I’m pretty confident that my Video Podcast Tip had nothing to do with this, but Morgan Webb’s WebbAlert is now much more comfortable to watch.

Why?

Because she’s a person now, and not a floating head. She’s farther away from the camera.

Compare this episode from Tuesday to today’s episode. Isn’t it so much better now?

You might not be able to tell from the still shot that it’s a huge improvement, but press play on the episode from Tuesday. It gets really creepy and uncomfortable to watch really fast.

Then watch today’s. See the difference?

Remember this when you’re making your own video podcast. Unless you’re making a horror show, you really don’t want to creep out your audience.

Embedding YouTube just doesn’t cut it.

Of the tips I’ve given thus far, this is probably the most difficult to accomplish. Bandwidth and time work against you when you try to provide more than one or two options for your viewers. But it makes the experience much better, and far more accessible.

Attention spans don’t allow people to only focus on one thing at a time. You’re listening to music right now, aren’t you? The TV might even be on in the background.

We feel weird if we’re not listening to music while we’re online. We feel weird when there’s not something on the TV in the background. I’ve been trying to cut down on my TV watching (down to only about 1.5 hours a day), so having the TV screen black beside me makes me really uncomfortable. I don’t want to watch anything, but I want there to be something to watch.

When you only provide a YouTube embed for your video podcast, you’re forcing people to focus solely on it. It becomes difficult to have it running in the background while you’re trying to do other things. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that if you have a video podcast, most of the your audience is using Firefox. Or, at the very least, they’re probably not running IE6. They’re used to having tabs. They don’t like having multiple browser windows open. Which means they can’t comfortably be reading websites while they’re watching your video podcast.

They need to be able to download it and watch it in their own media player.

As I said before, this causes problems for you, the producer, because you’ll have to spend time transcoding and you’ll have to spend money on bandwidth.

Providing an iTunes feed is a great start, but not everybody has iTunes and not everybody runs Windows or owns a Mac. But, at the very, very least, you should be publishing it to iTunes.

To see a great example of providing multiple formats, check out Rocketboom’s list of options for the viewer.

Revision3 offers, along with their embedded Flash player, multiple Quicktime, WMV, and Xvid encodes.

Part 2 will have helpful tips about how to provide options like these for your viewers.