Video on Apple Podcasts: Now Open to All

From today, any creator on Acast can publish video to Apple Podcasts. Not a waitlist, not an invitation, not a select group - any creator on the platform, with the potential to earn from that video through our marketplace.

That last part is the bit that really matters. Video distribution in podcasting is becoming table stakes. What no one else can offer is the scale of the monetization engine behind our podcasts, the demand waiting on the other side. A creator who publishes video through Acast isn’t just reaching a new audience - they’re becoming visible to 4,000+ advertisers who value the kind of narrative influence only podcasting delivers.

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Early signals

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We’ve spent the past several months running video on Apple Podcasts with a select group of shows. What we found: podcasts in our initial beta that added video saw an estimated increase of around 25% in weekly sessions on Apple Podcasts - meaning listens or views of their show - over the first four months. 

What grew there wasn't influence itself - the show, the host and the relationship were unchanged. What grew was the number of ways that influence could travel - one podcast, now watched as well as heard on the same platform where people were already listening.

We also learned the practical things, how creators actually want to handle back catalogs, what they need from analytics, where the workflow friction sits. Most of that is now built into the product. Creator needs are our roadmap.

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Acast’s place

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Podcasting has never had a single center of gravity, and it shouldn’t. The medium’s defining quality is that a show can exist everywhere at once - an open format, reaching audiences wherever they are. That openness is why podcasting grew and thrived, and it’s why it has stayed durable while other digital formats have consolidated into a handful of closed platforms.

Acast has always been built for that reality. We are not a destination competing for attention. We are the infrastructure underneath, the layer that takes a creator’s influence and carries it formatted, monetized and measured - to Apple Podcasts, Amazon, Spotify, YouTube, to every app or destination that speaks podcast. Working closely with them all is not a diplomatic choice: it’s our business model.

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Brands are already buying

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Podcasting is multimodal. Our 2025 Podcast Pulse research showed it’s a spectrum: some people only listen, some now only watch, most move between the two depending on where they are. Nearly four in five do both, with audio still the main channel - a permanent feature of the medium, not a transition.

This is powerful for advertisers, and brands are already diving in. Video advertising in podcasting has gone from experiment to line item. In May, State Farm and T-Mobile ran the first integrated video campaigns on Apple Podcasts with us - audio and video in one buy, not two. 

Video doesn't change what makes podcast advertising work. It's the same show, the same host, the same relationship - with a screen. Everything advertisers already come to podcasting for is still there: premium, brand-safe, transparent content available at scale. And audiences don't treat watching and listening as separate experiences - they move between them without changing how they feel about the show.

Brands don't buy a format, they buy outcomes: attention, recall, the decision to act. Opening video to every creator gives the shows they already buy more ways to deliver those outcomes - same marketplace, same teams, more places to reach audiences.

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The creator decides

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Video is a real opportunity, and the beta data supports that. But it’s not the right choice for every show. Plenty of podcasts are better as audio. Some hosts don't want to be on camera. Video is an option, not a mandate, and a creator who decides against it is making a legitimate editorial judgment - not falling behind.

So we’ve built it as a choice. Video publishing is something a creator opts into. And if a creator tries video on Apple Podcasts and decides it isn’t for them, they can stop - consumption returns to standard audio distribution, the episodes remain intact, nothing breaks. No penalty, no lock-in, no erosion of the audio experience they built.

That principle matters more as the ecosystem gets more complicated. The creator holds the decisions. Our job is to give them real options and honest information about each one, then get out of the way.

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Getting started

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For shows in our creator network, video on Apple Podcasts is now available through your Acast partner manager, please reach out to have it turned on.

For all other creators on Acast, video publishing is available as part of our new Video plan - a subscription tier that includes video upload and distribution to Apple Podcasts, automatic audio extraction, the ability to replace existing audio episodes with video versions, video and audio performance data side by side in our creator hub, and the opportunity to make your video inventory available to advertisers through our marketplace if you meet the required thresholds. Details are on our pricing page.

Publishing video was always coming. Building the demand behind it is the hard part, and the part we've spent years getting good at.

We are - as ever - for the stories.