A new "Playlist Playground" feature will let Apple Music subscribers generate playlists with text prompts, and native support for video podcasts is coming to the Podcasts app. The Creator Studio version of the Freeform drawing and collaboration app is also available in the 26.4 updates, allowing subscribers to access stock images from Apple's Content Hub and to insert AI-generated images.
On YouTube, The Rest is History podcast draws roughly around 500,000 viewers, who stick around for an average of about 48 minutes. That's close to the length of a traditional hour-long show and even longer than the podcast's strong audio average of around 40 minutes.. For the production team, seeing that level of engagement, especially on TV screens, was a turning point. People weren't just listening along to podcasts. They're settling in to watch now too.
Spotify is lowering its eligibility criteria for podcasters to monetize their videos on the platform, dropping the minimum episode requirement to three, minimum consumption hours to 2,000, and engaged audience member threshold to 1,000 over the last 30 days. When the company introduced its partner program to monetize video content last year, creators needed to have published 12 episodes, hit 10,000 consumption hours over the prior 30 days, and had at least 2,000 people stream their content in the last 30 days to be part of the program.
Video Podcast Market Poised for Booming Growth is the WSJ header. As podcast listening grows, the article presumes, "brands can use the medium to boost engagement, build communities, expand ad revenue, and unlock new sponsorships." Podcast popularity is eating into TV and video streaming time. There's a dollar prediction here, too: Ad revenue for podcasts and vodcasts is charted by Deloitte (on the WSJ site) to reach five billion dollars in 2026.
Using YouTube's takeover of podcasts as a starting point, he explores how video has devoured audio and turned podcasts into something closer to daytime TV and late-night talk shows. NPR's Rachel Martin, host of the celebrity-interview show Wild Card, joins to talk about her own shift from intimate, audio-only conversations to highly visible video chats with mega-celebrities. She explains how the visual layer changes everything-from building trust with guests and audiences to deepening parasocial relationships, and why showing your face is necessary in a low-trust media world.
This past August, clips of the millennial comedian and podcaster Adam Friedland speaking about the war in Gaza collected millions of views online, becoming some of the year's most influential bits of commentary. In the footage, Friedland is slouched in a leather chair on a wood-panelled stage set, wearing a blue suit jacket with jeans, his curly hair foppishly askew. The vibe is casual, but his words have a sober urgency.
