Audio vs Video
formats & mediums sloshing about
Help! First up- a quick, last nudge.
I have a short, anonymous survey running to help me shape the Colour Bar better this year. It’s very short (2 minutes!), so I would appreciate it muchly if you could head over here with your responses!
As the blurring of formats and mediums* powers on, The Colour Bar pokes around how video continues to devour our ‘content’ spaces.
Audio, meet Video: The Format Formerly Known as Podcasts?
▶️ Curated/Cuts: A Dance of Ice & Fire + Iconic bikes in battle
Reels on TV: Wait, this is the TV app for Instagram?
Vertical Disney: more scrolling, yay!
➕ Youtube 2026, Spotify’s future, Prompt stealing!
The Colour Bar- like a friend in the industry who reads widely so you don’t have to.
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* Technically the plural of medium is media, but over time ‘mediums’ has become acceptable, especially with media mostly seen as news/entertainment media. Thank you.
1. TFFKAP, or The Format Formerly Known as Podcasts?
The incredible and seemingly irreversible importance of video in the world of Podcasts is now a given. All podcasts worth their salt are expected to have a video equivalent, firstly as an attempt to become part of the podcast explosion that Youtube has muscled its way into; and secondly to provide memorable clips for Reels & Tiktok & Shorts.
This means that the much touted ease of ‘sitting down and starting a podcast’ is rapidly falling by the wayside. It also means many pods seem now to be always on the lookout for that snappy line, that controversial excerpt, that tantalising blurb which works so well for thumb-stopping. The research/opinion/personality that was enough for most pods, now additionally needs production values, social strategy and muscle.
Alas! Our democratisation, as we have seen all too often now, needs an investor.
Look at me, waxing on this back in 2024, “if video is just going to be table stakes for podcasters, many smart & engaging minds could be discouraged or intimidated to even get into podcasting at all”.
The space has steadily been growing increasingly crowded, becoming ever more complex. With the pre-eminence of video, the essentials of what was proudly and organically an audio-only format are dissolving into a more ‘TV’ approach. Plus, the flood of ‘Clipping’ across formats could push long, rich podcast episodes into mere clip factories (whether sustainably, remains highly questionable).
“Netflix’s foray into the vast, strange, and increasingly confusing world of podcasting, now swung so deeply into video territory that its arrival on Hollywood’s biggest streaming service feels less like a category violation than it might have just a few years ago, when the medium was still defined by an audio-first shape and RSS feeds.”
As it may now seem inevitable, Netflix entered the space last year, but this podcast foray can actually be framed as part of its battle for the big screen with Youtube. Which, in many ways, should also be seen as a battle for ‘lean back’ viewing, or day-time TV.
Nicholas Quah questions this identity crisis of sorts, arguing that everything will become Youtube in 2026.
“we’re watching these two media giants being forced to define what it is, and what it is willing to become, in response to the other. Netflix can frame its podcast rollout as experimentation or even inevitability. But what it’s really doing is opening the door to blurring whatever makes it distinct from YouTube’s user-generated universe”
While we are on it, Netflix announced The Pete Davidson Show- its ‘first original video podcast’. The show will mostly be filmed in his garage, “where all the best conversations happen,” he says, but will also hit the road.
Me: You mean, talk show?
Also, it won’t appear on any other platforms at all, including audio versions on the Apple app. You know, actual podcasts.
It hits Netflix on Jan 30, so feel free to watch the podcast or listen to the talk show.
Or something like that.
2. Curated/Cuts
· A Dance of Ice & Fire.
Snow. Fire. Trails.
The Winter Olympics are upon us, and that means we can expect some fine trailer work. The BBC Creative team continues to maintain their wonderfully creative aspirations, this time working with the consistently distinct, boundary-pushing work of Nomint and director Yannis Konstantinidis.
Even though I’m not a fan of the line “Trails Will Blaze”, there is so much that is great here. The contrast of snow and fire. The challenge of an orchestrated, tightly controlled technique (stop-motion), with a fickle, famously uncontrollable element (fire). These represent not only the production challenge, but also the effect it has on us the viewers. If you’ve somehow not seen their stunning work before, please- go, now, check it out. If you have, in some ways the marvel of what’s been pulled off here is diminished, because they spoil us with their incredible craft and ambition.
“I wish I could do it more. I’ll probably never do it again!”
The BTS for these kind of projects is always almost as much fun, so watch it here, with the full credits too.
· Bikes & Battles.
Royal Enfield x BGMI The iconic bike brand and Krafton India announced a collaboration which will see its motorcycles appear in Battle Grounds Mobile India (BGMI).
The collab is cool, and the visual spectacle in the spot is cooler. I can be persuaded when cliches (there are a fair few here) are executed with such panache!
My gripe? What happened with the Voice Over, man? Maybe its the ‘cool bikes, so cool American narration’ thought process, but it was so jarring to me.
Coming from a brand that also did this and this in the past 18 months, it feels a bit… off-note.
Shyam Vinod Ravindranathan · Production House: Hammerhead Films ·
3. Reels On TV
Right, so we heard some time in mid ‘25 that IG was plotting an app for Connected TVs.
Youtube has made its place on the big screen, and from what we hear YT Shorts are doing ok too. And, communal viewing, lean back experiences, background TV, podcasts, more long form- so many reasons Youtube seems to be killing it in the living room.
Now, while IG does not come to this ecosystem with anything resembling the Youtube content repertoire, nor viewing habits, you kindly allowed for that the premise kinda made sense.
But they’ve released this ‘Reels On TV’ commercial a few days back, and it left me feeling like maybe this app isn’t a good idea, after all. It made the whole proposition real, but also very… meh. It goes and literally replicates the IG experience onto a TV- scrolling, super short, vertical, ephemeral.
Surely that can’t be it?
And the whole communal viewing use case. Right, what’s the thinking here? How keen will people be to watch others’ algorithms? Or indeed, share their own algo-fuelled idiosyncrasies on the telly?
Dunno… despite the cute-clever scrolling technique they came up with, the spot just deflated any positivity around this, methinks.
Also, man… those sets! Most of those TVs just didn’t feel like they belonged to those spaces at all.
PS- Compulsive ad watcher Andrew Tindall gives it all a zero. He sees the product itself dying, leaving us with the unsettling possibility that if it doesn’t find its grave, he will “do a webinar in a chicken costume about how very wrong” he was.
Relatedly,
Substack- that dear haven for writers, journos, bloggers and wordsmiths- is leaning even more into video- they have a TV App too! Wait what? I won’t explain why because I am not sure I can. Or want to.
Spotify- the
musicaudio streaming service also believes video is key to the future with young people. “They want to watch videos of everything,” Daniel Ek has said.
Eyeballs, people.
4. Vertical Disney
Talking of vertical videos, Disney will have them joyously bubbling in the Disney+ app some time this year, in an attempt at “turning Disney+ into a must-visit daily destination.”
Sure, mobile has primacy in the way ‘content’ is ‘consumed’, and this could be another easy timesuck for users. I suppose my question here is intent. Does Disney expect a vertical feed ala TikTok to help keep existing customers on the platform, or to draw in new ones? I can see how the former can work to a certain extent, for those already committed to plonking the $ every month for the streaming service. And, they’d need to be proper fans.
But the rest of us whose daily diet is already dominated by (free) scrolling vertical videos, are surely not going to be lured by this feature enough to pay $15-20 a month for the privilege?
And exactly what kind of videos will these be?
Its unclear at the moment; their EVP said “everything’s on the table”, so we should expect ported social media clips, cutdowns from shows, even original content? And oh, maybe some AI generated goodness from that crystal clear OpenAI deal? If you are thinking that sounds like throwing a lot on the wall to see what sticks, don’t worry- we are reassured “it won’t be a kind of a disjointed, random experience.”
They might have some learnings from last year’s launch of ‘Verts’ on the ESPN app, though arguably sports lends itself very differently to the ecosystem.
➕ Quick Hits
Youtube 2026: Jim Louderback has a great summary of what to take away from Youtube CEO Neal Mohan’s recent roadmap sharing.
Spotify: Bloomberg has a pretty solid and interesting piece for the new leaders. Fun fact: the co-CEOs are literal complementary opposites: Norström means “north stream” in Swedish, and Söderström means “south stream.”
AI: Furious AI Users Say Their Prompts Are Being Plagiarized. That’s right! “they now feel entitled to the specific prompts they use to churn out slop, as if the entire technology wasn’t based on the work of human artists that had been ingested without consent.”
“We’re going to invest in content and things on the platform that actually require you to commit a little bit. We want to create energy and culture, not just use it up.”
In a world of endless scrolls and auto-fed content,
Spotify co-CEO Norström promises a different path.
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