Speaker 1: 0:01

The Pod News Weekly Review with Buzzsprout. Start podcasting, keep podcasting. Welcome back to the Pod News Weekly Review and, as you'll know by now, hopefully or maybe you won't know but every Monday or so, we put full versions of interviews that we carry in Friday's Pod News Weekly Review right in here, and we're very pleased to welcome onto the show David Boddickham. Have I pronounced your surname correctly, David?

Speaker 2: 0:35

That's right. I suppose it should be Boddickham if you want to do the Welsh, because it's meant to be a bit like a Welsh valley. But we say Boddickham, that's fine.

Speaker 1: 0:46

Excellent, and you're a Managing Director of L of labyrinth games limited, which sounds very exciting. What does that actually mean in in uh in normal real life?

Speaker 2: 0:53

it is a call back to the very first show that I worked on, which was a british game show called the crystal maze. So labyrinth games game and I devised games for the labyrinth, games for the crystal maze and, uh, that's been my sort of overarching company name ever since and I've worked in a number of various uh medium, from tv to radio to escape rooms to, well now, podcasts.

Speaker 1: 1:18

So yes, and one of the podcasts that you're doing is lateral with tom scott, which is on my Overcast queue, so every so often, tom Scott dives into another 25 minutes of that. I enjoyed listening to it the last time when I was walking around Munich in the sunshine, which was a very lovely and slightly weird thing we have quite a lot of German fans actually, so you would have been in good company.

Speaker 1: 1:46

Well, there you go, and of course the ad breaks for all of a sudden, speak German when you're doing that. So that was a very peculiar thing.

Speaker 2: 1:55

Yes, or very clever technology.

Speaker 1: 1:57

Yes, that's exactly it. So you emailed right at the beginning of the year, weekly at PodNewsnet. Thank you for doing that, and I think one of the reasons why you had emailed is we were a bit sort of grumpy about video and in fact, I may have said what is the point of video on a podcast? Now, lateral with Tom Scott, you've been making video for socials and that sort of thing video for socials and that sort of thing and you sent this very well put together email basically saying why video is actually a good thing and why I shouldn't be talking it down. What were you saying there in terms of the benefits of adding video to a podcast, particularly one with four different voices as yours has?

Speaker 2: 2:50

Yes, well, we come from a slightly different background because our host, tom Scott, is a famous YouTuber, so, of course, when we launch a podcast featuring him, everybody's going oh, that means that it's going to be in full video, right, and um, we said, well, we'll see how it goes, and we actually found that shorter youtube clips work better for us, but the the in terms of the benefits of what the video brings.

Speaker 2: 3:17

It's a case of uh, we are a panel game and so, like watching people's reactions is a good thing. That, uh, if you have four people's voices, we try and introduce them slowly at the start so people get to know who is who, but some people do find it difficult uh, perhaps if they're neurodivergent or whatever uh to uh and keep track of the conversation. Sometimes, um, and also, just, we have a lot of people who English isn't their first language, and so being able to see and hear words spoken in context, with the you know, knowing who's saying what and to whom, and with the facial expressions, it all adds up to helping understand what's going on.

Speaker 1: 4:03

Yeah, and that's an interesting point that you just made about right at the beginning you're quite slow to introduce. You actually hear a good amount of words from one person before you move on to the second and to the third guest, which is something that, as a listener, I've spotted, but I didn't realise the thinking behind that. That's really interesting.

Speaker 2: 4:27

Yeah, it's a technique that I borrowed. Slash stole from Radio 4 panel games. I actually used to appear a long time ago on a BBC panel game called Puzzle Panel and we would bring a puzzle to ask the others, and Lateral's got quite a lot in common with that, and being able to introduce everybody slowly, without the immediacy of having to crash into in YouTube terms, straight into the content is fairly important for us, so that we know who's who.

Speaker 1: 5:00

Yeah, that's really interesting and in terms of the transcripts that you produce, you're not just running an automated transcript engine and just throwing those in, are you? You're actually spending the time doing transcripts properly, as I know that Tom Scott has always done transcripts are very important.

Speaker 2: 5:27

Uh, we hire a professional uh transcript uh service called caption plus who does all of our uh captions. We publish full transcripts on our website so that if you can't access them anywhere else, at least they're there. But uh, we also burn them into all of our socials and uh, once uh the transcripts tag becomes a widely accepted thing, that we can attach our files to our VTT files or whatever they are, then we'll gladly do that.

Speaker 1: 5:53

Yes, either VTT or SRT. I'm trying to push for just VTT because it's easier and it works on a browser, but we're going to dive into the more tedious side of that I noticed. So you come from a TV background and I think one of the things that I was saying in my typical sort of over simplistic way is Cheap television was the word that stuck in my mind.

Speaker 1: 6:26

Yes, and normally I say shit television, but I decided I wouldn't say that on the podcast I would say cheap television. What's your sort of view of on that if you were to do this? And obviously Tom has done a lot of different puzzle games and panel things on his YouTube channel and some of those are very fancy and have all of the CGI added to them and everything else. Why not just make David? If I can be so rude, why not make it properly?

Speaker 2: 7:00

Well, if I was to make a tv show properly, um, it would involve 10 times more people, uh, probably 20 times the budget, and it the lead time is just massively longer. Uh and uh. The thing that's great about having access to either youtube or podcasts or spotify, whatever you a creator-led commissioning process where we can just say, look, we think this is good, we're going to put it out there. We don't need any commissioners to tell us, oh, that needs to be a little bit more orange. Um, I've literally had that happen to me sometimes. Uh, we can just say, look, we think this is great, and we'll listen to feedback from people who consume the show. Um, by whatever means, but we will take our view as to what we think is good. Um, so it's just, everything's just so more efficient.

Speaker 2: 7:54

Um, I think the problem with um formats that are regularly repeating I think they work really, really well as podcasts because people expect them as like a weekly friend On YouTube. I don't think they work so well. I think people have tried quiz-type formats, panel game formats on YouTube, and what happens is people watch the first one or two and then they sort of go, oh, what's new? And they don't really have any brand loyalty.

Speaker 1: 8:24

That's interesting. I mean I use YouTube, I pay for YouTube so I don't see any ads on there, but that also means that I can download everything, and so I will typically use YouTube on the not insubstantial amount of travelling that I end up doing, and quite a lot of the shows on there that I've found are actually panels and panel games and things like that, mostly stolen from the television. I should say but yeah, but that's interesting. So you're saying that the habitualness, if you like, of a podcast means that formats work much easier than perhaps on YouTube, where you're finding new audiences all the time, which, of course, interestingly, is one of the reasons why podcasters love the idea of going on there in the first place, because you're finding new audiences all the time.

Speaker 2: 9:24

Yeah, I mean. What's addictive to me as a producer is I have access to all the statistics and I can see all the numbers going up, some faster than others, but it's very addictive to go like the hard work that we're putting in is showing results. Here and on a TV show I turn up, I write questions or devise games or whatever help with the format and it might be successful. It might not be so successful, but I don't really have any part of the IP and so I work for hire on those sorts of things.

Speaker 2: 10:02

So, yeah, what's great about podcasting is that you know if you want to have a break or do it as regularly as possible. We choose to stick to a very regular weekly format schedule because it just helps with the. Really we don't have to explain oh, we're going away and now we're coming back. Yes, it's just runs like clockwork. And also with us we can because we're not a topical show we can batch record. So we actually do a very intensive for podcasts 16 shows over four days.

Speaker 1: 10:40

Wow.

Speaker 2: 10:44

So we do two in the morning, two in in the afternoon for four days in a run, and that means that tom is then free to spend like his next three months traveling to europe to look at dams and escalators and whatever else he does. Uh, while I get on with uh editing this show, uh well, I send off to get edited and coordinate everything and get the next set of shows ready.

Speaker 1: 11:07

So I've got two questions out of that. I'll come back to the editing question, but firstly, what is Tom actually doing at the moment? Because he's not making his YouTube videos, or at least he's not releasing them. Ah, maybe he's making them, but he's making them more slowly. Now, what's he actually doing?

Speaker 2: 11:25

First of all, he's, first of all, he's really enjoying his time off. That's the first thing he's enjoying. He's planning and scheming some things. You may see an announcement in the next mumble months, but I can't say exactly. But yeah, in the next mumble months, but I can't say exactly. But yeah, he's starting to get the itch to do things. I don't think it'll be back to the weekly videos. I think he's put a tin hat on that. But yeah, he will be back.

Speaker 1: 11:57

There's some very clever reuse of that material on Facebook at the moment, where I seem to be served a young Tom Scott video every single week on Facebook for some reason. I don't fully understand what's going on, but in terms of editing you mentioned editing there I saw someone from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the ABC, and they were talking about a brilliant podcast that they make that comes out every week called Are you Listening, and what they do with that is they film the whole thing in video and then it's got lots of archive material in there as well, but they send it to two different editing teams and one set of people edit it editing teams and one set of people edit it for audio, one set of people edit it for video. Does it make it harder to edit if you know that there is video there as well?

Speaker 2: 12:53

So I got this wrong when, when Tom started, he said oh well, what we'll do is we'll just completely edit the shows in such a way that audio and video are going to be in lockstep, and that way we've got the whole audio, we've got the whole video and the show can exist in whatever form in the future. It doesn't matter which version you listen to. And now that we're on spotify and you have to flick between the video and the audio, then that's actually been a very good decision for us. So, yes, I mean that is definitely a editorial downside in that you either have to say, um, the audio is going to have some pregnant pauses in it, which for us as a sort of a stinky panel show isn't too bad, or your video is going to have jump cuts in it.

Speaker 2: 13:46

So if you've watched something like the Rest is Entertainment in video, you sort of go oh wow, they've really got a lot of jump cuts in here when they've cut out a lot of the fluff in the chat. So we've got a brilliant editor called Julie has it in dublin who, uh, she sort takes a view between the two. Yes, there'll be like any major dead ends will get chopped out, but not for really very much, but there might be like one or two moments where there's like a pregnant pause that ideally you'd want to take out but we can't do it because it would ruin the continuity of the video. But it works 95 better than I thought it would do yeah, no, that's.

Speaker 1: 14:26

That's really interesting, and I and I think it's that spotify, you know, has driven us um and, to be fair, youtube music will have driven us to do much the same sort of thing as well. In in making sure that the audio track for the video is is just what you get, which is a very different world, I think, than you know, certainly the way that the ABC are doing it. But if you're a public service broadcaster, you perhaps have a little bit more cash to splash on these sorts of things.

Speaker 2: 14:55

But I think if, if you've got the audio and you've got the video, at least you you can recut it with a, with manually or with the help of ai in the future, you're you're future-proofed. And if people just suddenly decide that you know, we all have to be watching these things on, uh, in in like a 90 second blips or 30 minute long form or whatever, you don't have to predict the future. As long as you've got the raw material, we can recut it, yeah yeah, yeah, which which makes a bunch, a bunch of sense.

Speaker 1: 15:29

There was a really interesting just finally, there was a really interesting um linkedin post from josh liston that we uh also linked to, I think, last week. Um, he posted four reasons to put your audio show on youtube, and what he was basically saying is look, non-technical people are out there. Non-technical people really want to have a listen to your shows and, frankly, youtube is on pretty well anything with a screen and with a speaker, and so, therefore, it's just easier. People understand how YouTube works. Youtube doesn't change very often, particularly on their TV apps and things like that, so people just understand how the thing works, and I think there's certainly something to be said for that as well.

Speaker 1: 16:16

You also, of course, have comments and thumbs up and those sorts of things on YouTube which you don't necessarily do on other platforms, so I think that that was interesting. He did say, though, the caveat this is, josh, the caveat I often hear about audio on YouTube is the extreme drop off rate, which I believe is real, but I would say he says that the dropoff rate for almost all content posted to YouTube is extreme. I don't know whether you see all of the stats. You were talking about stats earlier. Do you see an extreme drop-off rate for the shows that you're putting there or the clips that you're putting there?

Speaker 2: 17:01

So that is exactly what happened to us. We put up the first episode on YouTube in full and what happened is, yeah, we had a massive drop off. Only about 15% of people watched the entire thing, because people are not expecting on YouTube to sort of sit down and watch a 45 minute video. So we went oh, this is going to really tank our recommendation from YouTube, because if YouTube's going, oh God, only 15% of people are staying with this video. This can't be a great channel.

Speaker 2: 17:34

So what we did was we said look, let's for now do video clips. So what we did is we put up our best two or three questions which last about six, seven minutes and put those up on YouTube, sort of either as a taster for people who don't want to listen to the entire show and also as like an advertising for finding the show and then, if you like that, maybe you'll come across the full show, whereas the retention rates on the podcast are huge. I mean, I think at the end, maybe 80, 85% of people have listened right to the end of the final question. So, yeah, so there's the difference 14% or so, I think it was on the video and 85% on the audio.

Speaker 1: 18:26

But that's an amazing tip of yours to look at doing short form content as well in the same channel, because that actually helps the recommendation engine get more comfortable with the quality of the video that you have.

Speaker 2: 18:41

Yeah, I mean we're not huge fans of the way that YouTube has implemented podcasts and the way it's got these static weird things with the RSS and so on. And also YouTube pays less than the podcast on Spotify. So we yeah, we use it as a entry point, but we're still the main way of consuming the full podcast so far is going to be via podcast and Spotify.

Speaker 1: 19:10

Well, it's an excellent podcast. It's called Lateral, you can find it in all of your favourite podcast players and you've filmed all of them in video. Does that mean that at some point in the future, particularly on Spotify, which will be supporting video in full? Does that mean that, slowly and surely, we'll begin to see some of the videos of the older episodes?

Speaker 2: 19:38

So we had the foresight to edit as we went because, uh, we needed them for clips anyway. So we just asked for the whole show to be done. So I'm pleased to say that all whatever it is 120 plus episodes are already now in full, full-length video on spotify. So so knock yourself out.

Speaker 1: 20:00

That's very cool. Well, David, thank you so much. I appreciate it. Lateralcastcom is where to go for more information about that particular show. Is there anything else that you're particularly excited of right now?

Speaker 2: 20:17

No, not really. You do your own show as well, don't you?

Speaker 1: 20:18

No, not really. You do your own show as well, don't you?

Speaker 2: 20:22

Well, I do. I do my own podcast with my friend, Justin Scroggie, called TV Show and Tell. It's about the TV industry. I've got all the really nuts and bolts about how TV is made. So yeah, give that a try. Tv Show and Tell. It's called.

Speaker 1: 20:40

Excellent, David. Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.

Speaker 2: 20:44

Thank you very much.