To start a podcast in Lebanon you need four things in this order: an idea that can repeat for a whole season, clean sound, a decision about video, and a feed that puts the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube. Everything else, including the budget, follows from those four choices. This guide walks through them for someone who has no show yet.
We are Fine Line Production, a video production house in Beirut. We make two shows of our own, Kelmeh Wehdeh and ArtLine, in our studio in Hamra, and the studio is also available to rent. What follows is general advice for anyone starting out. If you already know you want a room to record in, go straight to our podcast studio booking guide. If you want the story of how our two shows get made, read how a podcast gets produced in Lebanon.
What should my podcast be about?
Start with the idea, not the microphone. A podcast is a format that repeats, so the concept has to survive repetition. Ask yourself whether you could name twelve episodes today without running out of ideas. If you can, you have a show. If you can only name three, you have a series of posts.
Our two shows use two different repeatable units. Kelmeh Wehdeh is a podcast about how we communicate, with words, without words, with tone, with looks, with silence, and it now stands at three seasons and 19 episodes and counting. ArtLine is a sit-down series with Lebanese painters, calligraphers, musicians and makers: one artist, one practice, one honest conversation per episode, across two seasons.
Decide three more things before you buy anything: who the show is for, which language or mix of languages you will speak, and how often you can realistically publish. A weekly show you cannot keep up is worse than a show every two weeks that arrives on time.
There is a regional audience for this kind of show. In research reported by Campaign Middle East in May 2023, Spotify's MENA team, citing a YouGov study, said Saudi Arabia led its markets with 67% of adults listening to at least one hour of podcasts a week, and that one trend it was seeing was the popularity of long-form interviews and conversations. That is Saudi Arabia, not Lebanon, and we did not find a comparable published survey for Lebanon, so read it as a direction rather than a local number.
What equipment do you need to start a podcast?
Less than most buying guides suggest, and the order of importance is fixed: sound first, picture second. People forgive a plain picture. They stop listening to a muffled voice. This list is general good practice, not a Fine Line spec sheet.
- One microphone per voice. Two people sharing one microphone cannot be balanced or fixed later. Each speaker gets their own.
- Headphones for whoever runs the recording. You catch hum, clipping and room noise while it is happening, not in the edit.
- A way to record each voice on its own track. A recorder or audio interface that does this lets an editor fix one person's level without touching the other's.
- A quiet room. Traffic, generators, air conditioning and hard walls are the usual enemies in Beirut. Record a thirty second test and listen back on headphones before you commit to a space.
- Cameras and light, only if you are filming. A two person conversation needs at least a wide shot and a close-up on each speaker so the edit can breathe. Light the set the same way every episode so episode one and episode twelve look like the same show.
- Storage and a backup. Video fills drives quickly. Copy every recording to a second drive before you leave the room.
If you present or read an intro to camera, a script on screen helps. Our free browser teleprompter runs on any laptop or phone, and the teleprompter guide explains mirror mode and external monitors.
Do you need a studio to record a podcast?
No, but you need a room that sounds right, and most spare rooms and offices do not. Reverb and street noise are the problems a studio solves. If you record at home or in an office, pick the smallest soft room you have, close the windows and switch off the air conditioning during takes. That gets a first season started.
A studio makes sense when the show needs to look consistent, has guests who travel to you, or is filmed. Our studio in Hamra is a fully equipped space with professional lighting and sound and a flexible setup: colored paper backdrops, a plain white wall for interviews and talks, a green screen, and an acoustic-treated black-box side for sound. It is where we record our own two shows, and it is available for podcast recordings, interviews and talks.
There are three ways to use it. You can rent the room and bring your own people. You can rent the room with crew from our team recording sound and video while you host. Or you can commission the whole show, from concept to delivery, the way we produce our own series. We do not publish a rate card. The rate depends on the hours you book, the number of cameras, whether a technician is included and whether editing is part of the package. Send the studio manager your dates and what you plan to record. How a session runs, what to bring and what to ask before you book are covered in our podcast studio guide, and the space itself is on the studio page and in the Fine Line Studio film.
Should a podcast be audio or video?
Increasingly both. In the Edison Research Infinite Dial 2026, a January 2026 survey of 2,050 Americans aged 12 and over, 58% had consumed a podcast in the last month and 57% had both listened to and watched a podcast. The same release says 84% of Americans in that age group use YouTube monthly. These are United States figures, so they show where the format is heading rather than what Lebanese audiences do today.
For reference, Kelmeh Wehdeh publishes on YouTube and Instagram, and ArtLine's full series lives on YouTube. If you think you might want video, record it from the first episode. Adding it in season two means rebuilding a set, a lighting plan and a habit that your guests have never seen.
Video changes the plan in four ways. It needs a set that holds for a whole season. It needs more than one camera angle for the edit. It needs each camera recorded separately. And it adds editing time, which is usually where the budget moves. Our guide to what moves a video budget explains the same drivers for any film.
How do you publish a podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube?
Podcast apps generally do not take a loose upload. You publish episodes to a podcast host, the host creates an RSS feed, and you submit that feed to each platform once. After that, every new episode reaches all of them.
- Apple Podcasts. Apple's requirements ask for an RSS 2.0 feed that is reachable without a password, a unique enclosure for each episode, a GUID that never changes for each episode, and an Apple Podcasts Connect account.
- Spotify. Video episodes can be uploaded in Spotify for Creators as MOV, MPG or MP4 files, with H.264 video in 16:9 and stereo AAC-LC audio, according to Spotify's publishing guide. Spotify also states that video episodes are only available on Spotify. If you distribute the show to other platforms, those get the audio only.
- YouTube. YouTube accepts an RSS feed, but for an audio feed it creates a static-image video from your show art. A filmed show is better uploaded as video. YouTube lists the countries where RSS delivery is available, and Lebanon is among them.
One practical rule: YouTube's help page says podcast content uploaded through RSS cannot contain advertisements, and branded content or sponsorships must be declared. If your show has a sponsor, read that page before you publish.
Platform rules change, so check each page above on the day you publish. Whatever the platform, give each episode a clear title, a plain description and artwork that reads at small size, in the language your audience searches in.
When should you hire a production team?
You can start alone, and many good shows do. A team starts to make sense when the show needs to look the same across a season, when you are hosting and cannot also watch levels and framing, or when an organization is behind the show and needs delivery on a schedule. Producing a podcast is a logistics exercise: guests booked, episodes recorded, edited and published on a cadence people can rely on. Plan episode twelve, not just episode one.
If you want to talk it through, tell us the idea, the language and whether you want video. We can say which of the three studio options fits, from renting the room to producing the show. See what we have made on the podcasts page and the rest of our range on the services page.