The Evolution of Podcasting: From Audio to Full Video Networks

Key takeaways

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• Podcasting has already crossed over: 73% of Americans have consumed one, 51% have watched one.
• Video added viewers without replacing listeners. About one in ten weekly consumers watches and never listens.
• Apple Podcasts switched on HLS video this spring, so every major platform now treats video as ordinary.
• The change that matters is not the camera. It is that a show starts behaving like a channel with a schedule.

Video podcasting is the same show, published so it can be watched or listened to depending on where the audience finds it, and video is now the default rather than the option. 

In 2005, Apple put podcasts inside iTunes, and the format’s future looked settled: RSS feeds, MP3 files, earbuds, a commute. Twenty years later, YouTube is where most weekly podcast consumers go, and Apple has spent this year rebuilding the very app that made the format mainstream.

Video podcasts have existed for years. What changed is that video stopped being a variant and became the thing platforms build for.

In this guide

• How the format flipped
• The numbers that ended it
• Three ways video actually reaches an audience
• The real change is that a show becomes a network
• What the split audience tells you to do
• What this means if you are the whole team
• Video podcasting FAQs
• Where this leaves you

How the format flipped

Podcasting did not begin as an audio-only medium by design. It grew out of RSS experiments in the early 2000s, when independent developers worked out how to attach media files to a feed. Apple’s contribution came in 2005, when it put podcasts inside iTunes and standardized the plumbing.

For two decades that held: a podcast was audio, and the camera was a bonus rather than a format.

Then YouTube launched a dedicated podcasts page in August 2022, and its share of podcast consumption climbed from 9.7% in 2019 to 28.6% in 2023, according to MIDiA Research. Spotify had onboarded more than 250,000 video podcasts by late June 2024 and now ships video for over 60% of its most popular shows, per Deloitte.

Apple held out the longest, which is what makes this the turning point. In February, Apple announced that Apple Podcasts would carry video delivered over HLS  HTTP Live Streaming  with playback in the app, offline downloads, and dynamic video advertising. When the company that defined the format rebuilds its app around video, the argument is over.

The numbers that ended it

The Infinite Dial 2025 from Edison Research counted 73% of Americans age 12 and older having consumed a podcast in either format, roughly 210 million people. Fifty-five percent were monthly consumers, a record.

The split underneath should shape your decisions. Edison found YouTube the service used most often, named by 33% of weekly listeners. Cumulus Media and Signal Hill Insights, surveying 603 weekly podcast consumers, found 31% naming YouTube as their most-used platform, ahead of Spotify at 21% and Apple at 12%.

Deloitte expects global ad revenue across podcasts and video podcasts to reach about $5 billion in 2026, up close to 20%, and roughly 27% of US consumers watch a video podcast weekly. The audience question is settled. What almost nobody writes about honestly is what happens on the production side.

Three ways video actually reaches an audience

The delivery layer decides who owns the relationship, and the three routes are not interchangeable.

Route	How it works	What you keep
Platform upload	Video published to YouTube or Spotify, separate from your feed	The upload. The algorithm and audience list are theirs
RSS video enclosure	Video rides in your own feed as an alternate enclosure beside the audio	Everything. The feed is yours, but app support is thin
HLS video	Your host packages the video for Apple Podcasts	Distribution and monetization, inside Apple’s rules

The middle route is the one worth understanding if you care about independence. Podcasting 2.0’s alternate enclosure specification lets a single feed carry audio and video versions of the same episode, so a listening app can switch between them. It is elegant and correct, and twelve podcast apps support it. That is the honest state of open video podcasting: nowhere near the reach of a YouTube upload.

Apple’s route runs through participating hosting providers Acast, ART19, Triton’s Omni Studio and SiriusXM at launch, and Apple charges creators and hosts nothing. The revenue comes from an impression-based fee billed to ad networks later this year, which tells you what Apple thinks video is worth: not a hosting upsell, but an advertising surface.

Our answer, having built for all three, is to use all three. The feed is your archive. The platform is your discovery. Pick only one and you have handed someone else the thing you spent years building.

The real change is that a show becomes a network

Standards and platforms are the easy part. The hard part is that video quietly changes what you are making.

An audio podcast is a series. Episodes arrive, people listen, the back catalog sits there. A video podcast is programming. It has a visual identity before anyone presses play, because a thumbnail does the work a title used to do. It has a cadence the audience can feel, the way they can feel a channel gone to reruns.

That is the shape we settled on, and it is why we built PodcastsityTV as a TV grid rather than a feed. The grid forces decisions early: how many slots you can actually fill, what each channel looks like, what happens in week four when the novelty has worn off. Those are harder questions than buying a camera.

For a solo operator, going fully video roughly doubles the production load. You shoot twice as long as you planned, you edit material you would never have filmed, and you find out that a camera changes the room.

What the split audience tells you to do

Cumulus and Signal Hill asked weekly podcast consumers how they prefer to consume. Thirty-six percent wanted audio only. Thirty-three percent wanted to watch. Thirty-one percent preferred listening with the video running in the background. Only 9% watched and never listened.

Video did not convert the audience away from audio. It added a second way in. Viewers gravitated toward news and sports, while true crime fans stayed with audio, which is intuitive once you say it out loud: nobody wants to watch a murder documentary while driving.

Then there is the living room. Almost half of podcast viewers reported watching on a connected TV in 2024, and 38% of YouTube’s podcast audience used laptops or TVs. Podcasts are turning up on the biggest screen in the house, competing for time that used to belong to streaming services.

So publish the video, but treat the audio mix as the product rather than an export. Two-thirds of your audience is listening with the screen off or ignored. If the audio sounds like an afterthought, that is what you have made.

What this means if you are the whole team

Independence is why most of us are here, and video raises the cost of it. Editing is where the hours go, not shooting. If you are one person running several channels, your tools are the only thing between you and a collapsed schedule, which is why we keep a running assessment of which AI video editors are actually worth using and why the economics of independent filmmaking with AI in the loop stopped being a niche concern.

The budget question has a real answer. Nobody needs three cameras to make a show worth watching, and creators without a studio budget are not competing on polish. They compete on specificity, consistency, and subject matter nobody else covers.

If you are weighing whether the format fits what you already make, the Featured Creator program is where we work that through with people. The channels and the grid already exist.

Video podcasting FAQs

What is video podcasting?

A podcast published with a visual component, so the audience can watch it or listen to it. Usually it means a filmed version of the same episode, delivered through YouTube, a video enclosure in the RSS feed, or HLS video on Apple Podcasts.

Is video podcasting replacing audio?

No. Thirty-six percent of weekly podcast consumers still prefer audio only, and under one in ten watches without ever listening. Video brought in a second audience rather than converting the first one.

Do I need special equipment to start?

Not to start. Lighting and audio quality matter more than the camera, and a phone with a decent microphone beats an expensive camera with bad sound. The bigger investment is editing time.

Which platform is best for a video podcast?

YouTube for discovery, because it has the audience and the algorithm. Your own feed for ownership. Apple Podcasts for the connected-TV audience. The strongest answer is all three.

How much does it cost to add video to a podcast?

The cash cost can be close to nothing if you own a phone and a microphone. The real cost is time, since video editing is where a solo production schedule breaks.

Where this leaves you

The format did not change because audiences demanded video. It changed because platforms needed a reason to compete for attention, and video gave them one. Publish to the open feed and to the platform, keep the archive somewhere you control, and remember that most of your listeners are still driving.