Apple is getting into the video podcasting action announcing support of video podcasts within the Apple Podcasts app.

Since Apple Podcasts is the #1, #2 or #3 podcast app in the world, depending on where you live, which data to believe, and how you actually count podcast consumption, that’s a big deal.

The technicalities are interesting, involving the use of HLS video streams which are delivered to Apple Podcasts users in small chunks that can be variably delivered to you dependent on your data limitations. That’s not unlike most streamers (YouTube, Netflix) who spend a lot of time giving you the best picture quality you can use at that moment given the limitations of your connectivity. But the key difference here is that Apple is not hosting the video files. That will be done by the hosting company you use — at least if your hosting company is one of the four groups supported at launch.

If you want to understand the full technicalities of how this is all going to operate, you should probably go over to Podnews where James Cridland has broken it all down.

What I’m interested in most of all here is how financial relationships are going to change, because another important part of this deal is that Apple is taking a fee for the delivery of dynamically served advertising within those video podcasts.

A quick refresher. Baked In advertising or sponsorship, is anything that is recorded once, usually by a podcast host, and because it’s embedded into the audio file, is heard by all listeners to a podcast regardless of when or where they listen to it. Once upon a time, this was the way that all podcast advertising worked.

Dynamic Advertising works in partnership with a hosting company. You deliver your podcast to your hosting company and give them timestamps for places where advertising can be dropped in. Your hosting company will serve different listeners different ads depending on things like where they live in the world, when they listen or various other metrics. It’s a little like you and me both getting different pre-roll ads when we watch the same YouTube video — except without Google’s sophisticated tracking behind the scenes to super-target us. This is the way the majority of podcast advertising is served in 2026, at least if you’re using a major hosting platform.

The key thing here is that what once was relatively simple in an audio-only world has become much more complicated in a video world.

• With podcast audio platforms, the creator decides the entirety of the monetisation opportunity working either alone or with a hosting company of their choice. I’m free to choose Acast, Audioboom or whoever to monetise my podcast. It’s a competitive landscape. The listener gets the same audio regardless of the podcatcher app (e.g. Spotify, Apple Podcasts) that they use to listen. The podcatcher app does not get a revenue share. Thus apps have historically used other ways to monetise themselves. Some apps have adverts in them (e.g. Castbox), others are paid-for in app stores (e.g. PocketCasts), and others are mostly trying to get you to take out a music streaming subscription (e.g. Spotify).

• With podcast video platforms, all the video podcast platforms are taking a share of revenues and/or charging fees to ad networks. And in many cases, they dictate who you use to monetise your podcast – namely themselves.

I’ve tried to summarise the picture in the below chart.

There are lot nuances here of course. Your hosting provider may be giving you scripts to record and bake into your episodes. And host-read sponsors can be delivered dynamically so that when an offer is retired, it can be removed. And YouTube does also allow some third party vendors to sell advertising on its platform, although obviously still retaining a share of revenues.

I would also note that Apple’s video hosting solution seems the cleanest. You can still choose between hosting companies (at least those with a relationship with Apple — a number that is sure to grow over time), and compare what revenue opportunities might be right for you.

With both Spotify and YouTube, you have to essentially accept their revenue splits, and, at time of writing, if you enable video hosting on Spotify, they use the audio from the direct upload of your video to their platform to serve their audio customers. That has the impact of breaking the ability of your hosting company to serve dynamic audio ads to Spotify audio listeners! As I have previously noted, this means that a number of major podcast titles that are producing video versions and putting them on YouTube, are also choosing not to upload those videos to Spotify. I suspect that Spotify will make changes to this situation in due course.

That all said, there are other complexities.

First, it’s clear that as a podcast creator who wants to get their podcast on every platform in every format, you now have to upload it to at least three separate platforms. It’s not just the upload, there’s all the metadata to complete, with show notes and other things to check.

It also seems that neither Apple nor Spotify are keen to host separate audio and video versions of podcasts. That’s not insignificant, because if you want to make a good experience for both audio and video consumers, then you might choose to make some editing choices. For example, snipping out visual gags from the audio version, or adding elements that extend the duration of the video version. As someone who primarily listens rather than watches podcasts, there is nothing worse than the creators thinking solely about how something looks. A case in point is the very funny Harry Hill Show “podcast.” He’s calling it a podcast, and there is an audio version of it available if you prefer to listen. But you’d be mad to do so, and many of the sight gags will make no sense at all. You have to watch the YouTube version. (Harry Hill has fundamentally made his own version of his old TV show, put it on YouTube and called it a podcast).

Matt Deegan gets into some of the other challenges involving the issues faced for serving listeners who switch between video and audio part way through a podcast episode.

Fundamentally, whatever your thoughts are on audio vs video within podcasting (and I do have thoughts), video is here to stay, and it seems to getting messier to manage rather than cleaner.

It would be great if there was a simpler solution across all platforms for video as there is for audio, but I’m not sure that the incentives are really there. Podcasting is enough of a business that YouTube spend some time looking at it. But it’s one part of a much larger video-ecosystem. That’s obviously something that Spotify and now Apple want a part of.

But this does now mean that monetising your video podcasts essentially cuts in all the podcatcher apps themselves, and that’s a model we’ve not had before in audio, whether directly as a revenue share or by charging ad networks fees based on impressions.

And if you build these foundations, as Apple has, in video, what might happen in the future with audio?

I’ve illustrated this piece with a Shure SM7B microphone on an arm, because at this stage, I think the only determinant of whether something is a podcast is whether this particular microphone, or one very similar to it, is being used. If it’s video and you can see microphones on arms, then it’s a “podcast”. If everyone is wearing lavalier microphones, as the TV industry has used for getting on for getting on for 60 years, then apparently, you’re not a podcast. As far as I can see, that’s the only differentiator between, say, Loose Women or The View and something like Joe Rogan or The Rest is Politics. Look – I don’t make the rules!

Note: Updated to reflect that Apple’s fees are impression-based and charged to the ad networks for dynamically delivered video ads in HLS.