Podcasting's Elephant In The Evergreens Conundrum

Podcasters often say “evergreen” and “timeless” to describe our content. But the future is rarely kind to creative expressions. Can we avoid making shows that sound dated to the next generation?

February 17, 2021

Article

I've been watching Chappelle’s Show on Netflix. It originally aired back in 2003 and is now back, after a bit of drama and controversy unrelated to the reason why I’m using a 19-year-old sketch comedy program to talk about podcasting.

I remember watching Dave’s show when it originally broadcast. At the time, my TV was then as it is now appropriately sized for the time. I don’t remember if it was flat or not. But I do remember it didn’t hang on a wall. Regardless, it was big enough to be the center point of broadcast media and console gaming entertainment in our living room.

But on the TV I have today, the show looks really dated. It’s still funny (if that’s your style of humor, and Dave’s style of humor is not everyone’s cup of tea, so feel free to not send me an email on the topic). A few of the references are dated, but such is the nature of using “current” events as the base of many jokes. The audio quality isn’t noticeably different from TV shows from today—at least not as represented by the modest soundbar attached to my TV.

The problem is the video. It’s grainy and the image doesn’t fill the screen. And that got me thinking…

Will The Future Be Kind To Your Podcast?

I know that yes, pixel density and other developments in on-screen reproductions have advanced by leaps and bounds over the last 19 years. But I don’t remember Dave’s show looking that bad way back when. It looks like it’s being played from an old VHS version, and that can’t be right. I assume that Comedy Central went back to the masters to create what we’re watching on Netflix today, right?

The “letterboxing” doesn’t bother me. I’m OK with the left and right sides of the video not displaying. That’s better than stretching the video to fit, making everything look squished and goofy. And it’s better than trying to re-format the wider version through creative cropping to fill my screen.

But still… 2021 is not being kind to the visual reproduction of Dave’s show. I worry that one day, that might be the case for those of us who are making evergreen podcast content.

This is less of a problem for news and current events shows, where the back-catalog has more archival value than anything. But a good amount of us are making—or are at least trying to make—timeless podcast episodes that are fine to listen to 3 days, 3 weeks, 3 months, or even 3 years in the future.

But… will they be in 19 years?

In 2040, How Will We Listen To Podcasts?

It’s 2021. In 19 years, it’ll be 2040. Deal with that for a minute, and then think about sound quality advancements. Video reproduction has changed drastically in 19 years, as I’ve just illustrated. But has audio? More to the point, will audio?

Were I a betting man, I’d bet against the status quo. Granted, it’s exceedingly hard for video to replicate in 2D the 3D world our eyes encounter every day. Every year brings new advancements, which leads to the older technology becoming more dated.

On the surface, solving the same problem for audio seems simpler. There’s a range of sound frequencies our human ears can perceive. By and large, we’ve been able to create speakers and sound transmitters that produced rich and immersive sounds within that range for decades. So no problem, right?

Not so fast. Podcasting, at least as practiced today, sends “lossy” files to our listeners. Lossy means what it says: some information is “lost” on the copy that reaches our listeners’ devices. And from there, depending on what or how they listen, additional signal will be lost before it reaches their ears.

Will that be “fixed” in the future? Will bandwidth and storage considerations be so vastly different in 19 years that “lossless” audio files can be sent to listeners? And if so, will binaural and spatial audio—formats that accurately preserve the 3D nature of sound—become the standard, much like stereo, surround-sound, and other formats proved their superiority over mono?

Can Podcasters Prepare For The Future?

My friend and exceptional audio engineer Marcus dePaula recently said that marginal video is forgivable. But low-quality audio is not. He’s right, and I have to assume that at some point in the future, podcast episodes that are “acceptable” today will be painful to listen to.

Obviously, we should all be preserving the source files and masters. That way, when there is a breakthrough in transmission and storage, we can make higher-quality files relatively quickly. This, by the way, is what record labels do with they re-release an album 20+ years old so that it sounds great on the newest listening devices.

We can also lobby our hosting providers to help us stay current. Rather than uploading lossy .mp3 files, we could be uploading lossless files, letting the hosting provider make some on-the-fly decisions about the quality of files to distribute based on a variety of factors. Factors that, in theory, will change and allow for higher-quality content delivery as technology progresses.

But that won’t help us too much if the promise of binaural or spatial audio becomes dominant. Yes, I assume that, just like letterboxing on our current TVs, the headphones or speakers that are capable of reproducing 3D sound will also handle non-optimized content. It’ll just sound… dated.

Beyond that, I’ve nothing much for you other than questions. And that’s OK, as it’s sort of the gist of this program: questions every working podcaster should be asking themselves. These are questions worthy of the other people in your podcasting peer group. I’m betting one person—perhaps you—is way more persnickety than others when it comes to sound quality. Share this article with them and see how the conversation shakes out. Even if there are no definitive next-steps, it’s always good to be thinking about the future.

Because if we don’t, our evergreen and timeless episodes are all too quickly going to start showing some browning around the edges.

If you liked these thoughts, please go to BuyMeACoffee.com/evoterra and send me a virtual coffee to show your support.

I shall be back tomorrow with yet another Podcast Pontifications.

Cheers!

Transcript

Podcasters often say "evergreen" and "timeless" to describe our content, but the future is rarely kind to creative expressions. Can we avoid making shows that sound dated to the next generation?
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Hello, and welcome to another Podcast Pontifications with me, Evo Terra.
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I've been watching The Chappelle Show. Remember Chappelle Show from 2003? Oh my goodness. Yeah. Well, it's back again on Netflix. There's a whole series of drama around the re-emergence of that show and it's not even close to important to today's topic.
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I'm watching this show that I used to watch a long time ago on my new really big TV that I didn't have back in 2003. It's still funny. There's still parts of it, some of it's a little bit dated for the references in there, but it looks dated. I mean, holy cow does this thing look dated - giant pixels, doesn't fill the full width of the screen. Just the video is - that's the biggest problem that it has.
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I just wonder was video on television that bad back in 2002? I mean, it had to be. It's not like they took VHS copies of this, that they had stored in an archive somewhere. This is Comedy Central. They have the masters from nineteen years ago.
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So that's leading me to think about us and the podcasting space, not from the video stuff. That's video. Well, that's video. This is audio, and I worry about - and I wonder about, I don't worry about it. I wonder about how audio quality will be treated in the future? Specifically, how the content you and I are making today for our shows will sound nineteen years in the future? Because you know, we're making - a lot of us are making - evergreen content.
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Not all of us. Plenty of news shows that are out there and current events and trends and that's fine. But for a good amount of us, we're making content evergreen that's designed to be listened to at any point in time in the future, which means nineteen years in the future, what will it sound like?
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It'll sound like it sounds today. Yeah. But how will today's sound be accepted nineteen years in the future? You know, sound reproduction gets better all the time. It really does. The way we listen to and perceive sound is getting better. Just like video, you know, that we can now preserve pictures and present those pictures, moving pictures on a screen with much more clarity and high definition than ever before.
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That same thing is happening in the audio quality space. Reproduction is getting better and by definition, podcasting, we're working in the lossy medium, which means data is lost when we push out our MP3 files, which is the most common way of releasing podcasts. There is some data that is lost, which means that there is some data loss going into headphones or earbuds or speakers or whatever the future might actually hold.
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So nineteen years from now, will your episodes sound dated? Are you even designing them to be enjoyed nineteen years later, or are you making choices based on the realities of today? No judgment, but you might be making choices based on the reality of today, where you want small files as far as overall bits go so that it goes into people faster.
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Well, how's that going to work nineteen years from now? Have you considered this? You know, a friend of mine, Marcus dePaula, said to me the other day that marginal video is forgivable, but low quality audio is not. And I have to agree with him. And I don't think anybody right now is making low quality audio.
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If you're listening to this show and you're making low quality audio, what are you thinking? That's not good to be done. But in the future, I wonder about the okay quality you're doing right now for audio might be considered low quality very quickly.
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You can combat that in a couple of different ways. I mean, what you should be doing, what I assume that you are doing, and what I certainly am doing, is preserving the master files. I'm not recording straight to MP3, obviously. I save my build files and the original source files. So in the event that I, we do need to, I do need to go along and remaster, I can do that pretty quickly. That, by the way, is how music stays not sounding too dated is they go back and remaster a lot of albums because they have the source material.
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Well, as podcasters we probably have our source materials. So that's one good thing we should do.
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Maybe we hope for a hosting solution that comes along that allows us to upload our lossless audio files, and then they make some choices of how to compress and downgrade those files as they are being sent out today in 2021, that can be vastly different tomorrow in 2031 or 2040 - weird numbers to say.
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That might be happening. Although, that's not going to help us with binaural sound or spatial sound, which was a promise that was the brought out last year that I don't think has really seen full adoption yet. But think AR, VR, but in your ears. Is the content we're making today fit for that if that becomes the way content is listened to? Probably not, but hopefully that will fail gracefully so that even if there are some fancy headphones or whatever listening device out there, a decent file, maybe stereo, not mono, still sounds good on those devices. I don't know.
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And I got nothing but questions for us today, people. I have no answers because the future is not yet written. That's okay. Questions that you should be thinking about, all of us working podcasters should be thinking of, is kind of the gist of the program. So it makes sense.
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And I want this to be a conversation. Well, you and I can't have the conversation because this is a one to many broadcast, but you can have conversations with the other people in your podcasting group, can't you? I will bet you someone in your group, in your peer group, I will bet you there is one person who is way more picky than others when it comes to sound quality. Maybe that's you, but maybe not. I bet that person is thinking about this a lot.
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So share this episode with them. Yes, shameless plug for me to get you to share Podcast Pontifications with someone else, and see what you're all thinking about the future of sound, and how we can deal with evergreen and timeless content that at some point in time is going to look a little brown around the edges, and also dated, or sound that way at least.
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If you liked the content I brought to you today, and I bring to you every single day, at least, you know, four days a week, please go to buymeacoffee.com/evoterra and get me a virtual coffee. That would be a lovely thing.
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That's it. I shall be back tomorrow with yet another Podcast Pontifications.
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Cheers!

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