Rob Chandler

Look at almost any video podcast and you will see the same room. A bookshelf. A plant. Some letters spelling a word. Maybe a neon sign, because someone decided in about 2021 that neon signs meant "podcast". It's fine. It's also completely silent about what the show is. You could swap the set between a true-crime series and a fintech interview show and nobody would notice. That's not laziness. It's economics. Sets became generic because sets got built A physical set is a construction project....

Every studio sells you the room. The mics, the cameras, the lovely lighting, the coffee. All of it real, all of it worth having — and none of it the part that actually stops podcasts from existing. Podcasts die in the gap afterwards. You record something good on a Tuesday, you go home with a hard drive, and then it needs cutting. And whoever is going to cut it has a job, or a rate card, or both. So the episode sits there. Then the next one records before the last one has gone out, and now...

An exec or VIP is coming to town. How do you maximize the visit? Meetings with key partners? A conversation worth capturing? So you book a crew, purchase orders, scope, meetings... Three weeks of diary juggling later, a camera operator and sound recordist spend half the day setting up in a hotel meeting room that wasn't designed for cameras or conversation. You get one, maybe two finished pieces. The edit takes another three weeks. By the time it's published, the moment has passed. The...