This episode of Podcast Answers explores the benefits and drawbacks of uploading video podcasts to Spotify. Discover how to make the most of Spotify’s video features, manage stats and distribution, and decide if adding video to your podcast strategy is right for you. Learn tips to streamline your production process and grow your audience.

Welcome back to Podcast Answers, the show where I help you start to grow your podcast

by answering any questions about podcasting along the way.

That's right.

It is a new day.

It is a new time.

We are...

We're back.

We are...

Yes, we are here.

We haven't gone anywhere.

It has been a week or two.

The summer is just a crazy time for me for podcasting.

We end up...

The summer is ending up winding up, but it's just...

It's hard because vacations and all that stuff, but no excuses.

You don't care about excuses.

All you care about is me podcasting.

And so that's what we're doing today.

I'm going to be podcasting.

I'm podcasting.

I'm telling you all of the things that you get to see live here with me.

And by the way, we are live and lit today, which means you can watch on YouTube at youtube.com/at

podcast answers.

That'll get you to our live YouTube where you can see me do this show live.

We're also broadcasting live on a lot of the new podcast apps such as Podverse.

You can also go to episodes.fm and search for podcast answers and you can listen live

right there.

So yes, we do.

We do a live audio episode as well as video.

So there you go.

Those are the things that you can do now these days with podcasting.

It's great because you don't need a radio broadcast studio like you needed to in the

past.

You can now do this from your attic, from your living room, from the basement by the

washing machine.

You can do a podcasting wherever you want and send it out to the world, both audio and

video, not only recorded, but also live.

And that's, that's where we're here today.

So there's a big debate about video.

And so I'm going to talk a little bit about video today, and I'm not going to say whether

or not video is a podcasting.

I'm not going to come to a definite conclusion on that because I have my feelings both ways,

whether video is a podcast.

And if you ask me, unless it's delivered by an RSS feed, it's not officially a podcast,

but it's a show.

And that's the important thing.

What I'm doing on YouTube is a show.

Yes, I produce it as a podcast for your podcast apps, but it is in all reality, just a show.

And so what I want to do is I want to be in the most places that I can.

I want to be in Apple podcasts.

I want to be in Spotify.

I want to be in YouTube.

I want to be in wherever you listen to podcasts, Casta Matic, all sorts of podcasts, apps.

And again, not all of those can do video.

And that's, that's fair, right?

But but video people say it's hard.

And yes, it can be hard if you're doing it where you're producing it and having to edit

the show.

But the way that I do my podcasts, I don't do a whole lot of editing to begin with.

I hit record, I talk to you, I snip the ends and I send it out.

And so really, it doesn't take me a whole lot of time to do any podcast editing at all

because I don't do podcast editing.

So with that, though, what that means is I do the same thing for my video, right?

I have, I use a program called E cam.

And if you want to check out E cam, it's a Mac, Mac program for video, live streaming

and recording.

You can just do recording if you want, you can do live streaming, which I like doing

that because then you get the feedback from people as you are actually going out live.

And so for me, I like doing I like using a cam, it makes it super easy.

I can have all of my scenes set up.

And I can have it ready to go.

It's a super easy program to use.

And if you've never seen it, it's on screen right now, if you're watching the YouTube,

but it's a lot, it allows me to basically essentially send my video really easy to wherever

I want to send it to.

And so what I what I found, though, is, you know, I want to be everywhere.

And yes, YouTube is getting kind of into this podcasting thing.

And it's getting into trying to be the video.

Again, it's a large debate whether or not, you know, video, especially on YouTube or

or Spotify is a an actual podcast.

But again, I don't know that it's necessarily a podcast, but I want to be everywhere.

And so since the beginning of this podcast, I've recorded the video.

So that way you can see it.

And really, at that point on YouTube, I could go to Facebook, I could go live, you know,

YouTube allows me to to to do live streaming to multicasting.

And so again, that if you want to check it out, podcastanswers.com/ecamm, E-C-A-M-M will

take you to their website.

Yes, it's an affiliate link.

But I really truly believe in the product.

I use it every day.

Like you said, like I said, you can see it right now.

I'm using it as I'm recording this podcast.

So what it allows me to do, though, is it allows me to to send it multicast.

So I could do YouTube and I could do my podcast to Facebook or Instagram or wherever I want

to do it.

Twitter at one point when you could stream to Twitter.

And that was all great and everything.

But those are kind of like events.

I mean, yes, the YouTube stays there and it kind of stays in the package because YouTube

is meant for for live for video.

You have your profile and you can arrange it.

But YouTube or Facebook and Twitter and things like that aren't really meant for your video.

Yes, you can do video on them.

But it's kind of a ephemeral thing that scrolls past because they have a timeline and things

like that.

And so I wanted to get in other places.

And I've noticed I noticed a while ago.

So I'm in Spotify.

I noticed a while ago that you could you could go into Spotify and you could set your video

up in there.

You could essentially upload your video.

And I can't go live to Spotify.

Now, that'd be great if I could Spotify.

If you're listening, I would love to see you.

I'd love to see it so I can go live in Spotify and have a live video experience that to me,

that would be great if I could go live in Spotify, because most people have the Spotify

app installed.

Most people have YouTube installed, but.

You could go live right in Spotify, and I would love to I would love to see that just

like I can go live in a lot of new podcasting apps now and get notified when I go live with

that audio.

I would love to see that in Spotify, but I can't yet.

So what does that what that does mean, though, is that it allows me to to upload a video.

So if you go in to podcasters dot Spotify dot com and I'm showing this on screen right

now, so you should be able to to see that it is there and me get to the right screen

chair.

If you go to the right screen chair, you can see now that I am in this podcast, that Spotify

dot com podcast sorry, Spotify dot com.

That's the correct URL.

And I'm in my show.

I'm in podcast answers and you can see my episodes here.

And so this is the back end of Spotify.

So if you've never seen it, this is where I have a little bit of control over my my

podcast podcasters dot Spotify dot com.

And I can go ahead and I can see all of my episodes again.

I don't upload them to Spotify, the audio.

I don't upload a Spotify.

I just it just shows up because it's looking at my RSS feed.

So whenever I publish a new episode, it shows up as an episode in Spotify, which is great.

So let's take a look at the last episode that I did here.

It's Apple podcasts, episodes, you know, experience to the web.

You know what it means for creators and listeners.

So that episode, you can see it's published.

It was in the format was audio.

The published date.

Well, now, if I click these little three icons over here, I now have the ability to upload

video.

So this is where you would take your recorded video.

And the great thing, again, is as soon as I hit stop on this podcast, as soon as I end

the podcast recording, I'm going to have my video locally because I'm recording it as

well as streaming it to Facebook or to YouTube.

I'm going to have my video file so I can just go upload and put it in there.

So if you haven't done that for a while and I'll tell you a little bit why I haven't done

this, but so you can see down here on the using a transcript for Apple podcasts, it

now says video.

And so it now has a video in this podcast episode.

So if I click on it, it's going to take me to that specific episode.

And I will have a few things that I can do so I can go to the details here.

And there's where I'm going to see the video, the episode preview, the transcript, which

I can see the transcript on it.

Spotify does create its own its own transcript, but you can also see the video now and I can

restore to audio.

If I want to go back to just audio, I can change the video.

If I decide that later or something, I want to edit out of this episode.

So why would I do this?

I want to be everywhere, right?

I want to be everywhere that I can be.

So why would I not want to upload my video?

Because I think that video is great and video is awesome.

So here's the one reason that a couple of reasons that I wouldn't necessarily want to

be in Spotify with my video.

As soon as I upload my video, Spotify always uses the video.

You can turn it off.

You can as a listener, you can turn that off and just listen to the audio.

But what you're getting is the audio from the video.

And so why this matters is you don't have control.

You don't have as much stats into it now.

Now if I go back into the podcasters.spotify.com, I can see a little bit of the stats here,

even for the audio episodes.

And I can see that for the video.

It's the same thing.

It's going to show up in here under the video and it's going to show you all of the stats,

but it's not going to pull that from my hosting provider.

It's just going to pull that from my Spotify.

It becomes Spotify's file.

The video lives at Spotify.

It doesn't live in my hosting provider.

So you don't 100% get accurate stats at your host now, because if they're watching it,

they're now always going to be watching the video and it's always going to come from Spotify.

It's never going to come from your hosting provider.

So that's one key thing to know, right?

Is now because you've uploaded the video, that video takes over and no longer it pulls

your audio file from your podcast host.

So for stats, that matters.

For stats, that matters.

The other thing is I can't upload this video until I've made it public.

So today, that's not a big deal because today normally I publish these episodes for podcast

answers on a Thursday.

And I'm actually recording on a Thursday right now.

So it's really not that big of a deal because by the time that I publish, I upload this

to my podcast host.

Shout out to Captivate, one of my favorite podcast hosts.

But when I upload them to Captivate, and then I publish it, it's going to take a little

bit before Spotify sees this episode, right?

It's going to take a little bit before they can see the episode.

And then I can go ahead and upload it.

But that's not a big problem today.

Because again, today I'm recording on a Thursday and I'm going to publish on a Thursday and

you're going to see it.

When that does become a problem is on days that I'm recording on a Tuesday, but not re-releasing

it until a Thursday.

So I may upload that to my podcast host, get ready to go.

Thursday morning at 1am rolls around and my podcast publishes.

I'm asleep.

But I can't upload the video.

I like doing all my things at once.

I'm going to record, I'm going to send the audio up to my host.

I'm going to schedule that and get ready to go.

Once I'm done, I'm done.

Even if you don't hear it in your podcast app for another few days, I'm done with it.

I've taken everything that I need to take on it and I have sent that to the podcast

host to schedule it ready to go.

And so I can't do that with my video on Spotify.

I can do it on YouTube.

I can upload a video or I can go live and then unpublish it, do whatever.

But I cannot do that in Spotify.

Spotify, I have to have published it at my RSS post before I can even upload that video

file.

So you may get a section where it's not available by video for a little while for your listeners

and Spotify.

If they come to your show to watch your video on Spotify and there's no video.

Because you are sleeping, because maybe let's say they see that there's a new episode.

They're up at three in the morning.

You're not, but they are.

You publish your episode.

So it's there at Spotify, but they click play and there's no video.

There's not gonna be video until you wake up and you upload the video.

And so on the days of publish, I have to get up and actually have to upload, which is why

I haven't done it for a while for this show.

Yes.

If you look in my podcasters.spotify.com, a lot of them are audio.

When you go down to the get down to, Oh, I don't know, a while back, like let's say January

of this year, there was video there, but now I haven't done it for so long, just because

it takes so it takes extra time for me to do that because I can't do that all at once.

So what are your thoughts?

Tell me, I would love to know.

I would love to know what your thoughts are on this.

So if you want to, you can contact me at podcastanswers.com/contact.

I would love to hear from you on that.

I would love to hear and you tell me why you like that or why you don't like that.

Tell me, tell me what your thoughts on this whole Spotify video thing.

Is it good?

Is it bad?

Is it?

Who cares?

Like, right?

Like, tell me what you think.

So again, podcastanswers.com/contact.

Let me know what you think about podcasts, video podcasts and videos being on Spotify.

Guys, I want to bring up this real quick before we take off here for this episode, but I do

need some help.

I have been editing this podcast and my other podcasts on my work computer.

I've been producing them on my work computer.

The video is produced on my work computer.

The audio is produced on my work computer, the one that my employer provides for me.

They're getting more and more strict with what I can and can't do.

And I really do fear that in the future, I won't be able to do any of this podcasting

stuff on it.

And so I really need your help.

I need to buy a new MacBook Pro.

And so if you want to help out with that, you can do one of the things.

So there's going to be...

There's a wish list at our Buy Me a Coffee, which you can get there easily by going to

podcastanswers.com/buymeacoffee and see all of the options.

Or you can go to podcastanswers.com/help and that'll take you directly to the place that

you can donate to this wish list, this fund of me getting a new laptop.

Again, I hate begging and asking for these type of things.

But I'm at a point where I'm going to need to have a new machine and that's really not

in my budget right now.

So if you get any value out of this show, if you get any value out of me podcasting

to you, and teaching you about podcasting and whatever, take the time to go over to

podcastanswers.com/help and make whatever contribution you feel that you feel so motivated

to give.

If I've helped you out for the whole...

Worth thousands of dollars, give the whole thing.

If I've helped you out with $5 worth of content, give me $5 back.

Again, I hate to beg, but I just won't be able to do this show much longer if I'm going

to have to keep doing it on my work laptop, because I really do believe that coming soon,

I won't be able to use my work laptop to actually produce the show.

So again, guys, if you want to help, I would greatly appreciate it.

It would mean the world to me.

So just head over to podcastanswers.com/help and help out.

Thanks, guys.

I really, really appreciate you.

And if you have any topics that you would like me to cover, I would love to cover topics

for you.

Go ahead and let me know what those topics are.

You can either shoot me an email, a text, however you want to get a hold of me.

Podcastanswers.com/contact will get you a contact form because I would love to answer

your podcasting questions and help you grow and maybe even start your podcast.

If you've never started your podcast, it's easy to do.

Contact me.

Have a great week, guys.