The Audio-Visual Schism
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It’s 1130 AD in Rome, and the College of Cardinals has hastily convened to elect a successor to the Pope, Honorious II, who has died in a monastery overlooking the Palatine. It takes just six scarlet-capped cardinals to elect Gregorio Papareschi as Pope Innocent II. But the next day a majority of the remaining cardinals announce their preference for Pietro Pierleoni, who they re-Christian Anacletus II. And so, for decades, these two men — these two Popes — would proceed in tandem, Anacletus governing in Rome, Innocent supported by the monarchs of Europe. Two heads of the Church. Innocent and Anacletus; Pope and Antipope.
Schisms have a long, venerable and often destructive history. And while nobody does them better than the Catholic church, there’s an emerging schism in the world of digital media. The Audio-Visual Schism. And to understand this, and how it’s unfolding in the Year of our Lord 2025, you need to go back a decade, to 2015.
In 2015, the world of journalism was gripped by a terrible realisation. Everything they had was now predicated on the continued dominance of social media. Newspapers might have existed for a hundred years before Facebook, but their financial survival now relied upon the ranking algorithms cooked up by some speccy nerds in a Harvard dorm room. The internet had already proved a fickle friend to journalists, and the early excesses of the Dot-Com boom had given way to a more pessimistic realisation that it wasn’t just the delivery mechanism that was changing — it was the content too. And it was in this landscape that the phrase “pivot to video” started to be used. Over the next couple of years, media organisations, old and new, would invest heavily in video designed for internet consumption, pouring huge amounts of money into an undertaking which, like the Edsel or New Coke, has become a byword for industrial misdirection.
Put simply, the pivot-to-video process went: loads of money was invested in video, loads of staff were hired, publishers failed to find easy solutions to the dual challenge of reach and revenue generation, money went down the drain, staff were laid off. It is a classic cycle and a good example, too, of the fact that if you HIRE loads of people for a project and then FIRE loads of people from that project, they’ll remember the firings but not the hirings. Pivot to video came to resemble another digital boom and bust.
In reality, though, the video era never went away. The challenge was fitting it into the budgets of legacy media corporations where the undertaking was seen as wildly expensive. Kids were producing videos from their bedrooms for YouTube, using a $400 smartphone and their own free labour, and out-performing companies that were paying tens of thousands of dollars, per video, for talent and crew and studios and gear and post-production. The opportunity, they could see, was there — what wasn’t clear was how they could effectively harness it. The option to default to amateurish, low-cost content doesn’t really exist if you’re the Washington Post or The Atlantic. And, broadly speaking, the decision was made to default; to step away from an unwinnable battle.
In 2016, in the middle of ‘pivot to video’ mania, I was hired by a British current affairs magazine to run their nascent video operation. And by video operation, they meant: me. Me with a camera and a computer, and access to their staff and offices. (They didn’t even provide me with a camera or computer, I brought my own). For a short while, we produced video content, but, as a one-person department I was struggling to output more than a single video a day. These were usually short videos filmed on College Green outside Parliament, but once they’d been scheduled with the ‘talent’ and interviewees, filmed, edited, subtitled, uploaded, and distributed, it didn’t leave much bandwidth to do more. It’s why we started branching out into the world of podcasts, where there was a feeling that we could squeeze far more content from our limited resources. Within a few months of taking the job (as Broadcast Editor) my focus was solely on podcasts. The rest, as they say, is history (or politics, football, money, classified etc).
This experience provided a hint of the schism to come, because it was born of a simple problem. The publication wanted video but it could only afford audio.
It’s been remarked that we are seeing a return to this decade-old demand for video. I was on a call with a nice bloke from Spotify just before Christmas and he told me that their number one priority, in 2025, would be video. That’s Spotify: the world’s biggest audio app. This is Pivot to Video 2.0 albeit with slightly different motivations and radically different executions.
At its heart, this push is being driven by the corporate desire to be an everything app. YouTube adds music and podcasts to its video offering, because consumers would prefer to deal with one provider rather than three. Because they do that, Spotify have to add video. And so on. And nobody has done this more transparently than — you guessed it! — Elon Musk’s X. When Musk took over Twitter it was still a fairly down-the-line micro-blogging app. Previous initiatives to enhance the site’s video offering — such as the acquisitions of Periscope and Vine — had been tentative toe-dips in the world of video. But pressure from Instagram and TikTok had made it clear: if you want to be a social media site in the 2020s, you need to offer short form video. “X is now a video-first platform,” the company announced at the start of last year, a predictable response to the market demands.
Video has long had a couple of advantages over audio. The first, and most obvious one, is retro-compatibility. Put simply: if I make a video then it’s very easy to turn it into an audio product, whereas if I made an audio product, it’s very tricky to subsequently turn it into a video. This isn’t a new idea: I grew up listening to the audio versions of the BBC sitcom Blackadder. By the time I was 13, I had heard every episode of Blackadder dozens of times but never actually seen the show. Conversely, think about what it took to retrofit The Ricky Gervais Show for the animated version that ran on HBO and Channel 4 (and which adapted limited content from just 39 episodes).
The second advantage is their use in digital advertising. Podcasts have long had an issue where advertisers feel like the path from advert to product is tricky. Consumers don’t see the product, they don’t even see the brand’s logo. And they certainly don’t have a clickthrough route from advert to purchase. As such, the price paid for adverts on podcasts has always been comparatively low, and the companies that have done it seriously — like, say, Squarespace and Beer52 — have used a flood of cheap adverts to enhance brand recognition through sheer force of repetition. Male Chimp? Mail Kimp? Mail Chimp. Eventually we’d get there.
I remember meeting with the managing director of a podcast start-up aiming to allow creators to enhance their product with illustrations or annotations that were timed to appear on the user’s device, like an elaborate slide-show. It would’ve been perfect for shows like This American Life or The Rest is History, where the occasional photo is the ideal accompaniment to the discussion, and could’ve solved this advertising conundrum. But it had a fundamental problem: that’s not how, or why, people listen to podcasts. If I listened to podcasts with my phone in my hand, my eyes glued to the podcast app, well, I’d just watch a video instead. (That app was eventually acquired by a mid-sized publisher and has subsequently disappeared from the face of the earth). But this is something that YouTube has achieved with its video advertising. There is a clear, hyperlinked pathway from advert to purchase. YouTube, which is sometimes half-jokingly referred to as “the world’s biggest podcast app”, has achieved that long-gone start-up’s dream.
More important still to Pivot to Video 2.0 has been the massive streamlining of video creation technologies. I hold the covid pandemic largely responsible for this, as it familiarised creators and audiences with the aesthetics of remote video conversations, and reduced the supposition that legacy publishers had to create video content that aped the BBC or CNN. The Washington Post or The Atlantic, who might have been squeamish about mirroring their homespun competitors, now had a legitimate pathway to create cost neutral video. That has been accompanied by significant increases in the ease of video editing, the amount that can be automated (a quantity that is increasing day by day — it used to take hours of my time to subtitle videos, now it can be done largely at the click of a button), and the cost effectiveness of equipment. The camera that I bought for thousands of pounds in 2015/16 — a Canon C100 — has now been rendered redundant by the latest iPhones. Almost all recording studios now have incorporated video and export that as the default. Costs have come down, as has complexity.
The question, really, is who is the Pope and who is the Antipope? Podcasters fear that in this world where Big Tech is driving more of the audio industry over to video, they will be swallowed by the vast, existing corpus of YouTubers, TikTokers and other visual content creators. That’s a legitimate concern. The flow of traffic is pushing audio-sole producers into being dual audio-visual creators, not the other way round. If the bods at Spotify and Apple and YouTube all believe that video is the future, the onus is on creators to work within that framework. And legacy video creators (by which I mean, people who already have a million subscribers on YouTube) will find it much easier to pollinate the world of podcasting with video content than their peers from the world of audio-only content. After all, podcasters are the ones being expected to acquire new skills and — just as importantly — significantly increase their financial overheads.
The reality is that Pivot to Video 2.0 is going to bite podcasters. Their medium is being deprioritised, ultimately. And while there are sometimes advantages to being refuseniks in a world of late converters — sticking to your ideals while others vacate the marketplace — that doesn’t really apply here. If I proudly announce that my podcast, The Ned Ludd Radio Hour, will never publish a video version, but continue being available from the good ol’ podcast apps, what do I gain? Those same apps are now pushing video — and those shows that do adapt to the video landscape will continue to be available as audio-only. I only have market share to lose and nothing to earn.
And because podcasters are being presented with this tough reality, there’s a natural temptation to rail against the misfortune. After all, the generalisation here is that video always enhances a broadcast product, which it transparently doesn’t. There are many podcasts that have been produced in the past two decades that would’ve been killed by the necessity of publishing video too. What the hell sort of mess would Decoder Ring or Reply All have been, if those episodes have required visual augmentation? Would panel shows with non-celebrities — like No Such Thing as a Fish or Call Her Daddy — have got off the ground if they’d had to start with a full-blown video set-up? I know, for sure, that I would never have made my podcast documentary, The Town That Didn’t Stare, if I hadn’t known that I could get away without any visual element.
The honest truth is that plenty of audio-only podcasts will continue to be made. There is still a clear market for them, and they will always be a) cheaper, and b) quicker to make, than videos. And so while the form continues to exist for consumers, it will continue to be a relevant proposition for creators. Will you vacate some audience? Definitely. Will you avoid some algorithmic preferential treatment? Probably. Will you miss out on potential advertiser revenue? Undoubtedly. But the space will still be there.
And I would still expect the biggest portion of the post-Reformation converts to adopt a position between hard-line Catholicism and liberal Protestantism. Most podcasts will continue to focus on their audio version first, using video to create a secondary, different, product. One that is, in large part, designed to market the audio version. It’s something that most shows now do anyway and is probably little more than a gateway drug, an interstitial phase, before video supremacy asserts itself.
But it’s clear enough to me now that video is Pope. It is the core mechanism through which decentralised broadcasting will be done in the next few years. You can fight that, kicking and screaming like the supporters of Anacletus II, and it won’t make you wrong. Chances are, macro forces far beyond your control are screwing you over. Competitors from another medium — who you might not have even recognised as competitors a few years ago — will likely come and cannibalise your audience. The biggest new podcasters of the next 5 years won’t actually be podcasters: they’ll be actors and comedians and musicians, of course, but also YouTubers and TikTokers and Instagram influencers.
The schism offers a simple choice: remain as a podcaster and defend your chosen medium as an ideological zealot, in spite of the media, technological and business currents assaulting you. Or give in to the flow of traffic and accept the transition that most mediums have already experienced, and go from the targeted attack of being a podcaster to the all out war of life as a content creator.
