Hungry eyes

Video kills the radio star (again)

The transition from radio to television had ended the careers of many of the radio duos. “Video Killed the Radio Star,” in the words of a hit song of that name in the late 1970s. But video didn’t kill the audio podcasts, at least not as of early 2025, when an industry estimate placed their number at four million.

I wrote the above about a year ago, in an essay on the rise of podcasts. The video that wasn’t killing the audio podcasts was video podcasts.

Maybe it wasn’t then, but it is now. Video is killing audio podcasts. The most popular audio podcasts are increasingly adding video versions, and the “vodcasts” are devouring the podcasts.

It was a puzzle to me last year why anyone would prefer a video podcast to an audio version. The whole point, I thought, was to be able to consume the content while my eyes were doing something else: watching the road I was driving on, sorting blue socks from black ones, matching the items on my grocery list to aisle signs.

I’m still a bit puzzled. My use hasn’t changed. But many others’ has. The change has been swift and dramatic. In October 2025 over half of new weekly podcast consumers in America preferred watching a video to listening to audio. That was up from fewer than a third the previous February. YouTube, a video platform, has become the leader in podcasts. Spotify, originally an audio streaming service, tripled the number of video podcasts in its content library, to the point where 60 percent of its programming includes a video component. Nearly all the most popular audio podcasts have added a video version, and the video numbers rival or surpass the audio.

What’s going on?

Part of the answer lies in the comparative cleverness of different algorithms. YouTube is simply better at suggesting new content to viewers than Spotify and other chiefly audio platforms.

But there’s more to it than that. YouTube and especially TikTok have demonstrated the primacy of vision in the way we humans engage the world. In particular, vision can hook us immediately, in a way audio can’t. Sound is perceived linearly, meaning that even the catchiest tune requires a few to several seconds to make its impression. Visual images are perceived all at once. A sunset, a pretty face or a corpse registers instantaneously.

Some of this is a result of evolution. A quarter to a half of the brain’s cortex is devoted to vision, while less than a tenth handles hearing.

This in turn reflects the nature of visual and audio signals. Light waves are of shorter wavelength and higher frequency than sound waves. For this reason they can carry much more information. And it is for this reason that humans evolved to rely more on sight than on hearing.

The primacy of vision explains why television trumped radio, and why vodcasts are beating podcasts. In both cases we can see a lot more than we can hear in the same amount of time.

Something is lost in the bargain. Listeners in the days of radio dramas had to construct their own mental images of the characters. The effort they invested often made the characters uniquely meaningful to them. The investment opportunity was eliminated when television revealed the characters visually.

Likewise with podcasts and vodcasts. Listeners get to know the hosts of the former by sound. They imagine what the hosts look like. When they see the same hosts on vodcasts, the reality dissolves the image.

A similar effect accompanies the adaptation of a novel into a movie. Readers have even more investment in dramatic characters than listeners of radio shows, for they have to imagine the voices along with everything else. Movies negate the investment and, depending on casting, can disappoint the readers of the book.

Some people value the effort of the investment, in the way people take pleasure in solving puzzles. Many prefer their imagined versions to Hollywood’s versions.

These people will continue to like books more than movies. Their cousins will like podcasts more than vodcasts.

But if you’d never read a book before you became familiar with movies, it would be hard to get you to forsake the latter for the former. Movies are richer in information and easier on the brain.

Similarly, a person who encounters a podcast in video form is unlikely to jump to the audio. Most vodcasts don’t add anywhere near as much informational value to podcasts as movies add to books. But viewers get to know hosts they can see better than listeners know hosts they can only hear. Or they think they do, which is the crucial matter in hooking them.

Books didn’t disappear when movies came along. But they lost market share in narrative. Podcasts won’t disappear. But they’ll continue to lose ground to vodcasts.

When humans get a choice, the eyes have it.