The following are the runtimes of some recent episodes of several of YouTube’s more popular podcasts:

“This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von,” #595: Two hours, 14 minutes.

“Club Shay Shay,” #172: Two hours, 59 minutes.

“The Shawn Ryan Show,” #215: Five hours, four minutes.

“Lex Fridman Podcast,” #461: Five hours, 20 minutes.

These shows follow the same general format: people sitting in chairs, in generically designed studios, talking.

And, like many of the biggest podcasts these days, these shows are all released as videos.

They don’t feature particularly fancy camerawork, or flashy graphics, or narratives. All of them require time commitments typical of feature films, ball games or marathon performance art installations. Yet going by YouTube’s statistics, hundreds of thousands of people have viewed all of the above episodes.

Which leads to comments like this, as one fan wrote after a recent episode of Theo Von’s show: “Truly, this podcast was amazing to watch.”

So a genre of media named for an audio device — the iPod, discontinued by Apple in 2022 — and popularized by audiences enamored with on-demand listening has transformed in recent years into a visual one.