How to Know If Video Podcasting Is Worth It for Your Show | Alban Brooke, Buzzsprout

Everyone is talking about video podcasting right now. Almost nobody is talking about what it takes to do it well without turning your audio show into a full-blown production.

Alban Brooke, Head of Marketing at Buzzsprout, shares the one question podcasters should ask before adding video, why most hosts spend too much on gear too fast, and the reason audio-first podcasting still has a major advantage despite all the industry hype around video.

If you’ve been wondering whether adding video is worth it (or just another way for podcasters to burn out chasing growth), hit play and let’s dive in.

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2:16 – The One Question Podcasters Must Ask Before Starting Video 

4:58 – How to Start Video Podcasting Without Overspending on Gear

8:42 – The Guest Setup Mistake That Makes Video Podcasts Hard to Watch 

10:50 – The Video Editing Habit That Hurts Your Credibility

15:51 – The Reason Audio-First Podcasting Still Has an Advantage

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Episode Links:

Meet Alban Brooke: Buzzsprout.com

Listen to Buzzcast 

Get a $20 Buzzsprout credit with this link thanks to Alban and the Buzzsprout team.

Book a call with our partner, Resonate Recordings to get podcast production off your plate.

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Other Episodes You’ll Love: 

Apple Video Podcasts Are Here. Should You Actually Care?

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Video podcasting is going nowhere. We started seeing buzz around it with the dawning of YouTube. We've seen more buzz around it with Spotify's edition of video. And now Apple and Amazon are both following suit. But if you're an audio first podcaster who's questioning whether or not to add video to your show, well, you and me both, Alvin Brook, the head of marketing at BugSprout, is joining me in this episode to walk you through the do's and don'ts of getting started with video podcasting. And I can promise you this by the time you finish listening or watching this, you'll be able to laugh at me for doing all of the don'ts so well. But more importantly, you're gonna be able to know whether adding video is the right move for you or just a distraction. Welcome to Insider's Secrets to a Top 100 Podcast. I'm your host, Courtney Ellen. Let's make your podcast binge-worthy. Elman, welcome back.

SPEAKER_00 0:53

Courtney, it's great to continue being here because we just finished our last episode and now we're doing the bonus one.

unknown 0:59

I know.

SPEAKER_01 0:59

I'm always like with guests. I'm like, all right, we're gonna record two episodes. We're gonna get it all done in the time that we have blocked off. Don't worry, I'll keep an eye on the time. And then literally what I do is I hit pause, we have a little chat. Okay, how did that go? All right, here's what we're gonna do for the next one, and then boom, welcome back. And everyone's like, uh, thanks. So I love that you called that up. You know, I'm loving this conversation around video podcasting too, because it does give a dimension for people who are watching that they maybe didn't get from audio. There's so much that you have to transmit through audio, through your voice, that expression. But you know, here in video, I'm cracking up laughing and like you see it all on my face, which is great. And I think that, you know, for those that are considering adding video, there's a lot of pros and cons to consider. As you mentioned in the episode before this one, it's not something to just rush into with the assumption that it's going to grow your podcast, but going into it with an intent, with a strategy is definitely something worth considering and worth testing. So let's imagine someone has an audio-only podcast right now, aka me. If you were coaching me and you were telling me, okay, Courtney, here's what you need to do. And someone is weighing these things, the budgeting, the bandwidth, the editing, all the extra layers of complexity that video can add. What is the best way for someone to assess first and foremost whether they should add video to their podcast?

SPEAKER_00 2:13

One of the main things I ask people is, do you want to do video? Is this going to make it a more fun experience for you? Or are we adding a bunch of anxiety that's more likely to convince you to quit podcasting altogether? You know, we go to all these conferences and you've met thousands and thousands of podcasters in real life. And the most common questions you get are not around microphones and podcast hosts and stats. It's about how do you get comfortable with the sound of your own voice? I feel like I don't have anything really to say. I've got a bunch of imposter syndrome. I just, it's awkward. It did I sound too weird? And it's a lot of I'm just learning to create things online. And by just making it audio, we've reduced the anxiety quite a bit. You know, I can't watch a video without watching the way that I react and go, oh gosh, I didn't know I made that face. I didn't know I stood weird or whatever. So I think it's in many ways, video is much more difficult. And so it has to come from a place of you're excited to do video, you want to be on YouTube, you want to be focused on growth now. Now that you feel like you have a really good show, you obviously need to have the bandwidth. And that's, you know, not just internet bandwidth and time bandwidth, but also money and just the emotional bandwidth of learning a ton of new skills because video is quite a bit more difficult than audio is just throughout the entire process.

SPEAKER_01 3:48

Yeah. Can you walk us through? I know y'all did a lot of testing with video. You had a whole studio and everything at one point. And there were some things that you have told me along the way that y'all learned, lessons that you were like, okay, we didn't expect this going into it, but these were the takeaways we got coming out of it. And some of the things that people really should consider because, like you said, video is an order of magnitude much greater than audio. And as we sit here talking, I am thinking, I am almost overthinking certain things because it's like, oh my gosh, did I did I look weird? When, or what is my reaction as I'm sitting here and like, does that smile look awkward? You know, there's all these little things going through my head. And also, too, in creating my own podcast lately, I batch my content. I usually do about six episodes at a time, once a month. And when I'm doing solos, like I'm just so engrossed in what I'm teaching and talking about. I might be looking at my notes on the screen. Like, I forget to hit record if I'm doing video. So it's like, is that unconscious? Am I, am I really, do I really want to do video here? You know, so I'd be curious to hear what were some of those lessons learned in the testing that y'all have done for video. Because as you mentioned in the previous episode, video is not something that you're considering doing long term with Buzzcast.

SPEAKER_00 4:51

Well, it started for me in the beginning of the year. I knew I wanted us to be creating video content for Buzzsprout. And I said, you know, I just want to have some of this skill set in-house. We'd hired a few different video people over the years, and for different reasons, each one didn't work out. And I so I'm just teaching myself and I start by doing lots of you know YouTube shorts and just recording videos on my phone, and you just start noticing lots of things that you want to change. Okay, I could improve the lighting here. And so you go and you buy some lights and you start learning about lights, and then you realize the audio is a little bit off and it seems like it's not synced correctly. And so you spend a few hours figuring out why is this audio off? Okay, you fix that. Then you start recording on your computer and you go, okay, now I need to download OBS. Oh, my computer's a little slow and it's the hard drives full. Might be buying a new computer and now you've got to learn to edit. So you're downloading cap cut and you're not sure if you should be doing that or DaVinci Resolve. And it's the whole process we go through with podcasting, except each step is so much more expensive. Literally, we've recorded good episodes by just recording into the bottom of a phone and then using uh magic mastering or power clean on it, and it cleans it up and sounds pretty good. You don't get to do that with video. With video, you end up buying a pretty expensive camera, hooking it all up, you're spending money on lighting, you've got to find a good place with at least like the background is uh good enough that you're not embarrassed of it. It just makes everything more difficult. So, one of the things I've learned is you kind of have to just be excited about the process, excited to learn. I really enjoy kind of every day I was making at least one short. And the benefit with that was every day I was like, okay, I'm gonna try to fix this. Oh, I'm gonna try to get a little bit better at this and iterate quickly and keep putting stuff out there because if I ever sat with it for too long, I would just feel, you know, embarrassed and not want to put anything out. And so it was just every day getting in that habit of put something out there and move on to the next one.

SPEAKER_01 7:00

Well, I feel the same way. And I hope for you listening right now that you are hearing what we are saying. And two people who teach podcasting, who live and breathe in the podcasting industry that, like, yeah, we feel this too. And it is kind of awkward and it is kind of different, and we don't always have it all figured out. And we want to put our best foot forward and, you know, make it look like we know what we're talking about. And part of that is the background and the lighting and all the things. But it is, there's a steep learning curve with video. I have a $2,000 camera sitting here that I'm not using because my webcam is so much more comfortable for me to use and it's decent quality. Is it the best? Probably not. But it's just one of those things where there's a learning curve and I haven't taken the time to learn it. And so, meanwhile, that camera sits there. And so does the teleprompter, and so does the light over here, and so does all the things that, as you said, add up very quickly. I have a question for you for my podcast. So, Alban, when I do guest interviews, I always record video. I have video backpiled in my Google Drive folder from years of guest episodes. It would there be any downsides to taking some of those best episodes, editing them now, and then uploading them, say, to Apple.

SPEAKER_00 8:05

Yeah, I mean, you can do that once you're on bus route, one of our video plans. You can go back and add video to any of your old audio episodes. If you do edit them differently, we are going to replace the audio with the audio from the video files so that they do match up so people can flip between the two versions. But there is a value in getting it out there. Now, one of the downsides is if you told those guests, hey, I know we record video, but we're not going to use it, some of them are going to be pretty frustrated if they find out, like, oh, I I I didn't know you were putting that out there. I don't know if I'm comfortable with it. So you really do want to make sure that uh when you're recording video or audio, that your audience is excited about it. One big lesson that I learned when I used to do a video show years ago uh that we put on YouTube. If you get on and the person who you're interviewing doesn't have a good mic, doesn't have a good angle for their video, uh, doesn't have good lighting, that you take the time to coach them on how to get that set up correctly. There were lots of times where you just felt weird. And so I'd be like, you know, the AirPods are fine, you know, the background's okay. And then I would just regret it all the time when during the edit and go, you know, it's not good. And if 5,000 people watch this, that's gonna be a pretty big bummer, you know, that there's a bad lighting across this guy's face the whole time. So it's good to let people know ahead of time here's what the plan is, here's what we're gonna record, and then take the time to get it right and feel the 15 minutes of awkwardness coaching them through it, like you did for me before we started. Do that rather than suffer through it on the back end.

SPEAKER_01 9:55

Yes, we need to let everybody in on that too, because before we recorded this episode, for whatever reason, we just had tech issues. Alvin couldn't hear me. Like, I'm like typing in the chat, try this, try this. He's like plugging things in in different places. I'm like, we should have been recording all of this just to show people like exactly that we no one is immune. No one is immune from the tech issues and the things that we that we face and experience. I'm curious if there were two or three things that I absolutely must do in doing video and two or three podcasting mistakes that I should avoid when doing video, what would those be?

SPEAKER_00 10:27

Well, what I would 100% recommend in the beginning is try to get good lighting. Focus on lighting more than on getting a new camera. And as with everything, let's start relatively simply. So I think the simplest setup is you've got a nice MacBook Pro and you just record with the camera that's on there. But let's orient yourself so you're facing a window on a bright day, and so you've got just the natural light coming in, that's gonna look a lot better. Um, for anybody who you know takes a lot of photos, like you know where in your house you'll take a better photo. That's where we're gonna want you to set up so that you can record uh the video. When you're editing, one thing that really becomes obvious is doing quick cuts in audio is totally normal because you can cut out a phrase, but if you do that on video, you start getting a kind of jumpy interview. I was telling you this earlier. I watched a video and it was about somebody giving like this uh real estate investment tips. No clue if they were even accurate at all. But then when I started watching the video, I realized the guy was like jumping around in his seat the whole time because they were cutting out big moments of silence or just weird gaps. And so it ended up, I'm watching it and going, I don't trust anything. You know, one, this guy seems a little bit off anyway, but second, I don't even know if this was edited fairly or if he even said the stuff that I think he's saying because I see all these harsh jump cuts. So when you're editing video, you want to be a little bit more comfortable with longer pauses. You're gonna have to be a little bit okay um cutting entire segments rather than cutting single words because each of those cuts is really obvious on video.

SPEAKER_01 12:24

Yeah. And to your point that you mentioned a moment ago, the audio is going to match the video.

SPEAKER_00 12:31

Right.

SPEAKER_01 12:31

So it's not gonna be as forgiving. You know, sometimes I take a hatchet to episodes and I'm taking the ums and the ahs and all the things out of there, or like I said, this weird, so I'm gonna repeat that, or I'm gonna splice in a new clip because I didn't like the way I said that thing. And so audio is really forgiving in that sense. But with video, for me, that is what has felt the most vulnerable for adding video because it's like, oh my gosh, now everyone's gonna see all of my imperfections because I am not perfect at this. And I want to appear like I'm perfect at this, but I'm really not, guys. I'm really not. And so I think for me, it's gonna be a good experiment. Um, for me going into adding video, I'm not gonna do it for every episode. My plan personally is just stick with the guest episodes. I already record video for that. I've always left it open-ended with guests. I'm like, are we gonna share this anywhere? I'm like, we might one day, perhaps. So, you know, I might just pick the best of the best and start there. But I'm curious, you know, as we wrap this up, this whole conversation around video, I had Tom Rossi, who's the co-founder of Buzzprout, for those that don't know, here on the show, probably about 18 months ago at this point. And he made a great case for why audio-only podcasts still dominate. Obviously, a lot has happened in that 18-month time period. We've seen a lot of platform changes, we've seen a lot of shifts in the industry. Is saying that there's a place for audio-only podcasting or going so far as to say that it still dominates, is that completely obsolete now? Or where do you see us going here, say over the next 18 months as the industry continues to evolve?

SPEAKER_00 13:55

We've got 20 years of audio growth. And we have seen that pretty consistently. And recently we've layered on video growth on top of that. But audio is so resilient. Think about how many hundreds of hours of radio that everybody's listening to every week. You know, you listen to the radio in the car, you listen to podcasts on a run, you listen to music, we listen to audiobooks. There's all these areas of life. That video content, which kind of requires a full undivided attention, is not optimal. And so there's a world of competition around video. Okay. And when you do video, you are competing on YouTube with everybody else who does YouTube. You're competing with uh uh books where people are looking at the book and they're reading, you're competing with TikTok, you're competing with Netflix, you're in a high competition of a fully engaging medium. So with podcasts, the benefit is that the competition is lighter. You know, it's still music and audiobooks and podcasts, but it's a little bit lighter of a competition. And the way people engage with audio is most people, once they find a few podcasts, they stick with them for years and they come back year after year, week or week after week, year after year, listening to you. And I know there's a temptation that people think, Well, what I could just do is what Joe Rogan does. You know, I could just record video and then take the audio and send that out in the audio feed, and boom, we're done. Like, I've just created both. The downside everybody has experienced when you start listening to a podcast and they say, like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. Check that out. Oh, that's hilarious. Oh, I can't believe you just showed me that. And you're sitting there going, like, I feel like I'm missing out on the joke, I'm not part of the group, like, what are they even watching? Because it was video first. There is going to always be a world where audio first content is going to have a home. And if you're somebody who loves listening to things, and that's me. I prefer things that I can listen to because I want to be doing other things in the day. I don't feel good sitting there looking at my phone, watching videos. I've already got enough things to watch on the TV. I don't need more. What I really do like is there's a really good podcast to listen to. And now it encourages me to go a little bit longer on my run or work out a little bit harder because I've got something fun to do while I'm working out. So I would recommend if you are an audio podcaster and you're excited about audio as a medium, you don't necessarily have to add video. Or if you add video, still make your show audio first. Focus 100% on the audio edit and just let the zoom call be the zoom call and go, whatever. The audio video quality is not perfect. I'm not stressed about it. Maybe a few people watch on YouTube, maybe not. But audio first is always going to have a place in a lot of people's lives.

SPEAKER_01 16:59

I agree. That's me too. I love a good podcast, just like a good book. I just can kind of immerse myself into whatever that topic is that you know I'm listening to. And I'm curious, we've covered a lot of ground here, but is there anything else that we should have touched on that we didn't touch on? Because, you know, I can sit here and prep questions all day long, but you're a wealth of information. And, you know, you know this better than anyone else. So is there anything else that we should mention here?

SPEAKER_00 17:24

Audio podcasting, the best tip I can give you, especially when you're doing an interview, is spend more time on the front end, on the prep. The more that you've prepared for the interview, the more that you've already written out the main questions you want to ask. You've you've actually written out and thought of what follow-ups would I have based on what they might say. The more that you've gotten yourself comfortable with what you'll be doing in this episode, why people would even listen to it, the better you will be as an audio interviewer. Now in video, it becomes even harder to edit out all the ums and ahs. It's a little bit less forgiving. Well, then all that prep just double down on it because every ounce of prep you put in is a pound of editing saved. And so if you have time when you're doing a video episode, I'd say do even more work on that prep because it's really going to pay dividends later on.

SPEAKER_01 18:19

Such a great way to put it. I agree. The prep is absolutely important. It's something that people don't give enough time to. They don't give enough effort to. And it's not because the intent's not there, but I think because people don't realize how important it really is. And what you just said about how it saves you on the back end is so, so true. Albin, thank you for being here today, for sharing your wisdom with us. I appreciate you so much.

SPEAKER_00 18:40

Thank you for having me. I love being on the show.

SPEAKER_01 18:42

And whether you are listening to this or watching this, I so appreciate your grace as I fumble my way through the learning curve of trying something new. And speaking of new things, in the next episode, we have got an exciting new rapid-fire QA format where I'm going to answer as many of your podcasting questions as I can in 20 minutes or less. I know that's a tall order for someone like me, but I've got some great answers to some great questions for you, including the number one mistake that I see hosts making when launching a podcast that keeps your show invisible. Plus, a question that I have seen asked no less than nine different times recently in an online podcasting group that I belong to. And why most of the advice that people give on this topic is completely wrong, I've also got a special guest cameo from someone who is so near and dear to my heart that you are not going to want to miss. All that's coming up next to help you make your podcast binge worthy.