TL;DR:

• Apple is adding support for video podcasts to their podcast app
• Podcasts are built on an open standard, which is why they aren’t controlled by a bad algorithm and don’t have ads that spy on you
• Apple’s new system for video podcasts breaks with the old podcast standard, and forces creators to host their video clips with a few selected companies
• The stakes are even higher because all the indie video infrastructure companies have been bought by private equity, while Trump’s goons go after TV and consolidate the big studios
• If Apple doesn’t open this up, it could lead to podcasts getting enshittified like all the other media

Podcasts are a radical gift

As I noted back in 2024, the common phrase “wherever you get your podcasts” masks a subtle point, which is that podcasts are built on an open technology — a design which has radical implications on today’s internet. This is the reason that the podcasts most people consume aren’t skewed by creators chasing an algorithm that dictates what content they should create, aren’t full of surveillance-based advertising, and aren’t locked down to one app or platform that traps both creators and their audience within the walled garden of a single giant tech company.

Many of those merits of the contemporary podcast ecosystem are possible because of choices Apple made almost two decades ago when they embraced open standards in iTunes when adding podcasting features. Their outsized market influence (the term “podcast” itself came from the name iPod) pushed everyone else in the ecosystem to follow their lead, and as a result, we have a major media format that isn’t as poisoned, in some ways, as the rest of social media or even mainstream media.

Sure, there are individual podcast creators one might object to, but notice how you don’t see bad actors like FCC chairman Brendan Carr illegally throwing his weight around to try to censor and persecute podcasters in the same way that he’s been silencing television broadcasters, and you don’t see MAGA legislators trying to game the refs about the algorithm the way they have with Facebook and Twitter. Even the Elon Musks of the world can’t just buy up the whole world of podcasting like he was able to with Twitter, because the ecosystem is decentralized and not controlled by any one player. This is how the Internet was supposed to work. As early Internet advocates were fond of saying, the architecture of the Internet was designed to see censorship as damage, and route around it.

The move to video

All of this is at much higher risk now due to the technical decisions Apple has made with its move to support video podcasts in its latest software versions that are about to launch. The motivations for their move are obvious: in recent years, many podcasters have moved to embrace new platforms to increase their distribution, reach, engagement and sponsorship dollars, and that has driven them to add video, which has meant moving to YouTube, and more recently, platforms like Netflix. That is also typically accompanied by putting out promotional clips of the video portion of the podcast on platforms like TikTok and Instagram. Combined with Spotify’s acquisition of multiple studios in order to produce proprietary shows that are not podcasts, but exclusive content locked into their apps, and Apple has faced a significant number of threats to their once-dominant position in the space.

So it was inevitable that Apple would add video support to their podcasting apps. And it makes sense for Apple to update the technical underpinnings; the assumptions that were made when designing podcasts over two decades ago aren’t really appropriate for many contemporary uses. For example, back then, by default an entire podcast episode would be downloaded to your iPod for convenient listening on the go, just like songs in your music library. But downloading a giant 4K video clip of an hour-long podcast show that you might not even watch, just in case you might want to see it, would be a huge waste of resources and bandwidth. Modern users are used to streaming everything. Thus, Apple updated their apps to support just grabbing snippets of video as they’re needed, and to their credit, Apple is embracing an open video format when doing so, instead of some proprietary system that requires podcasters to pay a fee or get permission.

The problem, though, is that Apple is only allowing these new video streams to be served by a small number of pre-approved commercial providers that they’ve hand-selected. In the podcasting world, there are no gatekeepers; if I want to start a podcast today, I can publish a podcast feed here on anildash.com and put up some MP3s with my episodes, and anyone anywhere in the world can subscribe to that podcast, I don’t have to ask anyone’s permission, tell anyone about it, or agree to anyone’s terms of service.

If I want to publish a video podcast to Apple’s new system, though, I can’t just put up a video file on my site and tell people to subscribe to my podcast. I have to sign up for one of the approved partner services, agree to their terms of service, pay their monthly fee, watch them get acquired by Facebook, wait for the stupid corporate battle between Facebook and Apple, endure the service being enshittified, have them put their thumb on the scale about which content they want to promote, deal with my subscribers being spied on when they watch my show, see Brendan Carr make up a pretense to attack the platform I’m on, watch the service use my show to cross-promote violent attacks on vulnerable people, and the entire rest of that broken tech/content culture cycle.

We don’t have to do this, Apple!

How this plays out

What will happen, by default, if Apple doesn’t change course and add support for open video hosting for podcasts is a land grab for control of the infrastructure of the new, closed video podcast technology platform. Some of the bidders may be players that want to own podcasting (Spotify, Netflix, maybe legacy media companies like Disney and Paramount), or a roll-up from a cloud provider like AWS or Google Cloud. Either way, the services will get way more expensive for creators, and far more conservative about what content they allow, while being far more consumer-hostile in terms of privacy and monetization. We’ve seen this play out already — video shows on YouTube give advertisers massive amounts of data about viewers, while podcasts can be delivered to an audience while almost totally preserving their privacy, if a creator wants to help them preserve their anonymity. The reason you see podcasters always talking about “use our promo code” in their sponsor reads is because advertisers can’t track you going from their show to their website.

This will also start to impact content. You don’t hear podcasters saying “unalive” or censoring normal words because there is no algorithm that skews the distribution of their content. The promotional graphics for their shows are often downright boring, and don’t feature the hosts making weird faces like on YouTube thumbnails, because they haven’t been optimized to within an inch of their lives in hopes of getting 12-year-olds to click on them instead of Mr. Beast — because they’re not trying to chase algorithmic amplification. The closest thing that podcasters have to those kinds of games is when they ask you to rate them in Apple’s Podcasts app, because that has an algorithm for making recommendations, but even that is mediated by real humans making actual choices.

But once we’ve got a layer of paid intermediaries distributing video content, and Apple leans more heavily into the visual aspects of their podcast app, incentives are going to start to shift rapidly. Today, other than on laptops, phones and tablets, Apple Podcasts app only exists on their Apple TV hardware, and doesn’t even have a video playback feature. By contrast, a lot of video podcast consumption happens in YouTube’s TV apps in the living room. Apple Podcasts will soon have to be on every set top device like Roku sticks and Amazon Fire TVs and Google’s Chromecasts, as well as on smart TVs like Samsungs and LGs, with a robust video playback feature that can compete with YouTube’s own capabilities. Once that’s happened — which will take at least a year, if not multiple years — creators will immediately begin jockeying for ways to get promoted or amplified within that ecosystem. Even if Apple has allowed independent publishers to make their own video podcast feeds, it’s easy to imagine them treating them as second-class citizens when distributing those podcasts to all of the Apple Podcast users across all of these platforms.

The stakes for all of this are even higher because nearly all of the independent online platforms for video creation outside of YouTube have been bought up by a single private equity firm. In short: even if you don’t know it, if you’re trying to do video off of YouTube, all of your eggs are in one, very precarious, basket.

What to do

Apple can mitigate the risks of closing up podcasts by moving as quickly as possible to reassure the entire podcasting ecosystem that they’ll allow creators to use any source for hosting video. Right now, there’s a “fallback” video system where creators can deliver video through the traditional podcast standard, and other podcasting apps will show that video to audiences, but Apple’s apps don’t recognize it. If Apple said they’d support that specification as a second option for those who don’t want to, or can’t, use their video hosting partners, that would go a huge way towards mitigating the ecosystem risk that they’re introducing with this new shift.

If Apple can engage with a wide swath of creators and understand the concerns that are bubbling up, and articulate that they’re aware of the real, significant risks that can arise from the path that they’re currently on, they still have a chance to course-correct.

Some of these decisions can seem like arcane technical discussions. It’s easy to roll your eyes when people talk about specifications and formats and the minutiae of what happens behind the scenes when we click on a link. But the history of the Internet has shown us that, sometimes, even some of what seem like the most inconsequential choices end up leading to massive shifts in a larger ecosystem, or even in culture overall.

A generation ago, a few people at Apple made a choice to embrace an open ecosystem that was in its infancy, and in so doing, they enabled an entire culture of creators to flourish for decades. Podcasting is perhaps the last major media format that is open, free, and not easily able to be captured by authoritarians. The stakes couldn’t be higher. All it takes now is a few decision makers pushing to do the right thing, not just the easy thing, to protect an entire vital medium.