All Podcast Roads Lead to Video

If you’re a regular consumer of podcasts, you may have noticed a change over the past few years: many of the world’s most popular shows (and maybe some of your favorites) have started including the ability to watch instead of simply listen. While video podcasts are not a new concept, they’re quickly becoming mainstream and will soon represent the majority of the world’s podcasts. As the co-founder of Anchor, the world’s biggest podcasting platform, I’ve paid close attention to this growing trend over the past few years.The format of podcasts has long supported video. In fact, RSS, the standard by which most of the world’s podcasts are distributed, has always supported an option to indicate to platforms that an episode is a video file. However, lack of seamless support for shows that feature both video and audio has prevented most creators from utilizing this option, thus disincentivizing most major platforms from going all-in. Despite this limited demand up until recently, several major podcasters, including some of the most influential in the world (like Joe Rogan) have been publishing video podcasts for years. Now it seems nearly all podcasters are at least considering switching to video. But why?Before COVID changed the way we all live and work in 2020, many of the world’s podcasts were recorded in real life. For shows with multiple hosts or guests, podcasts were often recorded in a studio or physical space, with creators huddled around a few microphones. Once COVID hit and we were all forced to social distance, people naturally started using more web-based capture tools to record their podcasts.

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