In early 2023, I was sitting in the parents’ room at church with some of the other baby and toddler parents. I was trying to pay attention to the service, but between chatter with parents and keeping the boy out of mischief, I was missing most of the service. This is the church where I grew up, but I had only recently returned after spending a decade travelling and working abroad and interstate. The church started livestreaming the service during COVID, and they still stream every Sunday. Catching up by watching the stream didn’t appeal to me as, at the time, YouTube didn’t have the ability to use my phone for other things while watching a video. I approached the ministry team with the concept of using the stream audio to create a podcast. This was met with enthusiasm, and I got to work at night and during free time on what is now known as Basecast.
The Blacktown Anglican Church podcast published the first episode in April 2023 and now has over 150 episodes, more than 2,000 downloads, and a global audience. The podcast is available to listen to on all the major podcast streaming platforms (I use Audible while I’m exercising). The growth has been organic, with the only promotion being a Spotify icon at the bottom of the weekly newsletter.
Basecast is a new online platform that takes the technical bit out of publishing your podcast. It is a web application that allows you to upload your video file, select the start and end times of the clip(s) to include in your podcast episode, add an intro and outro, create an episode thumbnail, and publish. You can connect with your existing podcast account (currently Podbean is supported) or leave connecting with a podcast host and configuring distribution to us. Every user account gets access to the free Clip Creator to extract audio clips from video. Check out our plans here.
Like the Everest basecamps, Basecast is where you get started on your journey to podcasting. It is a non-technical entry point with clip editing, volume normalisation, and noise removal. Basecast makes it quick to extract and publish episode(s) from a raw video file. Uploads happen async and episodes will be queued and processed once the upload is complete. The included audio and thumbnail processors will create files that are compatible with the main Podcast Apps (think Apple podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music/Audible, and more), where your podcast episodes will land once published.
The Basecast workflow has turned out to be valuable for me and I developed it into a product that I believe others will also find useful. You can get started for free with a Clip Creator account once logging in. Give it a try and reach out to start your own podcasting journey with Basecast.
