Hey, if you're a podcast host like me or you're interested in becoming a podcast host, you've probably looked into different options for recording your podcast. And in this video, I want to talk about my favorite solution that I finally landed on after trying probably about 10 different platforms, including Zoom and Skype and one called Squadcast and Zencaster. There's a bunch out there and they all do a pretty good job. They all do a good job for what they do. And I have finally found one that I am incredibly satisfied for one specific reason. It records great video. The video you're watching right now is actually recorded through Riverside.fm, which is the platform that I'm talking about. Riverside.fm also does a great job with the audio quality and it makes it pretty easy for the other guests to join. First of all, if you are thinking about trying to use Zoom or Skype, those work fine. They're totally acceptable ways to record a podcast. Zoom is probably the easiest and has the lowest barrier to entry for you and your guest. However, the audio on Zoom is very hard to make it sound good and the video specifically is really bad. Now the biggest thing is even if you can get some decent quality from, let's say, Skype or Zoom, there is still the latency issue where if you're recording online, you might have noticed recently in the last couple of months or so as everybody has been using the internet to record videos and be on video calls that there's been a lot more latency and lag in the videos. That's really frustrating as a podcaster trying to hold a conversation and also record something without having to do a ton of editing on the back end to make sure it all lines up. Now what Riverside.fm is actually doing is recording the podcast on the local computer. On my computer right now, instead of on the internet where this is streaming, that's where the video is being recorded. That's also where the audio is being recorded. Now on the guest side, and you can have multiple guests, on the guest side, it's doing the same thing. It's recording it locally and it's uploading it while the conversation is happening so that when the conversation is done, when the podcast episode is finished, most of the episode has already been uploaded. I've only had, I've done about 12 different episodes now with Riverside FM and this was before the most recent update that it made, which made it even better, but I had two issues. The first issue was that you have to use Google Chrome. It's tested and it works for sure with Google Chrome and that has something to do with the way that the videos are uploaded and compressed. They will give you, if you try to risk screen record with squadcast or you've tried to use Zoom, you might notice the video files are huge. What Riverside.fm is doing is uploading it and as they're uploading it and sending it back to you to download, they're compressing the video. It keeps the quality really high but makes the file size much more manageable. The way that that is happening is through a Google software so you have to be using Google Chrome and your guest also has to be using Google Chrome. I did one episode where I did not have my guest using Google Chrome. They were using Firefox and everything seemed fine until it came to the time to download their video. It was processing and processing and processing. I contacted Riverside.fm support. They were awesome. They gave me the raw file. It didn't quite work out still but they've always been incredibly responsive and they will jump on a call or on a chat. Pretty much immediately to try to figure out, pretty much immediately to figure out whatever the problem is. Now, the other issue that I've had was where the other person's internet was incredibly incredibly slow. Which honestly, if you're going to be on podcast as a guest, you have to make sure you're somewhere that has a little bit better internet connection and it's frustrating though because for a lot of people in rural areas, this person was in rural England and the internet is just not very fast out there. He left it open overnight though and it did eventually upload. Even though on her end, it was saying that it didn't upload. It did upload and I'm happy to be able to edit that episode and get it out soon. That was a specific example where the video quality was absolutely terrible when I was looking at it on the screen. But I knew that it would be fine because Riverside.fm was recording it on their end. To sum things up really quickly, Riverside.fm is the platform that I'm choosing to use now after using a lot of these other ones that are available. I was actually going to make this video anyway, but they just released an affiliate link which prompted me to be a little more ambitious about making this video because if you sign up, I will get a small percentage of the subscription which helps me, helps my podcast, the happy or hear podcast out. Also without a doubt, it's the most quality platform that you can be using. You get one hour free to try it out. They also have live streaming which I have not used and I would love to talk to anyone who has used their live streaming portion because I'm sure that it works great. To quickly summarize, Riverside.fm is great for recording high quality video and audio. I highly suggest you at least go check it out. Use the free trial recording an hour episode. Do that with a friend maybe and spend a half an hour. Check out the video quality. You will not be disappointed. There's nobody else out there that's doing this. Squadcast was the closest when it came to audio quality but they don't have video recording at all. I think that by the time they get video up and running, it's going to be well behind what Riverside.fm is doing. I highly suggest you check that link out in the description down below and let me know what you think.