Video Podcasts Are Taking Over—Here's the New Aesthetic

Hey, that's up. Waiting here for YouTube to kick, right? Go live.

We are live.

Yes, we are live. Welcome to The New Media Show, everyone. And, uh, Pat had to do a reboot right before the show. Rob showed up and I couldn't hear him. But hey, welcome.

Yeah, back for another episode of The New Media Show.

Yeah, and it's, it's almost, uh, as much stuff changes, it stays the same.

Yeah, I mean, it's an evolution that's going on, right? It's not, you know, there's no like week-to-week huge jumps in anything. It's kind of like, you know, one step at a time.

Yeah.

You know, podcasting has been like that for years.

And I giggle because the— and of course everybody's gonna say, oh, please kill us— the, you know, the, the all of a sudden The interest, the fantastic interest of video and podcasting and open RSS.

Yeah, right. It seems like such a new concept. Yeah, doesn't it to you? Yeah, yeah, right.

So, so, yeah, I mean, you know, it's good, it's good that they're talking about it, but you know, there's this this behind-the-scenes conversation going on in a Slack channel. I don't know if you're in there or not. It's a ESP discussion. It's got a whole bunch of people.

Oh, I think I used to be in that group, but I'm not in there anymore.

Yeah, there's a whole bunch of people. And of course, Justin and the others have been all talking about HLS and, you know, the sexiness. And, you know, when we were at the podcast show in London, you know, I talked to Ted and the team at Apple and, and, you know, they've known for a very, very long time, at least where my head's been at. I don't know if anyone else has been telling them this, so maybe I— so maybe I—

so maybe Mike?

Yeah, yeah, you're back.

Okay.

So, you know, maybe I was the lone wolf in describing the, you know, the things we want. And so happens. That's what happens when I have to reboot everything and wasn't able to run my preventive measures, is now the RØDE is disconnected twice in a row for no reason. Yeah, yeah, the computer's either getting adjusted or whatever.

I don't know, there's a driver conflict of some sort.

Yeah, it's, it's this RØDECaster, dude. It's a piece of shit. No.

Well, I still have the first RODECaster Pro and it doesn't—

it's solid.

I have too many problems.

Yeah, you know, so maybe I'm gonna have to take this home and bring back a Pro on the next— I mean, the original one, you know. Yeah, you know, and it never disconnects. This one just arbitrarily says, you know, good night. Um, At least it gives me a heads up. I hear a little ding go off my headset now when it disconnects. I can reach over and pull the USB cable out and plug it back in.

Right.

So, you know, someone's saying, well, we don't want passthrough. And I was like, okay, be careful what you wish for because you may wake up one morning and your CDN bill is You know, you could have serious damage if you all of a sudden get popular with a video. Audio is—

oh, you're talking about just generally with hosting video? Yeah, regardless if it's HLS or MP4 or MP4.

Yeah, you know, so people are saying, oh, you know, we're gonna lose monetization if Apple caches the video and I'm like, are you monetizing external video now?

Well, that's the piece that somewhat is missing, is the, is the programmatic for video podcasts, right?

Yeah.

Isn't, uh, I think the architecture is there, it's just it's never been implemented with any kind of a podcasting platform.

No, right. And you want to talk about some cost So I'm like, okay, if you wanna pay for your bandwidth and doesn't want Apple to cache, then, you know, set a flag. I truly believe if they want the best user experience, that's what we do is let Apple cache the video content. Not people are gonna be like, oh no. But in retrospect, how about a ping back to us say, hey, someone's listened.

I mean, if that's the only hurdle, then yeah, I think that's a good solution.

But it doesn't—

Yeah, it's actually a complicated conversation because you start talking about HLS, then you're streaming that content to Apple versus Apple capturing the MP4 file and they're streaming it.

Yeah, there was a comment, man, I'm not gonna say who it was, Um, uh, so funny, this, this chat is just so— it makes me giggle so much. I love Justin and the rest of folks. But someone said, yeah, MP4 is kind of a one-size-fits-all. You get one resolution, even if it's way too large, small for the current device posture, and you lose the seamless switch between audio and video and interstitials, multiple captions, and other stuff in HLS, but it's certainly better than nothing. So, you know, essentially, you know, that was a comment made by someone I respect, obviously, in that group. But, um, Rob, has anyone in this audience ever complained about this show's video?

Uh, I mean, it is true. I haven't heard anybody complain about it.

We— and, you know, we have never had feedback from a podcaster and/or a listener of a podcast giving feedback, maybe in the early, early, early, early days.

Yeah, maybe back when it kind of sucked. Yeah, that was because our, our video probably wasn't very good.

Well, it's also bandwidth just sucked 15 years ago, so, you know, so maybe, uh, 15 years ago, but in the past 10 years? Nah, no one's complained.

So yeah, I guess it depends, you know, if you get into this conversation about it like a, like a variable bitrate playback situation. I, I don't know that, um, you can really do that effectively in an MP4 download situation. I think the player would have to be intelligent enough to be able to play back a— yeah, probably VBR file. That's—

but up to this point, again, people are watching— 15% of you listening are watching. I should have said 15% of you are watching this show right now. So, you know, you, you tell us, is there, is there an issue? So, um, yeah, yeah. So it's, it's—

and I think that the, the strategy that was proposed by Justin, I believe it took into account MP4.

Yeah, it did, it did, it did. Yeah, it did.

As optional enclosures. Yeah. And then also it talked about feeding the video to YouTube and Spotify via API.

Yeah, well, I'm not feeding to— I, I refuse to feed to Spotify via API. People that want to do that can.

Just currently, uh, I don't believe either one of those platforms accepts video via API?

Yes, both, both do, right? No, you can submit video. Oh yeah, you can submit video to YouTube via API, and you can— and if you want to sign the agreement with Spotify, you can submit via API.

Yeah, I thought it was only for special partners.

No, well, it's basically— they offered it up to us some months ago and I said no.

Okay.

And they were incredulous. Why would you do that? And I go back to the conversation we've already had half a dozen times is that it placates the audio feed and the audio gets demonetized. Yeah. So.

Yeah, if they stop doing that, I think it changes the conversation.

Right, changes the conversation. Yeah, it does.

And I think that that would be a smart move for Spotify to remove that. That aspect of what they're doing with video.

Well, the problem—

that's kind of predatory right now.

Yeah, the problem though is, is do they— they'll definitely prioritize video, and are people just going to click play and stick it in their pocket and, and let a video play? And so— and they're also caching too, so that's another issue.

So yeah, it's them wiping out— yeah, yeah, the RSS-based audio version, which is where the objection comes in.

Yeah. So anyway, it's, it's just funny this conversation's continuing, so we don't need to spend a lot of time on it.

I think we're getting to the meat of the matter here, and I think the, the final message in the, the kind of chat room that we're both in, um, about podcasting, um, that was the last post that was made by, by Justin, was this idea that, um, all this doesn't really work very well if Apple doesn't make video discoverable.

Yeah, it's a moot point. So it goes back to Apple's gonna tell us what to do.

Yeah, well, in this case, I don't think it's a big shift for them. It's just, is it in the pipeline coming anytime soon is the— is the question.

Ed says in the chat, YouTube is the most frequently used service to listen to podcasts in the US. Again, this is the story, Ed, so be careful on, you know, quoting that as a quote quote.

I think you have to get clear on what, what you're talking about there. Are you talking about the numbers of episodes being consumed, or are you talking about the number of users that may be consuming what they've seen, a portion, I think it's a podcast, a portion of a—

yeah, right, right.

So because if you're actually talking about consumption, Apple is still the biggest.

Yeah, for sure.

So of what is termed a podcast, depending on whose definition that you—

well, we're not going to use— we're not going to get into those definitions at all, but More importantly, uh, the, uh, funding tag, which, you know, all of a sudden people are, oh my God, NPR supporting funding and da da da, and I'm like, uh, hello, where, where have you all been for the last couple of years here? Actually more than a couple of years.

Yeah, so I think it's a good, good move.

Yeah, there's about 70,000 shows that support the RSS funding tag. Which actually was told I need to fix ours. There's something wrong. Some, the link is having an issue. So I need to look at that. It reminded me.

Todd, are you getting the feeling like that because of the moves that Spotify is making and the talk in the industry around video and YouTube's kind of influence coming into the space that there's more energy and interest in the Podcasting 2.0 and PSP stuff now more than ever.

Yeah, because there's a reason. People are seeing the numbers and they're worried about survivability.

Yeah. Yeah. So I think this may be a good time for the Podcast Standards Project and others, as we push towards trying to figure out what's the next innovation around this video question. How can RSS hold on to its distribution core for podcasting, audio and video podcasting? That's the question we're trying to answer here because podcasting when it started was audio and video podcasting.

Yeah, it's been that way from the beginning.

Right. So let's go back and support what this medium started out as. And especially now when we're faced with big competitors like Spotify and YouTube who want to disrupt the audio side. Yeah, yeah, with video, that I think it makes sense for us to, you know, push forth an optional effort on the video side with RSS.

And it's, it's no doubt, you know, it says hard to say. I do see YouTube starting to dance with— of course it is. It's, you know, it's— and you've got a lot of YouTubers that have what's something they're calling a podcast that don't have a podcast on Apple. They are just on YouTube. And, you know, one of my, one of my favorite YouTube channels, they have a podcast. I don't watch it. It's a separate channel on YouTube. They call it a podcast. And, you know, I've told them about 100 times in their YouTube comments, I can't find you on Apple Podcasts.

And to try and draw a parallel to the early years of the video podcasting ecosystem that existed in the first few years of the podcast medium, there were a few shows. I wouldn't say it was a huge number of shows that were video podcasts only.

Oh yeah.

They didn't do audio.

Yeah, they didn't. Oh yeah.

I think that could be what comes out of this.

Yeah.

Again, is that if Apple supports this, we will see video first, for sure.

Podcasts come out and be distributed via RSS like they were in the beginning, right?

I think we'll see that get energized again.

Yeah.

And then, you know, obviously those shows will probably be published over to YouTube as well and probably over to Spotify. So then we start the, the, the development of a real video ecosystem that includes podcasts. Not excludes podcasts.

So yeah, right. So, you know, it is— we'll see what happens. Meanwhile, we, you know, it— I think what this is, is con— and I kind of agree with what some other folks' assessment is— it's the new shiny object. And, uh, you know, if, if video was all it was meant to be, then this YouTube channel that I have would have exploded years ago. And it has never exploded. And so yet the audio video podcast continues to do remarkably good numbers beyond anything that's on YouTube. But I never had a true YouTube strategy either.

So, well, you're also an audio-first creator too, so, you know, the video side has been kind of secondary to your priorities.

Yeah, but I've always had a nice studio background and, you know, the aesthetics have always been good and you know, flip in, uh, you know, different, uh, images and, you know, lower thirds and all that stuff. It's always been—

that's true—

part of the show. So, you know, again, but I must— I do— this is the show we do as a, you know, I don't know if this makes compelling content on YouTube or not. We get 20, 30 views or 100 views or whatever we get on. At least mine does. Yours get a little better than mine. And compared to the thousands on the RSS-based stuff. So it looks like, I don't fully understand how a company that is an ad buyer network can go into bankruptcy. PPX, how— Yeah. It surprises me that something where you're working on a 50/50 revenue share and you can't make it work.

Well, Todd, this may be less about that company and more about the advertising market in Canada too.

Oh, maybe.

I've been hearing talk in the industry that the podcast advertising market is a little soft right now, uh, and CPMs have been declining. Oh, that's, that's pretty, pretty significantly from what I'm hearing. And, and there's just not as many campaigns right now, um, that are coming through the pipeline. So, you know, I, I don't know if there's—

how many billion are we supposed to be?

Well, you know, it's possible that we could still hit those kind of numbers, but it just, from what I'm hearing, there's a lull that's going on. I don't know if it's in certain genres of ad buying that's going on out there, but that's just, I've been hearing that. I'm actually trying to dig into that a little bit deeper to get people to actually tell me really, really the candid truth about what's going on, because I think there's a tendency to try and tell the industry what the industry wants to hear.

That's right.

Not necessarily what the truth is. So, because I mean, everybody wants to be positive. Everybody wants to be optimistic and everybody wants to put out this growth vibe about the industry. But, you know, I think You know, if you're participating in the industry, you want to kind of know what the ground truth is, not just what the fluff is. So, you know, that's the tension that's in the space right now, you know. And this could be a reflection of—

well, it'll be interesting to hear what people are saying at the El Podcast Movement when— what people are saying behind the scenes, because usually people are— well, you know, it's, it's rare though for Well, sign of the times, they were— people are very aggressive at the podcast show trying to get my programmatic business. I had at least 4 companies talk to me about, you know, providing inventory for the programmatic. Our programmatic is doing well. Our programmatic still continues to do well.

Are you talking about Providing inventory or buys?

Inventory.

Inventory of ads.

Well, basically they wanted to, you know, be the supplier, you know, replace SoundStack. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So at the same point, um, I worked with, uh, BackBeat Media. BackBeat Media is the company that we send all of our big podcasters to for representation on host threads. And I meet with Dave every month, 6 weeks, to get a feel. And maybe they're niche enough, maybe they're not feeling it. He said sales were good. So he would tell me if things were down, if things were soft. So I'm for sure that You know, I would get the straight story there on that, but we are lit and live today, ladies and gentlemen. So if you're on one of those newfangled podcasting apps, you can listen to this show live on the app. So maybe, maybe ultimately this discussion then will transform into— also, I think the thing that has a huge value for podcasters right now is this ability to to go live and to have a live show, whether it be audio only or audio and video. So maybe this will drive some of that conversation. Um, I don't know, we'll see.

That might be an important part of the industry as you look to the future with all this AI content coming in. It's— I don't know that AI content's going to be doing live, so it's— right, I think I've used this term before, it's proof of life.

Oh, that's true.

It is what live turns into be.

Yeah.

And but it takes a certain amount of, I guess, kind of experience to do live effectively. It's not a, it's not a turn the camera on and it's magically all going to work for you.

No, no, not at all.

So I have a lot of juggling. It's almost like being a juggler in a circus, right?

Yeah.

Trying to juggle a lot.

I haven't looked at the— should move this— I haven't looked at the, um, numbers for June. Of what? Of statistics, because we put out a statistics report every month.

Um, on what, what aspect?

Yeah, for basically, it's, it's basically consumption at Blueberry. You know, what the, you know, what total downloads were. You you know, all, you know, these things. And, uh, I haven't seen— that's due probably this week because of the holidays. So, um, seeing this news from Podtrack about having a ranking dip, um, it's interesting. Podtrack releases June ranking, show month-over-month losses in unique audience for every participating publisher. So that, that's concerning that they're seeing a drop. But I don't know if we've seen that here. I have to go back and look at the global numbers.

It also says advertisers and publishers must now reevaluate where audiences are shifting and adjust strategies accordingly.

Um, who made that commentary?

Um, well, it came out of the article that Podtrack put out.

Well.

So, and then I added a couple things in here too. But yeah, it's, you know, all these things might be related to each other.

I'm sure.

Right? The whole ad CPM models. It could also be that the advertisers and publishers are shifting their focus a little bit to include video buys now. I'm sure. So that may impact audio buys. Yeah.

So interesting that PodTrak's making this commentary. It is an interesting, I guess for a better word, a little bit of an insight, a little crack below the glass. That we normally don't hear?

Well, it's a changing, it's a changing and evolving landscape. It's not, it's not the same, you know. And I think many in, many in the industry would like things to just stay the same, right? Yeah, but they don't. Yeah. So the, the economy changes, these brands start prioritizing different kinds of ways of spending their money.

Well, it's, it's been evident. We've been saying this for a long time. It's flatter than a pancake. So, you know, just not in here's again, this is the narrative. When you have an 800-pound gorilla like YouTube saying things that they say, and then you have the whole industry going apeshit gaga over video, and you know, every podcast consultant in the world saying you have to have video.

And then, um, you know, then the reason that happened was that there was a perception that that's where the growth was.

And maybe there is growth there, but when you say that, then you exclude a whole class of potential creators, of new podcasters, that say, oh, you know, it's just the story. We've heard this story many, many times. Oh, podcast is dying because of this or that.

And, um, yeah, it's true.

You know, we're not stupid at Blueberry. We're gonna definitely gonna be— we're embracing a video product. Vid2Pod product is being very successful. Um, not so successful that it's taking up, you know, it's not like a 10% revenue line yet. When it's 10% revenue line, then I'll be then they'll get my attention.

But well, there's probably an awareness issue with it too.

Yeah, and, and making people understand that's there once they find out. Matter of fact, uh, we've had a number of folks that have canceled their podcast hosting at other platforms because they basically don't have to do double work. They come over to us and, you know, migrate over essentially. So yeah, it, it remains a pretty, yeah, pretty successful endeavor. But so maybe I need to double down on that.

So I thought this next topic is podcasting passes radio in Germany for young people.

It took this long? Yeah, well, do people in America even— do youth in America even listen to the radio?

Uh, yeah.

Do we have that number here?

Do we? I don't actually have it in front of me, but yeah, I don't know if I've ever seen that number published in the U.S.

before.

Says for the first time, podcasts have overtaken traditional radio, for 18 to 29-year-olds, monthly listenership among women has also surged, tripling since 2019. So yeah, youth markets increasingly favor on-demand audio over traditional legacy media formats.

Here's what's scary is, um, used to be when there was bad weather or an event, something that was critical to the community, you would flip to FM 100 and you would get the, you know, that was the utility for me that was important, you know, after I really completely transitioned to digital and, you know, as back, you know, probably, you know, 2004, I started shunning radio because of podcasting and So now, uh, I think I still have one AM/FM battery-powered— I think it's a hand crank model or something. It's emergency radio. I don't think that, um, if there's something going on, let's say there's a tornado or a hurricane, I don't think my local— of course, I live inland, so it's not like I'm going to have hurricane coverage in, in Michigan, but in Hawaii There's no one at the radio station. It's all running on a computer. So how do they have any sort of break-in where they can come in and say, hey, we've got a, you know, an 82-car pileup in the fog, you know, south of Fresno, or we have a, you know, a tornado on the ground in, you know, in your community, you know, your community named XYZ, and You know, I don't think there's the ability to radio to serve the public in that regard anymore. So with—

that's gonna have to be done by AI now.

Well, I think what's already happened is what do I do now? I look out the window and I say, oh, there's weather, there's bad weather coming. What do I do? I load my— grab my mobile device. And I load weather.com or Weather Underground or one of those apps, and I figure out, okay, I've got a— in matter of fact, it notifies me that you have a thunderstorm warning or tornado watch or whatever it is based upon where I'm at. And, you know, that's how I get my notifications now. So the radio to me has lost all of its purpose and I just continue to be amazed that it holds on as strong as it's still holding on.

Well, it's mainly holding on with the music side. I think that's the genre of radio that's gonna last the longest. Talk radio doesn't have a bright future.

Ed says, do you think that podcasting will ever shift from CPM model? It's already multiple models. There's already—

it's multi-subscription.

Yeah, it's, it's multiple listener support, value for value. There's, um, there's flat rate sponsorships. You know, my tech show has been flat rate from the beginning, um, so I was never on a CPM model with GoDaddy. It's always been flat rate with bonus. So Um, I, I think the models are pretty diverse right now, but I think a lot of shows, uh, is that a fixed dollar amount and then bonuses on top of that? Yeah, okay, a base. Yeah, I get a base rate. So, but Spotify, you know, they've been, uh, they, they released something. I saw that they gave some product back to its original owner It was Podlink or something like that. I can't remember. I saw the article. I don't have it in front of me. It's not in our show notes, but I think it was a—

I think it was a link thing that was picked up by Podscribe, I think.

Yeah, well, they bought it, but, uh, PodSites bought it before they were acquired.

They—

they're right, before they were acquired, and they've reverted it. Um, no.

Um, but the Spotify deal offering $5,000 free ad credit. Yeah, new video podcasters to promote their shows on the platform.

Yeah, we talked about that a little bit on the last show. Yeah, $5,000.

Yeah, those are credits, right?

It's not like—

yeah, you're not getting Spotify's actually spending any money.

That's right. And they get to write that all off. That's a tax deduction for them. Right. Yeah, that goes straight there. We'll give you 5,000 credits and the accountant puts $5,000 in promotion, no credits, and they, they, they get to write that off. So big loss to them. They probably fill that in unused inventory. So, you know, it really costs them nothing.

Right, exactly. So it's a strong incentive to shift audio shows into the video format. Oh yeah. Didn't you know that?

Yeah. You know, tell that to the $600 camera I have right there now. And, uh, yeah, I switched cameras.

Um, very happy with the camera that you're using now.

Um, I'm using PTZOptics camera.

Is it like a webcam, or—

it is a pro camera that operates As a webcam.

Oh, it's like a, like a mirrorless SLR kind of?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like a PTZ, but it's without the, without the swivel on it. And I'm very, very, very, very happy with its output. And probably I have a couple of cameras at studio in Michigan that are getting really long in the tooth.

So it's a PTZ camera? Well, it's that large aperture?

Well, it's pivoting. No, it doesn't pivot. It, it's the camera that came out of their PTZ camera line. Okay. Yeah, yeah. So I, if I can actually find it here, but it's a fixed mount. Yeah, it's a fixed mount. Yeah. And it's got, you know, focal adjustments, white balancing.

It's got all the pro features Um, can you zoom in and out with it?

Yeah, I'm zoomed in now. Yeah, got a pretty wide field of view and, um, that's pretty good on, you know, so far so good. I'm pretty happy with it. It's—

yeah, it seems sharp.

Yeah, sharp. It does a little— I, I've got to— got one thing I got to figure out on it on color correction because you'll see once in a while I'll shift in color So I got to get it so it's locked and not, not auto-changing on the— probably a white balance issue is probably I need to manually white balance it instead of letting it auto white balance.

These lights I've got are pretty good, um, but yeah, I set my camera to be a, be a little bit more saturated in the colors so, so that you don't look like you're so white.

Right. Yeah. So for those that did notice, yes, I've lost some weight. Lost 14 pounds.

So you lost your beard too?

Well, I haven't had that in a while, so— okay. Yeah, maybe I have a—

I have a shadow, but yeah, I would say I have a beard.

I've got one day stubble right now. Um, yeah, so This— what is this thing you've got here about video podcast aesthetics? Oh, living room style. In other words, they're building studios. People are building—

yeah, podcast studios are, are, you know, have been for a while becoming more visual. Yeah, in their conversational type of formats. And I think that trend has been going on for a while now. I think there's actually a trend kind of, I think, starting to develop away from that now. I think this may not be at the cutting edge of where it's at right now. And I think you see some early signs of that on the YouTube side, where people are increasingly doing stuff outside or they're doing it in, you know, like an office setting or something like that. I mean, people are still concerned about the aesthetics, right? But they're not as, you know, locked into these kind of like these, you know, the big microphones, the big couches, all this kind of—

they're trying to make it look like it's more real, making it look like Good Morning America.

Yeah, it's not like staged sets, that kind of stuff. I think the staged sets kind of thing is— I think we're going to move past that stage and it's going to be doing things in more authentic-looking places, right?

You know, I've been on a kick recently of watching a lot of bourbon channels. That's kind of my latest infatuation. Over the past— bourbon channels, yeah, bourbon reviews, and, uh, and watching the bourbon bros and, and, and, and gals talk about, you know, different bourbons and, you know, and do all that. You know, be honest with you, I don't have a palate. If, if, you know, I can, I can tell the difference between Jack Daniel's and, uh, let's say, um, a scotch. Obviously that's a pretty easy difference. But when you get into bourbons, and I can tell the difference between a wheat or a rye, but when it gets into these flavors, oh, I'm tasting marshmallow, I'm like, GTFO, come on, you taste marshmallow and drinking 130-proof alcohol? Really? You know, and it, you know, come on, you know, if the flavor is good, it's good. And it's But people have these refined palates. Oh, and they give these caramel and all these descriptions. I'm like, you're talking about whiskey or, you know, alcohol that was put in raw, dog. It was basically put in raw in an oak charred barrel. And what are you going to taste? You're going to taste the recipe and the charred oak, you know. So I mean, the charred— yeah. So I don't know, if they have these palates, can actually taste that stuff, great. I would not make a— what do they call it? A wine— what is the word for the wine experts that can taste wine? Poulier, or I don't know, whatever the name is. Sure. You know, so I get a kick out of watching these bourbon channels, and all those guys have their bourbon collections behind. It's like, you know, and of course they've got their $3,000 Pappy Van Winkle. And you know, they've got all their different alcohols behind them. And in today's world, if I buy bourbon, I drink it. And I'm not going to buy a $1,000 or $3,000 Pappy Van Winkle because it's 18 years old and supposedly fantastic. And I, I basically don't drink at all. I, you know, I made a rule, no more than $10 per year of age You know, that is probably the top end on liquor. But I will say this, if anyone sees a Jack 10, 12, or 14 in their liquor store, and it's priced at $10 per year, or thereabouts, I'm good for it. Pick it up and ship it to me. I will buy it from you. Jack 10, 12, or 14. Yeah, but anyway, so anyway, so yeah, all the bourbon bros have their, you know, they got the glass all lit up. It's beautiful what they've done with a little bit of lighting.

Um, so those are a lot like, like, like my background.

Yeah, but it's full of bourbon bottles. Yeah, just bottles, except it's a little more narrow because most these guys don't have 500 bottles because it would take 500 bottles to fill your background. You know, you know, so at 100, you know, it can be empty bottles. Yeah, they could be, you know, that I don't know if you'd want to have 500 empty bottles. It probably would be a life insurance liability, right?

It's almost like the equivalent of having a bookshelf behind you, right?

Yeah, yeah. I've got one bottle of Buffalo, and it's actually, uh, Eagle Rare, in my studio when I'm in Hawaii. If you'll look above my head, there's one bottle of Eagle Rare on the counter. And I've only had 3 people say, "Oh, I saw that Eagle Rare." You know?

I think most of mine, my background is microphones, old microphones I don't use anymore.

I've got a whole bunch of those in a closet. I could break out all those and put them on stands. Yeah, might be fun.

Right, right.

So yeah, aesthetics. It's all the aesthetic seems to be— seem to be changing. And you know what that all means? Money, money, money, money, money.

Well, maybe not. Um, I mean, if you want to go down that path. Yeah, I think increasingly more people are trying to record it in natural settings. Yeah, that don't cost money.

Well, you know, then you have to have a portable setup and I've been down that road before and getting the lighting right, and it's still money, money, money, money.

Well, you still have to get a, like a, like a portable video camera or something like that, which tripods, lights, yeah, all that stuff.

Yeah, more power to them. I'm not doing anything that requires me to pack anything up anymore. I'm not. I don't.

You lug that stuff around You can travel pretty, pretty light these days.

Oh my God, unbelievable. And actually, what I built here now is a little bit out of control. So if I ever, uh, depart, you know, not have a permanent place here in the Philippines, I will definitely, uh, how should we say it, I'll have to sell some stuff because this all will not fit in a suitcase or two. Yeah, maybe 2.

Yeah, I have the, the DJI Osmo 3 with the— yeah, the, the lavalier microphone.

Yeah, I've got one of those connected to it.

You never use it?

Never use it. It's in a bag. Matter of fact, it's with me now. It's sitting right— yeah, it's behind.

I think they've come out with the Osmo 4.

I think so. Yeah, about, about every 9 months there's a new one to make you spend another $700.

I think, yeah, I think they can be a little more than that.

Yeah, they're a little pricey.

Depends on if you get all of the attachments.

Yeah, get the extended package with the extra battery and so forth. But I see a lot of folks that are doing, um, they— that's good about that unit is you don't have to shut the camera down. You can hot swap the battery and keep on rolling.

It's got a pretty long battery. I mean, I've got it on my shelf over here, but Yeah, it's got a pretty— it's got a pretty long battery. It'll go for a while.

I've got the first version of that that's about this big. Yeah, somewhere.

I mean, the actual camera itself is— yeah, like you say, only about that big. Yeah. So, and it comes in its own little carrying thing. You can just drop it in your pocket.

It's— it is pretty remarkable how small stuff has gotten now and how good of audio you can get from just a portable little portable rig. And, you know, it bodes well for people that want to do a show on the audio podcast on the cheap too, you know.

Yeah, I, I think increasingly you can do terrific stuff with, uh, like an iPhone or—

oh, absolutely. And just one external, maybe an external, uh, audio kit, maybe just like same thing, that stuff from DJI. Um, that connects right— will connect right to the iPhone.

Yeah, Rode's got some of those mics that connect right to the phone.

And if any of you are buying any of that stuff, I'm just going to foretell you, a lot of it's been, uh, white-labeled. So there's a lot of white-label solutions out there, same quality of remote recording mics that are in the hundreds of dollars, not the five hundreds of dollars. So Don't be afraid. Knockoffs, you mean? Yeah. Yeah, go on Alibaba and, and look for them and you'll find the same charging package. You'll find the same model. Yeah, they'll— and again, it's by, you know, Juju company or whatever.

It's, it's probably made out of China. China, well, notorious. Well, it's cloning products.

Well, no, no, what happens, this is what really happens. The company, a company designs that package and then licenses it to XYZ companies, and they license it and put their label on it, yet the original version of that was never designed or built by the company that's representing it. So it wasn't a— some of this stuff, not everything, was originally a Chinese brand that was developed. I'd see this stuff of 5 or 6 months in advance, it would be in, you know, on Alibaba. And then all of a sudden you see a major company that has never been in this space before making announcement about a new product, and it was the clone of what I saw on Alibaba 6 months before. And I'm sure Rode builds their own stuff and, and, uh, and others, but You know, there's definitely— and there's probably stuff that's cloned or ripped off from those designs too.

Yeah, I was watching a video on YouTube the other night. Um, there's a guy that went on a trip to China and, and went to the city of Shenzhen. Oh yeah, which is— and did a complete tour of Shenzhen and all of the tech that's in that city. Yeah, I guess it's, it's, it's considered the most technologically advanced city probably in the world.

The challenge Shenzhen's having right now is because the most of them, a lot of manufacturers are moving out. So Apple has their iPhone, iPad factories in Shenzhen And Apple has moved a majority of their stuff to Vietnam.

Yeah, oh, Vietnam.

Yeah, Vietnam and India, different. They packed up the whole factories and moved. So, but still, if you, you know, if you're ever in China, Shenzhen would definitely be a great shopping location to pick up lots of electronics cheap.

Yeah, but it's also a fascinating place to see probably what our future looks like with technology integrated into everything and camera surveillance and drones delivering all sorts of products to you no matter where you are.

Well, you look at my Wyze cameras now, my Wyze cameras now, which are $40 each or something like that. They have facial recognition, so you register faces that are familiar. Like, um, I can register my mom, my sister, the family members, and it will say, oh, okay, I don't need to— I don't need to do a report because there's Sherry, or there's Chantel, or there's Todd. Oh, there's a face I don't know, let me record that. That's on a $40 camera. It's insane, you know.

So, um, I don't think you have to have really high-end equipment anymore to get, um, to be a content creator, to be a podcaster. I mean, I think, I mean, you're— I mean, I've got a—

oh, you can get—

I've got an iPhone 10 here, and, and it, it does—

I think you're time for an upgrade, Rob. What's that? I think it's time for an update.

It is, but it— the phone continues to work well, so, right?

Yeah, I'm now— I've, I've went from 2 years to 3 years. I'm now on a 3-year upgrade for Apple. I don't do— I used to do it religiously every 2 years. Now I'm at 3. Same thing with my, um, Android. Uh, and the reason my Android, though, I will admit, is starting to get impacted by, uh, battery life. So I could probably— it's a— the phone is perfect.

I could probably actually took mine into the Apple Store and they actually got a new battery for it. I replaced the battery in it and it gave it a whole nother probably year or two of life.

Yeah. So, and it's again, again, the cost of doing stuff is remarkably low.

It is. Yeah, really, it's all about, you know, your imagination, your creativity, and and how you can, you know, do, be compelling in the content. I think that is the real challenge that's before everyone. And increasingly people are, you know, using these tools to do live video e-commerce now. And I think we've talked about it in a past episode, but a site like, it's called Whatnot. Oh yeah. Is a hot topic right now. And you look at TikTok and a lot of the e-commerce stores over there and content creators that maybe didn't make it as podcasters can go over there and be a huckster of products.

TikTok quality to me has went down. I'm not finding as much stuff that I want to find. I'm searching for stuff like this tragedy in Texas. I was looking for um, you know, on-the-ground TikToks for, um, for that, what was happening there. And I didn't find a lot on TikTok. Maybe people just weren't in the area, it was so devastated, I don't know. But, um, the problem I'm having with TikTok and why I'm using it probably 90% less now is the proliferation of people selling stuff. It's just every other video is someone doing e-commerce on TikTok. And yep, but it's amazing to me here, um, where I live, I have to go downstairs to pick up my, um, if I have something shipped in, if I have an Amazon or something shipped in from Lazada— that's a shopping network here like Amazon— If I go downstairs, I can see the packages behind the guys, and they're fascinated here with the TikTok shop. 65-70% of the packages that would be on the wall behind me is TikTok shop. So they do a huge amount of commerce here, which is pretty remarkable. All things considering.

Does Amazon have much of a place?

They do. Um, there's no— just, you, you have to have it shipped in. So in Amazon, I change my address to the address here, and then it changes the store to show me only things that will ship to the Philippines. And, um, there was something I wanted, uh, I forgot to bring Tylenol, and you can't ship Tylenol to the Philippines. The only way to get Tylenol in the Philippines, you got to go to a pharmacy. Tylenol is over the counter. You actually have to ask the pharmacist for Tylenol. They'll say, how many pieces do you want? You can order 10. Now imagine in America, you, you know, we're all used to buying the 250-pack of Tylenol or Motrin or whatever, right?

And, um, so it's only a 10-pack there, huh?

Well, you, you tell them how many pieces you want and you buy by the piece. And, um, so I was a pill by the pill. Yeah. And, uh, you have to tell them the milligram, and they don't have the big milligram size. So, um, I couldn't ship Tylenol to the Philippines. It was not on the allowable shipping list. So, you know, dummy me for not bringing Tylenol. I know, and I don't use a lot of Tylenol, but, um, every once in a while you just need a Tylenol, right? And, uh, so yeah, it's, it's pretty good. It takes 7 to— usually about a week, usually about a week to get here. They tell you the estimated shipping arrival date and it's, it's, it's pretty good. I've had some relatively expensive stuff shipped to a couple hundred dollar level, nothing higher than that. Um, it's come through just fine.

So yeah, it's good.

Yeah, it's good. And it is surprising the stuff that you can have shipped here, unlike in America. Like, I can have alcohol shipped from anywhere here. Um, and of course I live in Michigan, and you know, getting alcohol delivered to your house that is not a wine is impossible. So in some ways, the United States is so far behind in, you know, it's just the regulatory on, on liquor. The wine industry has done well in allowing wine to be shipped. And the reason I say that is because I'm on this bourbon kick. They have these bourbon clubs and you can sign up for X number of dollars a month and you get maybe a bottle every quarter or whatever it is. And they can't ship to Michigan. So I have a friend in Indiana that has agreed to allow me to ship to their house and then I can pick up when I want. So, you know, it's It's dumb. Really, really dumb. But anyway, back to the podcast stuff. Uh, AI-driven— and we're over time, by the way— AI-driven preview snippets boost engagement. Yeah, we've been seeing this too. Yeah, yeah. And it's just because it's easier to use. It's quick.

We use— you skipped over number 8, which is the audio Premiere still wins in key metrics. So this, this is a story that you should like.

Recent research finds audio podcasts have 10% more listeners listen-through rates than video. Oh, I believe the listen-through rates are much higher on audio podcasts. Yeah, but they say audio Premiere.

Does that mean like an in, an in, an intro No, just the audio, you know. Yeah, really, I think being audio first, I think, is kind of—

I, I—

is what it's implying.

I think I, I agree, and I think it's true in video too. If, if, if you're staying on topic, which we just kind of drifted off, but if, if you're, if you're being focused and delivering and staying engaged, audio or video, people will listen through. The problem I have on video is, is the pacing sometimes is too damn slow. They just— come on, get on with it, let's go, let's go. Um, a dopamine hit.

I mean, it can happen on the audio.

Oh, absolutely. I'm sure it's happened on this show too. So yeah, but that's good. I have no doubt that— I have no doubt at all. But I find this last one that you have, uh very concerning.

And, and where I don't think you talked about the AI-driven— yeah, snippets.

Yeah, it's just, you know, it's, it's doing well. I think it's known. It's— if I didn't have time to do snippets before and I can do snippets now and I don't need hours and hours to do it, so why is it being effective? Because it's more— it's easy to pull snippets out with AI and generate them and publish them.

Yeah, so what we're talking about here is shorts. Yeah, shorts, clips, or shorts, or—

and just reels, or— and just an audio-only clip are doing well too. We see this, you know. So I, I think that it's well known, like, shorts have done well everywhere. And the problem you're going to run into is you produce, produce too many shorts, people stop listening to your actual show. Because there's a few podcasts I don't listen to. I just listen to their 5 shorts.

Yep. So the last topic, and we can let everybody move on with their, with their day or evening or whatever, whatever time you're tuning, whenever they're consuming this, right? Um, you know, it's this whole thing about, you know, um, AI content. As AI content grows, you know, it's, it's It's becoming a mixed landscape out there around information and what you can trust and also ethical framing of topics and things like that. I think that there were some questions, I guess, over this past week with Grok, I guess, being a little bit extreme in its views.

Oh, and somebody got fired over that. There was some sabotage. Did you hear about that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Guy got fired and then he turned on the authentic Grok as he was going out the door.

Yeah, he turned off the guardrail for letting it do what it shouldn't be doing. And yeah. But also, I read into this, it says that they propose an audio alert for potential misinformation in podcasts. That's really not AI. That's a proposal to put an audio alert. Who's going to— okay, who's going to police that?

It's going to be policed by AI, isn't it?

Yeah, okay, whatever. I am absolutely unequivocally against this. GenPod, I don't know what that is. Shows constructive framing in AI-generated podcasts. Okay, so Gen— constructive framing. What does that mean, constructive framing?

I think it's framing that respects a certain kind of guidelines, um, in, in its ability to create negative emotions. Because I think that there's— I think I commented somewhere, I commented on this, that there There's a lot of research that points to negative commentary generates more interest than positive commentary. So people are leveraging, you see this on X and you see it on a lot of the platforms, is that it's not really about truth or what's wrong or misinformation. It's more about positive references versus negative references. The negative references tend to get more activity. So that's why you see on YouTube lots of thumbnails talking about, you know, doomsday, the end of the world, how the markets are gonna crash tomorrow, so sell all your stocks. Yeah, clickbait. Right, right.

And then they come on and say, oh, the world is great.

Right, and then 2 weeks from now you think, all those guys said that the market was gonna collapse and the, the economy was gonna— inflation was gonna go through the roof, and a year later, and that never happened, right?

It's interesting how a lot of these predictions, polling, it's broke. This is all completely fabricated information, stuff that's coming out from people, you know, in, in the news. The mainstream media is complicit. And telling a false narrative.

And yeah, because they're paid by attention, they're paid by audience, right?

And they're— and they— and I truly believe they have a political agenda to, you know, any— they're not news anymore, they're just extensions of whatever party that might be in favor at the moment. So it's, yeah, it's all BS.

They probably justify it from the perspective that it's— they're an entertainment platform.

Oh, they're serving their audience, right?

They're providing mental entertainment. You know, if you go back, it just so happens that it has a political bias too.

You know, if you go back, and I think I saw something— I don't mean— don't quote me on this, I might be wrong— that 15 of the 16 presidential polls had Kamala Harris winning— Kamala, excuse me— winning. And how did they all get it so wrong, you know? And, you know, what's the source?

Because the research was biased, that's why.

Or, yeah, you know, don't— oh, you got—

they just asked more Democrats, right?

They could get the wrong answer and they asked more people or something. The left— again, I don't know.

Pretty easy to to slant research. Yeah. Ask more people that are biased towards the side that you want to be slanted to.

But going back to this particular topic, I just, I feel very, very— I think AI should be flagged somehow. Yeah, there should be a flag that says, okay, this is— at what percentage is this AI generated? And I think that's really important. Um, we haven't really talked about that a while, and within the Podcasting 2.0 space, but I think it's something should be, should be.

Where's the line is the problem.

Well, that's the problem is that no one could agree before what the definition would be.

I mean, at what stage in how you're using AI do you cross over that line, right? Is it just at the creation part, or do you cross over the line by the editing part?

Yeah, so maybe there has to be a multi-flag level system, but then who's going to comply with that?

Like, almost like their rating systems for content of sorts.

Yeah. Which we've had at Blueberry for years. It, you know, very light. People said G for every episode, and then, you know, earlier in the show I made a little bit of an expected— we should have kicked it to PG-13 for this episode, right?

So, you know, or give me heavy AI, light AI. Yeah, there you go.

There you go. Or whatever is— or I think it's when it's 100% AI-generated. That's when the— yeah, I think we can— I can still recognize it, but that's going to change in time. Yeah, it's getting better for sure. All right, Rob, we did it. Yes, we, we're actually over. Uh, actually, we started a little late, so we're not as over as we thought we were, but, um, everyone, thanks for, uh, being here. And then we're trying to keep these to about an hour. Uh, I'm Todd at blueberry.com, @geeknews on X, @geeknews, @geeknews.chat on Mastodon.

I'm on X as well, @RobGreenlee. Just type in my name, Rob Greenlee, G-R-E-E-N-L-E-E, and you can send me an email, uh, to robgreenlee@gmail.com. That'll make it to me. We'd love to hear from you and get your feedback on topics we should cover on the show, or just, you know, share whatever you're seeing in the market. We'd love to hear some candid disclosures about what's happening in the advertising.

Yeah, if you have a secret, let us know. We're good at hiding, uh, hiding our sources. @NMSpodcast is the X account for this show, so if you want to follow that over there. Um, but of course, Rob and I both have YouTube channels if you're so inclined. But most importantly, follow or subscribe to the podcast on your favorite modern podcast app. All right, everybody, we'll see you next week.

All right, good night.