Join Colin and Steve as they explore the world of anime; ranging from the worst that the world has to offer, to best in class!

We met years ago while working in call center IT support, which in all honesty was not a job either of us enjoyed. While we haven't worked together in about 12 years, we've remained friends through a mutual love of video games.

Our podcast focuses on a different anime show each season we go through. So far we're on season 7 and have covered both incredible and terrible anime. We talk through the shows, discuss our likes and dislikes, form our opinions on character and narrative development, but ultimately just enjoy some time talking about anime. We...we get sidetracked...We don't take ourselves all that seriously, and we're not experts, but we are passionate about anime.

The listeners of our show I suppose are people like us! People that appreciate the medium, like to hear our rambling about vague tangentially related things, and just have a bit of fun.
 

I (Steve) listen to a tonne of podcasts. I've been listening to them since around 2007, back when the term podcast was still relatively fresh. I've even hosted a number of them over the years going as far back as 2009. They've become such an integral part of my week whether it's keeping up with the news, learning about science, or listening to horror, I think it's sort of like the "new" radio for a lot of people.

We started up the podcast at in the middle of the pandemic partially for something to do during the extended lockdown, and also to get a chance to socialise a little more. The ebb and flow of the restrictions was becoming a continued frustration in the UK, so we decided to add a little bit of regularity into our lives.

Our first episode went live about an hour after we recorded it! Originally we were live streaming the episodes over Twitch as well as putting them into a podcast form. Our original intention was for it to be more of a Twitch show, but that didn't really vibe with how we were planning on recording episodes, so we switched it up to have them recorded for podcasts as a primary medium.
 

We make time one evening a week to record so we can do an episode every week. It doesn't take too long (often less than a couple of hours), but as I've mentioned earlier we do like to ramble and sometimes our recordings run a little long. In fact we ended up recording for over two and half hours for one episode!

Because we record in the evenings it doesn't get in the way of work or family, but there have been times when life and work have got in the way of recording.

As far as paying for things, we don't really have too much overhead. Our podcast hosting is free and we don't spend anything on marketing. The only cost I think we really have is our subscriptions to Funimation and CrunchyRoll. That being said, we are entirely self funded I guess!
 

What we gain from podcasting is dedicated time to enjoy talking about a think that we both enjoy, but previously hadn't spent the time to recently. We've always been fans of anime, and myself in particular (Steve), I hadn't been watching much if any. Since starting the podcast we've both watched a lot more anime and in some cases watched additional shows - also ended up reading some Manga too!

We don't have any revenue, or sponsors, but that's not to say we wouldn't have one. If a sponsor liked what we did and we liked what they did, I'm sure we could work something out.

In terms of download numbers, we're not by any means "popular". We're currently at an average of around 80 downloads a month. Our listenership isn't big, but we appreciate what we have!

Podcasting for us is very much about friendship, and being able to explore our mutual interests.
 

Our podcasting process is easy enough. We meet using video call and record the input from both sides. This is later mixed together to form the podcast master.

We use Skype for our calls because it's the only reliable video calling service that's free to use and supports NDI (we also record the video version of the podcast at the same time and upload it later to YouTube). We both use VoiceMeeter Potato/Banana to help with audio re-routing, and to edit the podcast we use Audacity.

We've had one guest on our show, and he was a friend of ours that just so happened to be an expert in the topic we were covering, so it seemed a natural fit. We haven't actively looked for more guests, but we're definitely not against doing it again in the future. Because we interview over Skype it means that the person taking part has to have a reasonable microphone and ability to record their part of the conversation to share for mixing.

To prepare each recording we just watch the require episodes of the anime we're currently talking about - in this instance, Steins;Gate.
 

At the moment our listeners are across a number of different podcasting tools - 20% Apple Podcasts, 20% web browser, 15% Spotify, 15% Podcast addict and 30% other.

We have a Facebook page that we post our latest episode release to, but that's really it.
 

Podcasting is hard work and committment, even though it as a thing to be enjoyed. If you want to stick to it, choose something you enjoy talking about. A big part of why we've kept our show going for over a year now is because we had no expectations around success; we just wanted to have fun. If success eventually comes that would be great, but ultimately our goal was just to talk about fun things, and if other people wanted to be involved in that conversation we would welcome it!

The most commonly used resource for us is just asking a question in Google. There's nothing that we've found to be a definitive resource, but there's always information availble if you just ask the question. I definitely watched a lot of videos about the setup for VoiceMeeter Banana! It also helps that we listen to a lot of podcasts - competitor analysis is always valuable.
 

You can learn more about us by following these links!
Home of the show - https://anchor.fm/whos-that-anime
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/whosthatanime
YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChCq1b_-dobemhqZLdo-vyA
Ko-Fi - https://ko-fi.com/whosthatanime