Steven Bartlett co-founds a new video podcast distribution platform–and, of course, it has AI

Steven Bartlett, the British-Nigerian creator whose podcast Diary of a CEO has welcomed guests like Michelle Obama, Scooter Braun, Simon Cowell, and Richard Branson, has co-founded a video podcast hosting/distribution platform that (as is the case with many productivity pipeline projects these days) has AI baked in.

Co-founded with the former MrBeast engineer/Thumbnail Test founder who calls himself “Rox Codes,” Flightcast has been in beta for two years, secretly becoming the production bones of Diary of a CEO, which has 12 million subscribers on YouTube and brings in around 30 million views per month. In a launch video, Bartlett and Rox Codes say it was built in response to the needs of Barlett and his Diary team.

“You guys were posting in a bunch of different places, these gigantic 4K files. It took literally hours,” Rox Codes says. “And then the data that comes back from all those platforms running ten different spreadsheets, trying to aggregate them…It was a nightmare.”

They moved forward with one question, Bartlett says: “Could we build something that tells you that information, but also helps you figure out what to do about it?”

Out of that came Flightcast, which lets video podcasters upload their episodes to it, and then have its systems distribute those episodes across YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

“And then there’s AI on everything to help you analyze the data, to help you understand what’s working and help you understand what’s not, make recommendations as to what you should do,” Rox Codes says.

Flightcast isn’t just using AI on the creator-facing side. Before episodes go live to the public, Flightcast fits them with AI transcriptions, titles, descriptions, and chapters, and also has an auto-clipping tool that cuts out chunks, edits them, and posts them on YouTube Shorts. Like other data analysis/generation products that have emerged in the creator space during the AI bandwagon boom

, Flightcast says it offers custom generation that’s trained on individual creators’ content, so it can spit out the suggested new titles/descrips/etc “in your style,” thus saving creators the energy of actually, you know, creating.

In a LinkedIn post, Rox Codes says Flightcast has a chatbot, meaning creators can use “AI to chat with your data so you can actually understand what’s working.”

Flightcast is “basically taking the entire Diary of a CEO playbook one step at a time and turning it into software that any podcaster can use,” he adds.

In terms of being on trend, Barlett and Rox Codes are right there. AI is everywhere right now, and YouTube and Spotify have been putting big effort into making video podcasts a thing. The issues Bartlett encountered while making Diary of a CEO (big files, long upload times) are a widespread plague for video podcasters, and they–at least so far–haven’t had access to the same upload/distribution tools audio-only podcasters do. We can see how Flightcast would add value there for video ‘casters.

But in an era where generative AI grows ever more contentious (just check out the replies to MrBeast’s latest tweet about Sora), we’re wondering if Flightcast’s AI-heavy pitch will take off with creators who are conscientious about not feeding their work to slop machines.