Sarah Koenig and Dana Chivvis recording the hit podcast Serial. Would it now be a video series?, sooner or later platforms have a tendency to start cannibalising each other’s core features. This time, a medium is caught in the crossfire – raising the question of what differentiates a video podcast from the vlogs that YouTube first popularised.
In response to the video podcast trend, QCode’s chief strategy officer, Steve Wilson, says the company is thinking about what kind of video elements could enhance the experience. But he cautions that for fictional podcasts, using your imagination can be part of the appeal. “It makes our podcasts a little bit closer to something like reading a great book, where you’re encouraged to see the characters in the way that you envision them,” he says.
At Crowd Network, the motive behind video podcasts first came from a desire to offer audiences a “little bit extra”, says Jones. “But increasingly we’ve found that it is a whole new audience and actually there isn’t that much of a crossover.”, says this is true for his podcast, which took the leap into video this summer.