I'm excited about this, Levar has a great voice for podcasting.
On a website related note, the art19 website is bad in one big way. Their homepage is very "investor focused" and not listener focused. If they want to sell ads, they need to get people to listen to their shows! I can't find a link to other podcasts (googling "art19 shows" finds several). I know they have more, but if they want listeners, they need to have their homepage be a directory or recommendation engine so I can find other shows. The investor pitch needs to be secondary. I'm sure the people buying ads will appreciate that as well.
90 seconds of 'promo talk' before the story even started completely put me off. I'm not a big a podcast/audiobook fan - as I find that the narrator always talks too slowly and I can't hold focus - so I don't know if this front loaded advertising is common or not, but if it is, I'd be breaking out Audacity and chopping those bits off immediately.
It is relatively common to hear pre-roll advertising, and sometimes hosts do speak too slowly. A very niche solution to the problem is a popular iOS podcast player with a connected web service called Overcast (after downloading the app, you have access to a browser player with similar features.)
It approaches the pre-roll ad problems by having prominent "skip forward" and "skip backward" 30 seconds buttons, so usually two to three quick taps will bring me back to the content. It solves the speech speed problem by offering pitch-adjusted playback speed controls (so no-one sounds like a chipmunk.)
I assume those can be found in other podcast clients on other platforms, but I'm not familiar with them.
LeVar Burton played Geordi in StarTrek TNG, which I guess is how many of us know him.
But for those of you who don't know (I didn't until recently) encouraging/enabling people to "read" is actually LeVar Burton's main gig. He presented Reading Rainbow [1] long before his involvement in Star Trek.
The first selection, the short story "Kin" by Bruce McAllister, is one of my favorites of recent years. It was a Hugo finalist story, and in a different life I tried to get a film version of it off the ground. The rights have long since reverted back to Bruce, but hopefully someone someday will pick it up and get it made.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 32.9 ms ] threadOn a website related note, the art19 website is bad in one big way. Their homepage is very "investor focused" and not listener focused. If they want to sell ads, they need to get people to listen to their shows! I can't find a link to other podcasts (googling "art19 shows" finds several). I know they have more, but if they want listeners, they need to have their homepage be a directory or recommendation engine so I can find other shows. The investor pitch needs to be secondary. I'm sure the people buying ads will appreciate that as well.
It approaches the pre-roll ad problems by having prominent "skip forward" and "skip backward" 30 seconds buttons, so usually two to three quick taps will bring me back to the content. It solves the speech speed problem by offering pitch-adjusted playback speed controls (so no-one sounds like a chipmunk.)
I assume those can be found in other podcast clients on other platforms, but I'm not familiar with them.
But for those of you who don't know (I didn't until recently) encouraging/enabling people to "read" is actually LeVar Burton's main gig. He presented Reading Rainbow [1] long before his involvement in Star Trek.
Reading Rainbow itself, was somewhat recently rebooted by LeVar: https://www.readingrainbow.com/
[1] A show to encourage children to read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_Rainbow