Apple is taking over YouTube and Spotify with a brand new video podcast expertise launching within the spring. Customers will be capable to change between watching and listening to exhibits within the Apple Podcasts app, which can start utilizing the corporate’s HTTP Dwell Streaming (HLS) video expertise. Customers may also change to a horizontal model of the podcast and obtain movies to observe offline.
The transfer comes as video podcasting continues to achieve reputation. Edison Research lately revealed that 51% of the U.S. inhabitants has consumed a video podcast, and that 37% eat video podcasts month-to-month.
The up to date video podcast expertise will enable Apple to raised compete with the likes of YouTube, Spotify, and even Netflix, all of which have already embraced the format. YouTube introduced final yr that it has greater than 1 billion month-to-month lively viewers of podcast content material. Spotify mentioned final November that it has half 1,000,000 video podcasts, which almost 400 million customers have watched. As for Netflix, the streaming big has partnered with iHeartMedia and Spotify to carry video podcasts to its platform.
By bringing an enhanced video podcast viewing expertise to its app, Apple is aiming to maintain customers from turning to rival platforms to observe their favourite exhibits.
“Twenty years in the past, Apple helped take podcasting mainstream by including podcasts to iTunes, and greater than a decade in the past, we launched the devoted Apple Podcasts app,” mentioned Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice chairman of Companies, in a press launch. “At the moment marks a defining milestone in that journey. By bringing a category-leading video expertise to Apple Podcasts, we’re placing creators in full management of their content material and the way they construct their companies, whereas making it simpler than ever for audiences to take heed to or watch podcasts.”
Whereas the brand new video expertise will formally launch within the spring, the replace is out there to check beginning this week as a part of betas for iOS 26.4, iPadOS 26.4, and visionOS 26.4.
