SNAPSHOT
As one of the largest podcast networks in the business, iHeart Podcasts produces shows across every genre—from true crime and narrative storytelling to interview shows and branded content. In a saturated market where everyone's fighting for ear-share, staying competitive means cranking out high-quality content at scale without burning out your creative teams.
Descript transformed iHeart’s workflow, opening a smoother, quicker path from recording to release, without sacrificing quality.
Video
Podcast
Post-production
Once we had teams using Descript as an editor and using text-based workflows, we noticed those teams accelerated the amount of content they were able to push out.
Karl Keadle
Executive Producer
KEY RESULTS
Reduced post-production time by up to 50%
Enabled show teams to generate daily social media content to boost brand awareness
Improved resource allocation across multiple shows in the network
Speed vs. quality vs. sanity: a dilemma
iHeart Podcasts needed to produce more shows in less time—without sacrificing quality or burning out their teams. But their traditional workflow siloed producers and editors in separate tools, creating tedious back-and-forth that slowed everything down. Manual editing ate up hours, and iHeart’s audio editors didn't have the video know-how to create clips for Instagram, TikTok, and other video platforms, leaving potential marketing content on the table.
iHeart needed a solution that would smooth collaboration, speed up editing, and empower audio editors to create video content without months of training.
How Descript creates harmony in post-production
Text-based editing and comments help producers and editors get on the same page
Before Descript, producers built narratives in timestamped Google Docs, then handed them to editors, who spent hours hunting down each clip in the timeline. Working on separate surfaces made collaboration clunky and created repetitive, tedious work.
Now, producers work directly on the transcript in Descript, shaping the narrative with full audio context. They highlight sections and drop comments to flag jagged transitions or suggest fixes. Editors then quickly assemble rough cuts, also in Descript. Once those are locked, editors export to a DAW and work their magic on the final mix.
AI editing tools get you to a rough cut in record time
iHeart uses Descript's AI toolkit to remove pauses and filler words instantly, dramatically speeding up their workflow. Because producers and writers work directly in the text-based editor, every change they make—like trimming dead air, tightening breaths, cutting filler words—automatically contributes to the assembly edit. By the time the rough cut is ready to move to the DAW, much of the tedious editing work is already done, allowing teams to get to a v1 cut much faster.
“ We actually rolled out Descript for our entire post-production process. So now all teams at iHeart Podcast use Descript as their front-end editor.”
Karl Keadle, Executive Producer
Turn audio editors into video creators
Before Descript, creating video clips just wasn’t in audio editors’ toolkit. Now, with Descript's AI-powered clip generation, audio editors can easily create social clips to boost brand awareness for their show hosts.
iHeart teams use Descript’s AI to automatically identify and clip the most compelling moments from hour-long episodes, complete with virality scores. Then they apply automatic multicam and design to create catchy, engaging social content—no video editing experience necessary. What used to require a handoff to a video editor now takes less than 30 minutes, making it possible for every show to repurpose podcast episodes into daily social media content.
Scale podcast production across an entire network with Descript
Before Descript, iHeart's podcast production was hindered by siloed workflows and tedious manual editing. Audio editor didn’t have the knowledge or skills to create video content for promotion. Repetitive, time-consuming editing across separate toolsets slogged down production and made it difficult to increase output without burning out teams.
With Descript’s text-based editing and AI tools, iHeart transformed their entire post-production pipeline across every show in their network. Producers and editors now collaborate seamlessly in one place; AI handles rough cut work instantly; audio editors churn out engaging social video content. The result? Up to 50% faster production, happier creative teams, and far more high-quality content hitting the feed.
Video