You've said before that you didnt want to do video podcasts if quality suffered, if at any point the new studio had fallen short of expectations would the current plan have been scrapped or was there other business involved as well?

Yeah, we’ve basically been approaching the studio build from the angle of “let’s build a good podcast studio that we can use whenever we need one” first and “let’s put some cameras in there while we’re at it” second. So far the backdrop consists of… audio paneling. Originally I’d hoped that we could get some more decoration into the background of the shots, but we need to get the acoustics right. The production end of things got tossed up a little bit due to the change, which should actually result in a slightly faster turnaround time. This is why we get to move the recording time up to Tuesday mornings (previously it was Monday afternoons). The audio is still set to post by the end of the day on Tuesday, as it has been since the dawn of time.

And since we’re essentially producing the show “live” now, it made sense to start streaming it out for premium members who want to get the show as early as possible. The only consideration with that is that since the show is produced live, people watching that stream will get some longer-than-normal breaks. Dan’s bladder is apparently very small, so every ad break usually involves him running across the building to the bathroom. Also, because of the way the show’s getting produced, people watching that stream are looking in on the full production of the show. That means they’ll hear the ads on the live version of the show, since those are all getting spun out to tape ahead of time, the same way the segment music is. Anyway, it seems like a fun thing to add for premium members, many of whom do want the show as quickly as they can possibly get it. You can’t get any quicker than live.

The “business” end of this thing is pretty simple, really. We want to put the best, most popular thing we do in more places and expose more people to it.

It’s a good show, it’s real big. Bigger than it’s ever been, actually. People should listen to it. I want to continue taking over the world with this thing. There seems to be a big and growing audience for podcasts on YouTube and other video-based outlets (stuff like YouTube Red and their music-focused endeavors seem to lean in our favor on this stuff, too), so we’re going to put the show there and put it in front of more people. Originally I thought about just running a black screen or a logo as the video, but that’s shitty. We can do better than that. So we’re putting cameras up in there.