I was really interested in hearing what @tom had to say about the new current account last night, so decided to watch the Q&A on the way to work this morning. Needless to say attempting to watch a YouTube video while moving at high speed through patchy network coverage is painful.
It occurs to me that this sort of talk could easily be published as an audio podcast as well with practically zero editing. This would make it much more accessible to those of us on our daily commute, and I’d certainly prefer to consume it this way. Is this something Monzo might consider?
Apologies if this has already been considered and rejected!
That could be really interesting. My concern would be it wouldn’t be super high quality —and so especially if you found it without any context, wouldn’t be a great impression? wdyt?
It’s a fair point, but if this is a concern, perhaps you could lead in with a professionally produced standard intro which explains these are live recordings with associated quality issues?
The current videos have a viewer count in the hundreds - I’d have thought the interest is a lot wider than that, but the video format makes it cumbersome. A Monzo podcast notification in the app I use daily? Much easier!
I’ve not caught any live streams before. But if you set out to listen to the podcsat, knowing there’s a full video, it’s a given to expect that not everything will make perfect sense / will sound out of context.
Take Linus Tech Tips, they run the WAN show every Friday night. They upload an archive of the stream to YouTube and then a podcast to (I believe) soundcloud. There are frequent times where they’ll be talking about something that you can see but not hear, I find it very easy to ignore that / move past it. 90% of what’s said can be understood without visual context so I’d be happy to listen to a Monzcast, Monzocast, Modcastzo? ( Podcast )
You’re right that you need to consider how you present the podcast, both in (say) iTunes, and at the top of each episode. But speaking as someone who would love this, I think it would be great if you can figure out how to position the podcast so expectations are set appropriately, but you can then provide unedited audio of the meet ups and events.
Every interview/news article I’ve read with Tom or other Monzo staff has been very interesting, and there are always little details of interest. But, like others, I have little time to watch videos, so miss out on that content. I suppose I could download the audio from YouTube (e.g. with Downie) and sync it to my phone, but that’s going back to the early-2000s when podcast management was manual and cumbersome, and I just don’t have the stomach for it anymore!
Myself and @Sam have been looking at some pretty cool solutions for better quality audio recording. More specifically we’ve found a setup which works well alongside our current video recording equipment but I’m pretty sure we could rip the audio without compromising the quality.
We’ll be testing it out over the next week so will keep you updated. It would be awesome to have a place where people can listen back to all the presentations and talks Monzo team members have ever given - it wouldn’t be too much trouble to add a quick audio intro for context either. A good written description would also help
Thanks Naji! Really appreciate the effort you all put into keeping the community informed and connected. In the meantime, I’ve heard enough ‘good reviews’ of last night’s live stream, that I’ve downloaded the audio and copied it to my phone.