Podnews Daily goes to video with Liquid Studios pilot
Liquid Studios today released the first video edition of Podnews Daily, the essential industry news podcast written and read each weekday by Podnews editor James Cridland. For a one week pilot – Wednesday October 14 through Tuesday October 20 – every edition is also published as a video: a landscape cut for YouTube, a vertical cut for phones and LinkedIn, and a short clip for social.
Nothing about how Podnews is made has changed. James writes, reads and mixes the bulletin as he always has. The finished audio goes to Liquid Studios, and the landscape edition comes back within the hour, with the vertical cut and social clip within the hour following. All made to the style and criteria James requested. No camera, no studio, no re-recording, no extra work for the newsroom.
“This is what AI is made for - making human creativity even better,” said James Cridland, editor of Podnews. “It’s like an extra pair of hands for me: making extra content that Podnews simply couldn’t make on our own - something more engaging and interesting than our usual static slide, but within our control and with our own editorial. As podcasts go multiplatform, and audio turns into liquid content, this sort of AI augmentation is incredibly useful.”
The look adopted for Podnews is one documentary editors call the “Ken Burns effect”: real photographs, logos, and show artwork moving slowly as a slideshow under the story, in a Podnews-branded frame with captions, and the day’s headlines as lower thirds. Liquid Studios’ AI picks and times a picture for every beat and builds the captions. For Podnews, none of the images in the videos are AI-generated. Every image is sourced and rights-checked, the voice is James’s own, and a person reviews every cut before it’s published.
Ken Burns is one look among many Liquid Studios can create. From the same audio, Liquid Studios also produces cinematic and animated treatments, generates b-roll, assembles clips for each platform, and dubs editions in other languages, for this morning’s episode or an enormous back catalog. A news bulletin wants a style that reinforces calm and credibility. A true-crime series, educational content, a comedy, or an interview show might pick something else. It’s the customer’s choice whether to use AI-generated content or just use AI to compile it.
“So many ideas enter the world as a podcast first. Video doesn’t change the idea. It changes how many people get to find it,” said Jeanine Wright, CEO of Liquid Studios. “We love to start from something a human already made and carry it forward. Solving podcast video means solving it for the person who makes the show: a beautiful visual edition of their work, nothing to re-record, no extra work to do, and more audience and revenue potential on the other end. A daily news bulletin is one of the tightest turnarounds in podcasting, which makes Podnews a real test, not a demo.”
Editions are on Podnews’s YouTube channel and on LinkedIn as well as selected podcast apps: we’ll embed some on this page shortly.
This capability isn’t just for Podnews. For publishers, networks, and creators who want to expand their distribution, audience and revenue potential without a laborious video setup: schedule a meeting with Liquid Studios, send them an episode and see your own show in video before you sign anything. Pricing is $10 per finished minute.
About Liquid Studios
Liquid Studios turns the podcasts, newsletters and other IP that publishers already own into video, clips and editions in other languages, then distributes them across platforms and measures how they perform. The company is led by CEO Jeanine Wright, former COO of Wondery and co-founder of Simplecast, and Josh Taylor, Chief Production Officer, a multi-medium Creator, Director & Storyteller. Liquid Studios was formerly known as Inception Point AI. liquidstudios.ai
This is a press release which we link to from Podnews, our daily newsletter about podcasting and on-demand. We may make small edits for editorial reasons.