won't take up quite as much time to download, and it won't take up quite as much room, thus making it cheaper to host the media file. So if you want to make a video podcast, you can. That's my strategy. But one other thing to keep in mind, Apple will show a video podcast, but Stitcher, Spotify, Overcast, most of the top apps that people use do not accept video podcasts. People just kind of come to assume that a podcast is always audio. And as I said at the beginning, no, it's not. But realize that if you think you're going to get into all these apps, some of these apps will just ignore any particular episode that has video because they can't display it.

Dave Jackson [00:04:19]:
So that's kind of another check mark against not doing a video podcast. But it is a stream. And think of that. That's the flip side of that. If you go, well, there's not that many people doing a video podcast. The flip side of that is, yeah, there aren't that many people doing a video podcast. So there's going to be less competition in that niche of not a ton of shows there, not a ton of apps, but the people that want to find you will find you and there'll be less competition. So there is no kind of extreme right or extreme wrong answer here.

Dave Jackson [00:04:54]:
I just say, hey, if you're going to do this, do the HD version for YouTube, do the kind of low D version for the phone, a smaller phone size, and go from there. If you have any questions about video equipment or how I do my video things, feel free to go out to podcastconsultant.com click on the contact button and I would be happy to answer any questions you have. If you need some coaching, my mentorship program is back up. This is something I only let a few people in because I really want to give you my undivided attention. And that is now back open. So if you want to join the three month mentoring program again, you can go out to podcastconsultant.com and sign up today. Or if you just need some one on one consulting that again is also out at podcastconsultant.com thanks so much for listening. Now get out there and change your world one download at a time.