I still can’t quite believe it, but almost two years after we kicked off a regularly scheduled Digital Foundry show/podcast, we’ve somehow managed to deliver 100 episodes! To celebrate the occasion, I invited all current, serving DF team members and close contributors to join me for our latest show, covering the most recent gaming and technology news, fielding supporter questions – and then carrying straight on into a huge ‘AMA’ section, where backers of the DF Supporter Program could ask us pretty much anything they wanted.
DF Direct Weekly started off with an idea from DF Retro contributor Audi Sorlie to underpin the expansion of our Patreon with some fan service – bespoke content that would bring supporters closer to the team. Producing a weekly show would also solve a perennial problem of ours: the Monday YouTube slot. You see, we’re trying as hard as we can to limit out of office hours working and to enjoy our weekends, all of which means that a gaping hole appears at the beginning of the following week. DF Direct Weekly sounded like an ideal solution to that challenge.
Even so, while there were plenty of good reasons to produce an unscripted show, there were also reservations too. Digital Foundry producing completely unscripted, off-the-cuff editorial could go horribly wrong in the age of the soundbite, especially knowing how much weight our carefully considered opinions carry within our standard content. What if we said something that was wrong, or something that could be misinterpreted the wrong way? We’ve fallen foul of carefully chosen clips spreading around social media and misrepresenting what we actually said, but by and large, it seems to have worked out OK.
The next challenge was figuring out the extent to which our audience actually wanted a weekly show from Digital Foundry. Initial shows delivered an audience of around 50,000 views on YouTube, which trends significantly below the average. That is slightly problematic in that preparing the show and recording it amounts to around 2.5 man days of work spread across the contributions from the participants, plus the editing work required to get the show together. We went into this one wanting to maintain decent production values, so all speakers use DLSRs to record themselves, submitting their individual feeds to the editor.