Apple's video bombshell
What it actually means for your podcast
As you will have no doubt seen, Apple made a bombshell announcement this week. With their upcoming iOS 26.4 update this March, they are officially supporting video in Apple Podcasts.
In response, the podsphere has been set alight. Podcast commentators – myself included – have been sharing hot takes across LinkedIn (or wherever you get your podcast commentary), and the timeline has been positively sizzling.
Now we’ve had a few days to let the news sink in, I Have Thoughts. And I am sure you do too.
I would love for this to be a two-way conversation, so please hit reply to this email and tell me what you think, or jump into the comments on the Substack app or website.
Let’s talk about it!
Read on after this…
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Apple Podcasts embraces video
To recap, the headlines from Apple’s press release are as follows:
Users will be able to consume both video and audio directly in the Apple Podcasts app.
They’ll be able to toggle between watching and listening, seamlessly.
Video will be delivered via HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), housed on third-party hosting platforms (not uploaded to Apple separately).
Initially, four partner hosting platforms will carry the functionality: Acast, ART19, Omny Studio, and Simplecast.
The system will allow direct ad insertion (DAI) into video as well as audio.
With that in mind, here are my observations…
The battle for market share
It is worth looking at the context surrounding this move. Back in the day (all of, say, ten years ago) if you wanted to listen to podcasts, you used Apple Podcasts. They were the dominant player.
That is simply no longer the case.
Apple Podcasts’ market share has been declining consistently over the past few years, and they’ve now been convincingly overtaken by Spotify and YouTube. This trend was clearly observed in Edison Research’s Infinite Dial survey last year.
In her excellent analysis, Ashley Carman at Bloomberg published a compelling graph just this week showing exactly how Apple has lost ground.
This reflects my own experience at the New Statesman.
At the end of 2025 I analysed where our podcast followers had been coming from over the preceding six months. Spotify had far and away overtaken Apple as our primary source of audience growth.
I’d be interested to know how this compares with your experience.
Apple Podcasts is struggling to keep its crown. As Alan Abdine at YMH Studios so sharply put it:
“We are treating this announcement like Apple just entered the arena as a heavyweight. They walked in as a rounding error and asked every publisher in the industry to build new infrastructure to serve it. YouTube is not losing sleep over this. Neither should you.”
So the question is: will adding video at this stage attract enough users back to Apple, or will listeners stick with Spotify and YouTube?
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Have Apple cracked the video podcast UX (where Spotify couldn’t)?
The answer to that question lies partially in the user experience. As any Android user will happily tell you, Apple are rarely the first to invent new features. But where they excel is in designing intuitive, frictionless user experiences.
Spotify beat Apple to the video game by a long way, but their video user experience is… frustrating.
The Spotify app plays video by default where video is available. And it seems they’ve entirely removed the option to toggle video off within the app. (You can switch it off in the settings, but only when your device is using mobile data - if you’re on wifi you get video whether you want it or not).
Side note: judging by the comments on this thread, I’m not the only one who finds this annoying.
If you lock the device or minimise the app, you’ll hear the audio only. But the audio you hear is stripped straight from the video file. This means when you publish video on Spotify, you effectively overwrite your RSS audio feed, ads and all.
YouTube promises a toggling feature, but it only really works on YouTube Music - which, honestly, has really become just a worse version of Google Podcasts.
Apple’s approach, as demonstrated recently by Stephen Robles (watch his video below) and tested by James Cridland on Podnews, looks much cleaner. It uses a tasteful video tag to show visual content is available, and features a true, seamless toggle to turn video on or off.
What’s more, Apple’s delivery relies on HLS. This is effectively a playlist wrapper that houses several versions of your file, allowing the app to switch smoothly between different video resolutions depending on a user’s bandwidth.
Initially it was thought this would also override the audio file, similar to Spotify’s approach, but James Cridland reported on the Podnews Weekly Review podcast that Apple have indicated the original audio file from your RSS feed could be included within that HLS wrapper.
That would mean when a user toggles to the audio version they hear the carefully crafted audio podcast you lovingly edited, rather than the ripped video track.
If true, that is a vast improvement over what competitors currently offer.
Video makes production more complex
Producing video requires an entirely different skill set and toolkit to pure audio production. Plus, not every podcast format suits video. Audio can create a unique sense of intimacy and immersion which isn’t possible with video. There are ways to tell a story in pure audio that simply do not translate the same way on screen.
And in a market that prioritises video podcasts, there will be an increasing value in the skill of creating a show that truly works across both video and audio.
We all know when we listen to a show that clearly began life as a video product. If the producer isn’t careful, audio-only listeners can miss out on visual cues – like a host referring to something written on a whiteboard that you can’t see. It makes the audio listener feel like a second-class citizen.
This means top producers will need to learn a new set of storytelling skills.
A quick side note: I have been hearing from many audio-first producers who recognise this and want to add video production to their toolkit. I’ve been thinking about this a lot and I am considering putting together a training course on how to produce and edit a video-first podcast workflow.
If you are interested, hit the button below to join the waitlist. If there is enough demand, I will build it, and waitlist members will get it first at the lowest rate.
The discovery problem
If there is one thing Apple’s competitors do better, it is discovery. YouTube is the biggest podcast discovery engine because its algorithm is aggressively effective. Spotify also has a somewhat decent algorithmic recommendation system that surfaces shows similar to those you already like.
Apple Podcasts has been woefully lacking here. Adding video does not inherently fix their discovery problem, nor will it magically drive huge new audiences to your show.
Matt Deegan summed it up perfectly in his newsletter last week:
“[Video] doesn’t automatically solve the discovery problem that video podcasts still face inside Apple Podcasts. Search, recommendation and trending behaviour on YouTube is a very different engine to what we see in most audio podcast apps. Apple will need to lean into that behind the scenes if video podcasts are to feel native rather than bolted on.”
DAI is make-or-break
One of the features receiving the most praise from the podcast commentariat is Apple’s support for dynamic ad insertion (DAI) within the video podcast stream itself. Their initial hosting partners are all platforms that support DAI.
This sounds like great news. Spotify and YouTube have both previously said they will support video DAI in future, but it looks like Apple will deliver it first.
This is fantastic… if we use it to insert host-read ads into video, maintaining the high trust that makes podcasting so special.
But if this just becomes a cheap funnel for generic, programmatic, 30-second radio ads, we could be in trouble.
Alan Abdine captured this perfectly (emphasis mine):
“Most advertisers are not commissioning custom host-read video spots for every show on every campaign. They are running their existing 30-second pre-produced creative because that is what scales. And if that is what fills most of these ad breaks, we are not unlocking premium video pricing. We are shoving the lowest-value ad format into the highest-trust environment in media and pretending that is progress.”
I saw first-hand the dangers of an over-reliance on programmatic advertising during my time at the Evening Standard. When Covid hit, the bottom dropped out of their programmatic-led digital revenue model, advertisers bailed, and massive redundancies followed.
I sincerely hope podcast publishers do not make the same mistake.
Hosting costs could rise
This next point has not received enough airtime.
As Sam Sethi pointed out on the Podnews Weekly Review, this announcement is great news if you are an accountant at a podcast hosting company. They suddenly have a legitimate excuse to raise their prices.
Hosting video and building the infrastructure to deliver HLS feeds to Apple is bound to be expensive. While Apple will not charge the podcaster directly, they will levy an impression-based fee on the ad networks. It is highly unlikely that podcast hosts will just swallow these new infrastructure costs out of the goodness of their hearts. Expect at least some of that expense to be passed down to you through increased hosting fees.
If you work for a podcast host and think I am wrong, please reach out – I would love to be corrected!
It’s time for a better podcast publishing tool
Ultimately, this whole shift highlights the messy consolidation of modern multimedia.
Right now, to run a podcast, we are creating:
Audio episodes
Video for multiple platforms
Show notes and articles
Social media clips
Promotional newsletters
And we are managing this through a painfully fragmented stack of tools. We upload to our podcast host, write on our blog, draft in our email platform, and schedule clips on various social media platforms.
Then to check our stats we have to go back to all those different platforms and consolidate the data manually.
Yes, there are social media scheduling tools which cover off part of that - Buffer, Canva, Echobox, etc.
And some clever folk – like those at Bumper and ListenNotes – have developed ways of bringing a lot of the audience analytics together.
But overall, the workflow is wildly inefficient.
I would LOVE a single podcast publishing CMS. Imagine a platform that incorporates audio, video, text, and social scheduling, allowing you to publish everything from one place and pull all your analytics into a single source of truth.
If anyone is building that, let me know. I would be your first beta tester.
So, will Apple’s video pivot change how you produce your show, or is it just another technical hurdle? I would love to hear how you are planning to handle it – drop your thoughts in the comments or reply directly.
Finally, a huge thank you to the founding members of Podcast Strategy Weekly. Please do check out their fantastic products and services by clicking the links below:
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That’s all for this week. As ever, thanks so much for reading. If you enjoyed this, why not forward it to a friend?
Until next time…
Chris