← Growth Triggers: Content Marketing & AI
Growth Triggers: Content Marketing & AI
Best Video Podcast Hosting Software NO ONE is talking about in 2026
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Today I'm going to walk through what I think is the best video first podcast hosting software on the market today. As I record this, I've made the switch from Captivate, which I was there for like four and a half years, and over to this new software, FlightCast, that I'm going to show you today. I'm going to share with you some of the reasons why I did this switch. One, some of the things that I think are going to help me grow as a podcaster, and maybe you as well, if you make the switch. And I'm also going to share why we're moving some of our biggest clients. These are some of the biggest health and wellness and business shows in the country that I work with. Why we're moving them over there as well. So we're going to cover some of the things that are going to help you grow. I'll cover some of the things that I see as a big, big problem in the industry of podcasting and where everything is moving. And if it feels good and makes you a better podcaster, then hopefully you'll make the switch. There'll be a link somewhere in this description for you to make that switch if you want. It'll be an affiliate link. You don't have to use it, but you will save 10% if you decide to. So with all that stuff out the way, let's jump into the actual meat of this episode. I've helped generate over 50 million podcast downloads and work with over 250 different podcasts. And the great thing about that is that I get to use all that information to share at least one helpful tip every single week to help you grow your influence and your online presence with video podcasting. Hey, my name is Luis Diaz. I run a company called Top 10 Podcasts, and this show is dedicated to helping you learn at least one helpful tip every single episode to help you grow your influence and your online presence with video podcasting. So that sounds good. Let's get into it. So to illustrate the problem in podcasting that I've seen over the 10 years I've been in it, I just did this little Claude thing to make it easier and more visually appealing because this is YouTube and I got to keep you guys interested somehow, right? So, era one, let's call this 20. I came in 2015. Let's call this 2015-2018. 2019. The good old days, I call them. This was the era where you could record something, an audio form, and that would be fine. You can upload it to a podcast host Like Libsyn and you can just hit a button and distribute everywhere and everyone was happy. Pretty simple process, very repeatable, you get a lot of downloads. It was easy to grow back then. Worked really great. Era two, this is 2020 to 2022. Things got a little bit more interesting with the introduction of YouTube. Now YouTube has been there forever, but we all, all of a sudden as an industry got more and more fascinated with it because Covid was happening. We were bored at home and figured, hey, let's build a YouTube and a podcast channel. So a lot of people started incorporating YouTube. So the workflow for most of us was you upload to your podcast host, that'd be Lipsyn, then you upload to YouTube Studio, then you publish both places and it was double the work. And it was a new learning curve. But it was fine for the most part. It was pretty easy still. Fast forward to 2023, 24. Now Spotify video comes into play. So now we've got to figure out YouTube video, which they're also adding YouTube for podcasts at that time. You have to factor in how do we get our video on Spotify now? And also how, by the way, we also have to post everywhere else in video form. So it got a little bit more tricky. There was more logins, there was more, you know, figuring out do we edit differently for, for audio, do we edit differently for podcast, for video podcasts, how does that work, what's best, what's most efficient, what's the balance of the, you know, highest quality and more inefficiency. It was always that balance. So it got really complicated in era three. Now 2026, it's era number four where YouTube and video podcasting is everything. And I know this is a really weird, I don't know what Claude was trying to do here, so I'm just going to point it out for you. I didn't bother to go and change it. But the industry has shifted now and this is where the problem lies because all the tools, up until now, all of the podcast hosting providers have been based off of the idea that we publish with an RSS feedback, meaning you upload it there, you press publish and it goes. There's some tools that have like integrated YouTube, but it's been really clunky, to be honest with you, from what I've seen. So we're in the space now where video first is everything. People care more about video analytics like retention and subscribers gained. And what are the like, like what are the click through rates on those things? Things that aren't really a thing in podcasting. So all of these hosting providers are audio first and they were built that way. However, we are in a video first era. So the, the, the industry has changed, but the tools have not. Big problem. So this is why I moved to FlightCast, because they are a video first podcast hosting provider, meaning they optimize for video in a lot of different ways that I'll show later on in this video if you want to skip to that part. And over here I have a little comparison chart which I'll get to here later. If you want to skip to that, go for it. I think this is a public artifact. So if you click this below in the show notes or description and it opens up, hopefully it'll work. If it doesn't, don't kill me. Maybe you'll get a screen grab if you're watching this on the video version on Spotify, maybe even Apple Video or also good on good old YouTube. So this is the era that has kind of worked through since 2015, since I came into the business and now at this place where most tools don't accomplish or don't really serve us the way we want them to serve us. So we have to go into YouTube back end, look at all the analytics, become an expert over there and then also, by the way, still upload and look at the stats on podcasting. It's a headache. For a guy who manages 30 plus podcasts, it's a headache. But for if you, even if you're just doing one, it's still kind of annoying. Okay, so enter flightcast. This is why we're doing this whole video. I am an affiliate, so if you want to use my link, you'll get 10% off. Great. And if you don't, that's totally fine too. Either way, you do what serves you. But I found it extremely helpful. It's why I'm doing a video or else I would have just moved on with my life. So this is the area where we're at. Let's cut over to FlightCast and I'll share with you some of the things that I like about it. You may agree or disagree, that's up to you to decide. But these are the things that made me want to switch and made me want to move some of our biggest clients over there that have a lot of stuff going on. So if you run a big show, if you host or you in charge of a big show or you want to have a big podcast, these are things you should consider. And then also this little Comparison chart. Ask has some questions and also shares who it's not for as well. Because I don't think FlightCast is going to be, you know, a savior for everybody. But if you're a business owner who's building a personal brand, who's video first, this is probably good for you. So let's hop over into FlightCast and check it all out. Welcome to FlightCast. This is the what the back end looks like. And if you had, if you have multiple podcasts you have, they would show up here. But this is my only show that I'm work working on right now. So this is the dashboard and I'm just going to take you right to the thing that I think is really cool. So if you watch just one part of this video, hopefully you'll get some value out of it. Now, we all probably could agree that we would like to do more testing with our clips. We'd all probably also like to all post more, more clips and more content if we could. One of the biggest things that I think is a leg up in flightcast is that you can do that now without any extra work on your end, on your team's end. After you set this up, it can run in the background and test content for you on a separate channel that's not going to affect the algorithm that is attached to your, your YouTube channel. Okay, so this is the clips dashboard and what this is set up to do is essentially to test content from your long form podcast. It'll clip vertical videos from your podcast, it'll test them for you on a separate channel and it'll report back how many views you got. Subscribers gain all that stuff. Now if you don't have a separate channel set up for that already, don't worry, this will. There's a whole walkthrough on how to set that up inside of here. But I'm just going to take you through a little tour on my own and let's see if we can toggle back. I've been doing it for more than 30 days, so you can kind of see all these clips that I have not clipped myself. I have not used the titles. These are all just autogenerated titles. So, you know, for absolutely no work, this isn't bad. I actually got a few subscribers on this channel as well, oddly enough. And it's very unbranded. It's completely a test, a new testing environment just for me to see what content topics work, what hooks could possibly work, what are people resonating with without hurting my own YouTube channel. Okay. So how I set this up for my own personal use. Let's see if we can go to the settings here. Okay. Here. So again, this looks probably foreign to you if you don't have it set up already, but this is the channel. We have content frameworks. It's auto posting here. So I have it set up to basically auto post and auto generate clips. Every time I upload a new episode, it does it for me automatically. So if we move my mug out of the way, you can see the episodes that have pending clips. I think there's a way. Yeah, you can see episodes that are ready for clipping. You can see here I can just kind of go into this one and hit clip if I wanted to already. And I can also look at the recently uploaded clips that have come onto the channel. Right. So these are all the clips that have been on the channel. And then let's see here. Oh, a couple. One thing I'll point out before we move on from here is you can auto. You can select if you wanted to auto generate clips, or you can go in manually and pick which episodes you want clips made. Made from. Right. So if it is only one or two episodes out of a month that you want clips done from, you can just go and select those automatically. You just toggle this off and then if you wanted to automatically upload this to your channel, you can just connect it like I have and then it automatically uploads the clips on a frequency of one per day. And you can do more or less. I have been told that it does mess with your. You could get your YouTube channel shut down if you do more than one a day. So especially if it's a new channel, probably just stick to one a day. But the great thing is if one of these pops off and one of these videos does really well and I want to use it, I can just hit where is it? I guess come here. Oops. Hit download. And then boom. I can just download it and that way I can upload it to my main channel, I can upload it to other channels like LinkedIn or Instagram or Facebook or whatever and I can go from there. So I think of it like as a. This is the mid tier. This is a hundred dollars per month if you are curious in this. So I think of it, I spent a hundred bucks. That takes care of my hosting, Plus I get 30 extra clips from videos that I wanted to clip up anyways. So I like that feature. For me, it's really cool. The second thing that I find valuable and useful is this little AI they have built in called Faye. Now what I use it for is if I want specific downloads like I wanted to see a couple of weeks ago, like what are my. What was the prompt I used here? It was what's the seven day performance of my last five episodes? So I wanted to see what they looked, what episodes. Which, what was a performance for each episode at seven days. Which if you go to the analytics, they don't have a specific, you know, data point that, that mark that tracks that. However, their AI kind of covers the gaps for everything. So which is nice because I don't have to download my stats and then upload it into Claude. I don't have to take screenshots and upload it into Claude or, or give it to an AI or chat GBT or whatever. I can just go into Fay and it has all of my stats already uploaded. Arby has access to everything it that I can, that I need. So we use this for our client accounts as well. So if clients ask specifics around like what. What's trending or what's not, we can go in here and give them a very detailed summary without us having to do extra work or us having to find the stats manually, which is great. Okay, so even did this little graph for me, which is cool. Yeah. I can even look at like which episodes created had more like cross episode, like listener retention. So which episodes have more retention across the catalog and all kinds of crazy stuff. So you can get fun and get crazy in here. It's pretty interesting if you have multiple accounts, like I to I do. I can actually switch down here and look at like which podcast and toggle between accounts, which is helpful as well. Besides that, I'll list out a couple of other things. So let's go to podcasts and then I think it is over here under integrations. So let's say you wanted just to be a YouTuber first and you wanted to just have it to have a system where you upload to YouTube and then flycast just auto posts it to other places like Spotify Video as well as other platforms like Apple. You can do that. So if you wanted to just do that and I kind of call it like the autopilot, which is a bad name for it. But if you wanted to do that, all you got to do is toggle. Either hey, I want to do this going forward or hey, I wanted to do this for my full catalog. So you can totally do that. Which is really cool because that means all of your video podcasts maybe You've had a huge backlog of video podcasts on YouTube. You can now just click a button and now they all end up on Apple, Spotify other places. Very, very cool. They also, and this is probably most people already have this, but Apple podcast video, so they have Apple podcast video set up and then you can also automatically post to Spotify video from here as well. I don't have to go into the creator Spotify account, upload my videos. My team can basically run Apple video, Spotify video, YouTube video, all from one dashboard, which is really cool. Now last thing I'll bring your attention to that I think is cool personally is their analytics are very detailed. I love that I have the ability to look at listens views on YouTube and Spotify streams individually. I can look at subscribers gained from my content. I can look at average listen time, listening hours, unique listeners, all very cleanly and easily here. And again, if I has anything that I don't want or anything that I don't see that I want to learn or look into, I can just use the audio or the AI to fill in the gaps, which is really nice. The other thing I like again, Joe, it'll break it down by streams, views and downloads across the entire catalog, which is great. And then this is all pretty basic stuff here. Yeah, everything else is pretty basic, but I do find value in the way they toggle and just split out all of these different things because before you had to go to three different dashboards to do that. So for me that's the main thing. You can also manage your ads in here. So if you wanted to make money with Programmatic ads, I think it's. Where is it? Yeah, here we go. So I have show set to run four post roll ads and then Programmatic is set on. If I want to do pre roll and make money from pre roll ads, I can do that. I could just flip this on and I could tell it, hey, I want like a maximum of two ads and they would start to fill that inventory for me. I'm not gonna do that. I don't like ads in the pre roll so I'm gonna keep it like that. However, if you wanted to do that, you totally can, which is really cool. On the monetization side of things, if you are selling individual sponsors, like if you sold a sponsor like 12 episodes and you're going to run, you're going to do a pre roll and a mid roll for them for the next 12 episodes, you could create a campaign inside of the ads hub here and you can Set that up so that it runs for you and it's, and it's really, really simple. So yeah, they make it easy to sell your inventory as a podcaster. They also make it easy for you to run programmatic ads if you want to do that or you already have that. So that is it. Last thing we'll go over is a comparison chart because this is going to cover the questions you may have, who it's good for, who it's not good for, and anything else that hopefully you may have had suspicions about. So let's jump over into that and then we'll wrap this video up. This is a rough breakdown of flightcast versus some of the biggest podcast companies out there. Right? And of course verified and generated is used by Claude. I asked it to kind of like fact check it a couple of times so it's relatively accurate, I believe. But it's. Don't take it as gospel and I apologize if there's anything misrepresented here. However, I won't go through all this. This is a rough breakdown of the features compared to other people and then the price points. You can see that flightcast is much more expensive than the other ones. This is why it's not for everyone. I don't think it's for everyone. I think if you're a serious business owner who has a video show and you want to get more serious about streamlining operations, having higher veteran analytics, and also being able to monetize and get on, get your video everywhere, this is a good solution, but it's not for everybody. Okay, I'm going to just jump down here to who it's not for because I think this is probably the most important part of this whole, little, you know, Claude artifact thing. And you can totally check, check this out. I'll put it in the show notes as well. I'm hoping it works when you open it, but depending on claw and I guess it may or may not work. Okay, so if you don't do video at all, probably not fit for you. Like there's no need to get on this, on this thing if it's not, if it's not something you're serious about, if you're just getting started, then I don't think you need this right away. But if you are getting started and you're like, I know I want to do business, I want to do video for the next 12 to 24 months, probably makes sense to just jump in here if you need like a really programmatic, ad heavy podcast host. I would not think this is probably the best one. Like so if you're, if you're an enterprise network and you want to, you're big on programmatic so you make all your money, probably not the best fit for you, there's probably better options out there for you. I have a multi show agency so I'm. But we're video first, not audio first so that's why we use it. But if you're audio only multi show agency then probably not the best fit which is not many people watching this video. I would, I would wager if you're a, like a internal podcast, not a fit for you. And then if you need long term stability, like maybe you want to wait until like flightcast is 2 or 3 years old but the price may be higher than who knows. So up to you what you want to do. But those. For me this is, this was a nice thing I think I used to put together just to make it easier for you so you can jump through here and look at how it changes. Now the one thing I don't think this accounts for is Apple podcast video, which they do have and I know a couple other people here have as well. So take it with a grain of salt. I don't think this covers Apple podcast video, but it'll give you a nice overview of what, what to look for and maybe compare it against your current podcast hosting provider and see if it's better. See if it's worth the money. All right, so that's it. If you want to save 10% on your first three months, then there's a link below that selfishly or not selfishly or honestly will help me out a little bit too. So use it if you want and get 10%. And if you stuck around this long, thanks for watching this video. Hopefully this was valuable to you. See you later. Hey, just so you know, a couple things. Number one, this is the end of the episode. Number two, I have a completely free, no strings attached, no email, opt in required gift for you and it's called the Podcast Scaling Framework. Now this essentially is a Google Doc that lays out the long process we take clients through from ideation to monetizing. It's going to take you through things like the seven podcast formats that you should test or at Beast consider the five different monetization systems we use for our clients and how to execute all the KPIs, all the different types of podcasts you can set up based on your business, your size, your goals, et cetera. It's a very comprehensive document. Again, I teach my team on this. We also walk through it with our private health and wellness expert clients. We walk them through this and we work with them on this stuff every single month. So it's a living document. You may see me in there sometimes changing things or tweaking things because again, it's a framework that we're constantly updating. But. But check it out. It's completely free. Again, no email opt in required, which may change in the future, I don't know. So just get it now while it's free. But check that out. Use it, let me know what you think and if we can help in any other way. If you want step by step, more handheld, more of a, you know, a white glove service, then reach out to us@top10podcast.com and would love to chat. Thanks and talk soon.
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My name is Shannon Maldonado. I'm the founder of Yaoi, a gift shop. From the lens of artists and handmade objects, I chose Shopify because when I was testing other platforms it was definitely one of the most user friendly. It was important to me to think about where we would be in the future. All of the tools for reading your sales, like planning inventory, they're just right there on your dashboard. For anyone starting a small business, the biggest thing I can tell you is it doesn't have to be perfect. Shopify can help you build upon it. Start your free trial on shopify.com when
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