When you tune in to a podcast, you are probably not opening the Netflix app—at least for now. That might change if Netflix gets its way. The streamer signed deals with iHeartMedia and Barstool Sports this week, in addition to a recent deal with Spotify, to gain exclusive video rights to select shows. The company is also rumored to be in talks with SiriusXM.
Podcasters see this as an offensive move with YouTube as the primary target. The data provides a convincing argument. YouTube shared this week that viewers watched over 700 million hours of podcasts on living room devices like TVs in 2025, up from 400 million the year before.
As people begin to spend less time watching traditional television and more time watching short-form or low-cost, low-production value content on YouTube, that might present a long-term competitive threat to Netflix. This observation comes from Matthew Dysart, an entertainment attorney and former head of podcast business affairs at Spotify.
While podcasters might understand the motivation, not everyone is convinced about Netflix’s move. Some podcasters say they are not sure there is long-term value in video podcasts, while others worry Netflix is contributing to a podcast bubble.
They are basically saying they want to be the king of content, and the only way to do that is to take a swipe at YouTube, according to podcaster Ronald Young Jr. Still, Young Jr. thinks people are turning on video podcasts and letting them play in the background, noting that ESPN has been doing some version of this for much longer than we have been able to name it.
When independent podcasters Mike Schubert and Sequoia Simone launched their new show “Professional Talkers” this year, they noted the buzz around video podcasts and decided to start the new show as a video-first production on YouTube and Spotify.
Neither of them had done video before, so they decided to start from the beginning and make it a video show, Schubert explained. He found that his audience was ambivalent toward the video, perhaps because he has spent nearly a decade releasing audio podcasts, cultivating a fanbase that already enjoys and expects audio content.
They posted an audio-only episode, and it performed similarly in numbers. So why put so much time and effort into video and risk the episode being late when they could just do audio only, he reasoned.
Young Jr. considered investing more energy into video but decided against it. Like Schubert and Simone, he realized he built an audience that prefers listening to podcasts rather than viewing them.
He asked himself who he would be pivoting for and realized the pivot would be for advertisers, for podcast executives, and for people who think video is the direction everyone is going.
Still, some consumers want to see video, even as a passive show to turn on in the background, as evidenced by YouTube’s staggering viewership statistics.
Mikah Sargent, a podcast producer and host at TWiT.tv, works with shows like “This Week in Tech,” which have had a video component for more than fifteen years.
Something he regularly hears from listeners is that the show was their background when going through a rough time or when needing to travel across the country. Having that audio there helped them pass the time. There is a lot of passed time with podcasts, Sargent noted. So Netflix can look at that and see an opportunity to have content that in some cases takes up more time and more streaming than a typical show would.
There is a disconnect between how creators and tech companies each think about podcasts. For people who make podcasts, a podcast can be a conversational show like the ones on YouTube, but it can also be a format that does not translate seamlessly to video, like scripted fiction with sound design and voice actors, or the kind of reported, refined audio stories you would find on NPR.
This has to do with how squishy the word podcast is now, said podcaster Eric Silver. It means anything. It just means show now.
For these independent creators, the corporate dealings between Netflix and Spotify do not immediately impact their day-to-day work. But podcasters remember what happened when Spotify bought up and consolidated a significant chunk of the industry, created a bubble, and then burst that same bubble itself.
The impact reverberated across the industry with studio closures, layoffs, and a conception among onlookers that podcasting was dead. So when another big tech company comes waltzing into their industry, they are skeptical.
In any form of entertainment and media, when companies consolidate, the people who currently have power continue to get richer and the industry underneath gets poorer, Silver said. The future gets more murky and has fewer resources.
Netflix is not making as extreme moves as Spotify. The latter company spent billions acquiring several tech startups and studios, allowing Spotify to control the entire process of making a podcast, from the recording software to the ad sales tools.
What Netflix is doing is a little more calculated than what Spotify did, Young Jr. said. Spotify blindly threw money at the top creators and cratered the market in doing so, because the minute you value a top podcaster at hundreds of millions, the regular podcaster is left wondering where they fall.
But what is seen as an industry-changing infusion of money is not that staggering for a company like Netflix, which is on track to make about forty-five billion dollars this year.
Netflix and Spotify are similar in that way, Dysart explained. They make aggressive moves to test a new value proposition by targeting top performers and spending money that is not substantial from the perspective of a global tech platform, but is meaningful to the creator economy, to quickly learn if there is potential.
Netflix has only made deals with media companies thus far, rather than individual creators like Spotify did, but Dysart thinks Netflix’s investments are only beginning.
He would expect Netflix to at some point try to strike a nine-figure deal with a top podcast creator. He would also expect Netflix to take really big swings with very high-profile personalities on original podcasts.
If Netflix gets its way, our culture will shift away from watching programmatic daytime TV and talk shows and toward watching podcasts.
Back in the day, a parent might have had a soap opera playing in the background while doing things, and another person would have a sitcom playing in the background, Sargent recalled. Now people have a podcast playing in the background while they are doing things. If Netflix can be the place where they go to do that, then it is a win for the company.