Spotify goes big on video podcasting

Don't want to read? Listen to the audio.

Happy International Day of Awesomeness. Though, every day should have some awesomeness.

The origin of this completely unofficial holiday is a bit wholesome - someone tweeted out in 2008 that today should celebrate awesomeness and it stuck. Makes me nostalgic for the early Web 2.0 days when everything was fun and optimistic.

Anyways, on to some awesome signals.

Joey

🎙️ ➡ 📹 Few things happening with Spotify, and video is integral to all of it.

1 - They’ve introduced a TikTok like feed to scroll through (and discover) clips from music, podcasts, and audiobooks. I found this feed once in my app and it just showed me clips from music videos, which wasn’t that useful because I don’t care about listening to music clips. I use Discover Weekly to, well, discover new music. But podcast clips make a lot more sense and could be a huge boost to being the podcast discovery platform the industry needs.

I know I’m a broken record, but if you’re a podcaster and not recording video, you’re missing out. Audio clips will show up in the feed but they’re going to be left in the dust compared to video clips.

2 - Speaking of video podcasting, Spotify is widening support for video podcasts. Previously it was only supported if you hosted on Anchor. Now anyone in the Spotify for Podcasters program will be able to publish videos.

🍟 Reddit is expanding into video, splitting its news feed into Read & Watch (text and video). Watch feed will be like (you guessed it) TikTok, with the option to infinitely scroll. Reddit’s always been a tough nut to crack with sharing your own content, so I wonder if an infinite video feed will loosen up the connection to subreddits and their rules.

🪧 For some really good news: YouTube overlay ads are going away. Whenever I monetize a video this is the option I always turn off, I just can’t do that to the viewer. And most of the clicks are BS - I remember talking to someone at Blip.tv (long, long time ago) and they said overlay ad clicks were 99% of the time people trying to close them.

🏷️ TikTok rolled out a new keyword research tool…sort of. It’s a Keyword Insights tool for marketers to see what’s trending. But when I messed around with it, trying even broad works like marketing and cameras, I got no results back. Hopefully, this improves but could be a good hack once the data is there to see what to make videos about. TikTok is also testing out a Series feature where creators can paywall videos.

🤯 This clip from WonderDynamics is wild: AI automatically inserted and lit a CG character into real-world footage.

fwiw: this is the job of a compositor, not a video editor

🗣️ VoiceChanger: Upload audio, change the voice. Free.

🎨 Colourlab.ai: Tool to match and correct color in video. Useful for getting different cameras and scenes to match.

💾 Alteon: Media hub to store, collaborate, and share raw files and edits for review.

Don’t Cut on the Blink

Famous film editor Walter Murch has a rule: Never cut on the blink!

What’s this mean?

When you’re making an edit, especially when cutting away from a talking head or interview, you don’t want to cut while someone is mid-blinking.

I’m a bit maniacal with this and the team - my number one comment with new editors is about shifting a cut to not cut when someone is mid-blink or making a weird facial expression.

“But Joey, you’re being nitpicky, no one notices that!”

Do I think someone can call out a cut and be like, “wait, they were mid-blinking!”

No

But do I think subconsciously we just added some unneeded irritation to the audience and their viewing experience?

Yes

As Walter Murch describes it, it’s like having a piece of sand stuck in your eye.

For more on Murch, check out his book In the Blink of an Eye and his 6 rules for making an edit. The fun thing about those rules - continuity ranks towards the bottom of importance.

We will be at NAB in April, the massive camera and video tech convention where all the new gear is announced.

We’ll be producing a lot of videos on the latest news and updates.

This page on our site will be the central hub, along with our YouTube channel.

I’ll also have a separate email list segment that will be a daily update of everything we covered. You have to opt-in to that one - I’m not going to send everyone on this list a daily email they didn’t ask for.

So if you want daily updates (it’s only 5 days in April), add your email to this segment at the link below or just reply here and I’ll add you to the list.

Want to get in front of 100k viewers?

We still have slots for series sponsors. I conservatively estimate 100K views across all the videos we produce, plus this newsletter. If you want to get in front of marketers and creators, our target audience, reply to this email.

How else I can help you:

• Check out our YouTube channel with lots of free tutorials (and let me know what else you’d like covered)

• Get our YouTube & Video course, which has had over 4000 students

• If you have a specific project in mind and would like to potentially work together, just hit reply