Podcasts as streaming video = cheap TV that audiences trust
The bet being made on podcasts
Do you watch podcasts?
TVNZ is betting you will, announcing on Wednesday that the Between Two Beers Podcast and a swathe of other Frank Podcasts are coming to TVNZ+. Frank Podcasts are a New Zealand-based podcast production and brand partnership service. Between Two Beers is part of their ecosystem.
Six months ago, I would have sworn on my grandparents’ graves I would never watch podcasts (we’re going to need a new word for podcasts, she said for the 35th time this year). Podcasts were for my ears, in the car. Initially, they were made exactly for that. The long-form narrative hit Serial was designed as an audio-only product. The now-dominant chat format draws on old and familiar TV and radio formats, while being far cheaper to produce. We are acclimatised to lo-fi production after 20 years of social media, and the form has rooted itself in fulfilling both old and new audience needs while delivering video-friendly outputs.
I have been delighted by, and slightly obsessed with, this shot from a video stream of Louis Theroux’s podcast all week.
This is one of the world’s best-known documentarians, Theroux, introducing one of the world’s best-known journalists, Patrick Radden Keefe, for one of the show’s most recent episodes. We watched it like event TV, except it was on demand. It was a brilliant and absorbing conversation, and seeing their faces made it better. It was... a lot like... the long-form interview that everyone mourns has gone the way of the dodo in institutional media.
The production is, objectively, a bit of a shambles. You can clock the autocue. The producer is sitting on the floor. The logo on the screen behind Louis is half cut off. On Poehler’s Good Hang podcast, the white balance is sometimes genuinely alarming. I don’t care, and maybe nobody else does either. It engenders intimacy and authenticity, and brings the host down from the mountain of polished broadcast to something more approachable. I’ve gone from exclusively listening to podcasts to actively watching them in six months. Ramesh Ranganathan. Ezra Klein. The Rest is Politics. Amy Poehler. Theroux.
Lo-fi production now extends to some of the biggest names in entertainment and journalism. Marina Hyde and Richard Osman on The Rest is Entertainment understand the rules of engagement as well as anyone. Both titans of traditional media have no problems doing native ad reads, engaging their fan community with weekly mailbag episodes and events, and having their near-hour-long episodes clipped into bits for social.
Audience growth and monetisation in podcasts, including as they extend to video streaming, and despite their low production costs, requires either a celeb at the helm with big studio might, an existing platform or an almost non-negotiable toolkit that includes community building, very active social media, events, a newsletter, a subscription model, and a feedback loop with fans.
In streaming video form, they’re modern-day talk show hosts. Talk show hosts of yore always had live studio audiences. And while the needs of the audience aren’t really new - inform, entertain, inspire remain bedrocks for a reason - I’d argue that engendering a sense of companionship and two-way street engagement and participation are creeping into the “needs-must” mix.
High production values, broad, one-way-street reach and an institutional masthead used to signal trust. Now, two people chatting, revealing their own foibles and uncertainties, with a more niche audience in mind are emerging as trusted sources. The added bonus? Feeling like you, the audience member, are part of something and not alone as you grapple with things, big and small.
Between Two Beers has built something pretty incredible in a small market where we are, by and large, an importer of culture – a phenomenon exacerbated by global access to anything we like, and aided by lingering cultural cringe. Charts bob around, but a glance last night at the Spotify podcast charts right now makes this obvious. Outside radio shows packaged as podcasts and one “not for radio” New Zealand radio spinoff, only two New Zealand shows crack the top 20. The rest are from the US, Australia and the UK. Australia fares slightly better with a few Aussie-made shows cracking the top 20. Joe Rogan rules across both.
It’ll be fascinating to see how the TVNZ+ numbers play out. My hunch is that while it will time to shift pods (named for the iPod) from ears to TV screens, the direction of travel is clear. Chat podcasts translate well. We’re well acclimatised to lo-fi, and the creators doing it well understand that audiences expect to be somewhat included and recognised, even if that’s just having your fan behaviour highlighted in an Instagram story or your question read out on the mailbag episode. It fuels growth. By necessity, it’s a more generous form of media than most of us grew up with.
Cheap TV isn’t quite the right phrase for what’s happening here, and it probably undersells the people genuinely embracing an audience-first media environment. Whatever we end up calling it, Between Two Beers landing on TVNZ+ feels like a marker of something. Whether it’s a tipping point or just an interesting data point is something I’ll keep revisiting.