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B2B Podcasting Insights - business strategy podcast for founders and brands
Video Podcasting & B2B Sales Podcasts: Why Apple’s New Feature Matters
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I'm really excited about this announcement from Apple Podcasts that they are supporting video and I'm going to share with you exactly why. And unlike everyone else that's written about this or done vlog posts about this, I think I can share with you something that is being fundamentally missed about this. All right, so everybody and their dog has been rushing to upload thoughts about this thought leadership pieces around. Oh, this is great. Yada yada, Apple Podcasts finally catching up with Spotify and YouTube. I think they're missing the wider point here and I'm gonna share that with you right now. Most of the pieces I've seen written about this are getting really into the weeds on the tech. All the technical aspects of it, including what technology it uses. Yes, it's using hls, which is an Apple Podcasts proprietary system. It's not taking the whole file and re hosting it like Spotify and YouTube do. It's serving the content in chunks from your hosting provider who has to be on board. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get all that. It's early days. They only announced this yesterday, for Christ's sake. It's not gonna be perfect. But here I think is the point that everyone is missing. We can finally put paid to the what is a podcast question. We no longer have audio being podcasts and we no longer have oh yeah, but also video could be a podcast too, according to the new Merriam Webster definition. All of that. Finally we can lay that to rest because now, officially, according to the granddaddy of podcasting, the OG platform, the birthplace of podcasting, Apple Podcast is now both audio and video. That's it. There's no video podcast, there's no audio podcast. There is podcast and how you consume that podcast is the differentiator. Because now you've got the choice of audio or video within the same piece of content. You can click a button and you can have either version. Now a lot of people are getting upset because this is to get really technical and nerdy about this, it's bypassing one of the tags which is within an RSS feed. There are lots of different tags within the XML document and these tags tell the podcast platforms what things they should do to the end user. So that includes transcripts, that includes, you know, artwork, all that sort of stuff. And one of the tags is around the media alternative enclosure. In other words, this is an audio podcast, but it's also got an alternative enclosure that conserve video. And Apple Podcast is ignoring that for now. Now what's really interesting to me about this is that the alternative enclosure means more effort on the user end. So I totally understand why Apple podcasts are ignoring that at the moment because what they want to do, and let's face it, a lot of people have been nagging them to do what Spotify do, which is give the option within the feed, no alternative enclosure, just there on the public facing player, video or audio. And that's the option they've gone for. Now that doesn't mean that they won't add the alternative enclosure further down the line, but this is kind of like the nerdy podcasting 2.0 thing. This is about the individual platforms wanting their piece of the pie. So I'm largely sniffing at that at the moment because I think personally the option of audio or video very simplistically offered to you within the end user player in a really easy way, clicking one button, the same distance to getting that option as the transcript or chapters, that to me is the win. So that's first of all why I'm really excited about this because now we have one single definition for what a podcast will be. And as all the other hosting providers get on board, which they will, they did with transcripts, I think that argument of oh, it's only for a few platforms, a few podcast hosting companies, that will disappear quite quickly. The second thing I'm really happy about, I'll be honest, I've been shitting on video podcasting for the best part of two years since everyone started getting excited about it with YouTube saying, oh yeah, we're now going to add podcasts, podcasts to our platform. They've never added podcasts to YouTube. They never have. They've added something that looks like podcasts, but it's never been a podcast. It has been video siloed within their own platform that they've described as podcasts. It's content, it's video, it's still video. It's not connected to the RSS feed in any way, shape or form. They tried to get around that whole argument by appeasing lower end creators were saying, yeah, you can ingest your RSS feed and get audio only versions of your podcast was a disaster. Nobody took it up. And even now people are still uploading video versions of their podcast separately from their rss feed to YouTube. YouTube has never been a podcast app. I don't care how many articles from E Marketer are published, I don't care how many propaganda pieces YouTube put out. I don't care how much Edison research there is to say YouTube is the podcast. No, it's crap. YouTube has never been a podcast platform. All they've been is a video platform that allows people with podcasts to have a place to upload their content to. That's it. Now we have a place where there are legit video podcasts in every sense of the word. I should be able to. When I'm looking for a podcast, I should be able to go to any podcast app and find that content in both formats within one single RSS feed. Apple Podcasts now allows this. IHeartMedia are about to allow this. There will be other other podcast apps that will come along and do exactly the same thing. I know Fountain looking at this, I know a lot of little breakaway podcast apps are looking at this. What Spotify is doing is still a walled garden. What YouTube has been doing is still a walled garden. And you have no control over the content that goes out to the players via your RSS feed because he's not using your RSS feed. Apple Podcasts is using your RSS feed. So while I understand that not everyone is in favor of the way that Apple Podcasts do things, I always look at it from the point of view of what's best for the wider podcasting industry and what's best for the consumer. And frankly, I'm sorry if it upsets certain people that, you know, Apple Podcasts have been really slow and they're ignoring some of the 2.0 stuff and going proprietary. I think we gotta look at the bigger picture here. We gotta understand that this is the best possible thing right now for the podcasting industry. So I for one, for those reasons I've just expressed, I'm really quite excited that Apple Podcasts have embraced video in. In this way. And this is from a guy who's been shitting on video podcasts for two years. The other important point to make, for the longest time, if we wanted people to consume our video, we've had to ignore the fact that people have different modalities. Some people are audio listeners, some people are video watchers, some people are readers. And so everything's been siloed up until now in two very different distinct avenues of marketing. Audio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, an other podcast listening app, video, YouTube or Spotify, but with a whole ream of limitations. Now we've got one single place to send people to consume both. That makes our marketing easier. Now you've got one link. And the fact is, Apple Podcasts is now operating system agnostic. You can technically send all of your potential listeners, viewers, consumers to one single link. Should you do that? That's a decision only you can take. But bearing in mind the fact that Apple Podcasts is still, regardless of what YouTube try and tell you, the number one place to get podcasts on the planet. I'll leave that with you.