Podcasting's unique selling proposition is not video

On a recent Podnews Weekly Review, Sam Sethi and I discuss “lowlights” of the year from the podcasting world.

My first lowlight of the year…

The rush to video.

It’s such a short-sighted thing for the podcast industry to be doing, to move away from the very thing that we have in our favour, which is that podcasts are there as entertainment for your ears while your eyes are busy. That’s the fundamental thing that podcasting offers – and that radio offers, by the way – and if you turn it into television or, in podcasting’s case, if you turn into cheap television, I fail to understand where the benefit is over all of the other myriad of media out there.

I think that the rush to video is possibly the biggest lowlight, not just for last year, but the biggest lowlight in the last five years of the industry. It’s just such a short-sighted move, if you’ll pardon the pun, and I just think it’s wholly and truly the wrong thing.

Those people that can afford the video are doing great guns in terms of ad revenue: but that’s not podcasting, that’s something else, that’s making telly. And if you want to go and make telly with your stuff, then do, and compete with all the other people making telly. There’s nothing wrong with that. But please don’t call it podcasting and confuse the public out there.

Podcasting does not have pictures. Video podcasts exist, but podcasting does not have pictures. Full stop. It drives me a little bit insane that we’ve got all of these clever folk in the room tell us that we’ve all got to move to video, when it takes away the one unique thing that podcasting has going for it.

I will say this again and again, and again, until you say: “move on to your next one, James”.

(Sam:) So… what was your second lowlight?