The divide between professional and amateur video and audio worry me a bit. With articles/blogs/websites its easy to compete with the big guys on “production values” whereas video and audio the entry bar is set at a far more challenging level.
First of all there is the ability of the presenter, producer, director and editor (probably in a lot of cases all same person). When you write with modern tools you only need to be able to write. Journalistic, editing, research or even HTML skills can help but or not really necessary. With podcasting a whole new set of technologies and skills come into play. Equipment, sound levels, editing etc on the technical side and that is before you discover if you have any talent in front of the mike. Some people are naturals, I think Nicks years on the telephone have trained him to have a good radio voice, the rest of us would probably have to work hard to not sound uninteresting. Going into video you have even more challenges, as well as all the audio hurdles of podcasting you have the addition of the visual. Your presenter needs to look the part and many shows use graphics. Seamlessly and creatively directing and editing video is even harder. There is a reason why many of the top video bloggers are either TV or aspiring TV professionals.
OK, I know there are people who are doing podcasts with built-in sound cards and even built-in mikes. I suppose, though I don’t actually watch any, there are video podcasts (vlogs, vodcasts, whatever) where people sit in front of a video camera and just “do their thing”. How long will these efforts stay around though?
Look at the podcasting community discussions of “rigs“. Right away there is some snobbishness about using basic audio capture gear. Podcasts produced this way are largely dismissed. For a fun clip of someone falling over a video captured on a phone is sufficient, a regular “show” that is just thrown together probably wouldn’t survive very long and almost certainly wouldn’t attract any income.
For myself I think I will stick to text and maybe guest on a podcast or vlog if invited. I would rather leave all this complexity to others for now!