In this episode, I move away from talking about video podcasts in overly broad terms and try to get down and into the trenches. What was the process like of getting video podcasts onto a device to view them? And what was it like to actually watch a video podcast? And how did that affect the podcast intimacy?

To answer these questions, I first describe a method for doing media history that I’m calling the "technological re-enactment." Unlike something like emulation or retro tech preservation, the technological re-enactment is meant to be more accessible by more people – largely thanks to its attitude of "close enough." We don’t have to 100% replicate the technology of a given era, but we can try to get as close as possible by substituting in modern technology only when needed. By doing so, we can try and recreate the core aspects of what it was like to experience old forms of technology.

There are three main steps involved when doing a technological reenactment.

First, you need to identify the core characteristics of the experience that you are trying to re-create. These are features of the experience holistically, and don’t necessarily have to be specific pieces of hardware or software.

Second, you would determine what parts—if any—of the original experience you still have access to, and what parts you need to fill in with more modern technology.

Third, keep a running list of what substitutions you had to make, so you can consider how those more modern technologies affected the experience as a whole.

Ultimately, the experience of watching podcasts on the old iPod was terrible. Which wasn’t anything surprising: Given the limits of the technology – that is having to pre-load all the videos – along with the small size of the screen, it was just too much work for a less then stellar experience. This is because podcasts are characterized by forming an intimate connection between the podcast producer and the podcast listener. But when you have video, and can see that the podcaster is in a different place and time than you, the illusion of intimacy is lost.

And, as I’ve shown with my technological reenactment, adding suboptimal video technology on top of that is essentially just a death blow for the video podcast. Despite the promise of it being the "next generation of podcasting," it’s not really surprising that it didn’t take off.

In this episode, I was going to give a bit of a walkthrough of my process of doing the technological re-enactment of video podcasts. Unfortunately, I’m not very good at doing a walkthrough in a brief manner and ended up rambling for upwards of 20 minutes. Even after cutting it down, it was just too much and we ended up too far down the rabbit hole. There will be a supplemental video episode with a full walkthrough for those who are interested. But otherwise, this episode just gives and overview of the process.

I found the old episodes of video podcasts that I used during my technological re-enactment using the PodcastRE podcast database and archive. You can find out more information here https://podcastre.org.

You can download a copy of the Handbrake preset that I mentioned in the video on the episode page on my website.

Questions? Comments? Concerns? Get in touch with me - [email protected] or see my website www.benpettis.com. You can also tweet at me @ben_pettis_.

License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Owens, Trevor. The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018.