Apple is taking up YouTube and Spotify with a brand new video podcast expertise launching within the spring. Customers will have the ability to change between watching and listening to exhibits within the Apple Podcasts app, which can start utilizing the corporate’s HTTP Stay Streaming (HLS) video expertise. Customers may also change to a horizontal model of the podcast and obtain movies to look at offline.
The transfer comes as video podcasting continues to achieve recognition. Edison Research just lately revealed that 51% of the U.S. inhabitants has consumed a video podcast, and that 37% devour video podcasts month-to-month.
The up to date video podcast expertise will permit Apple to higher compete with the likes of YouTube, Spotify, and even Netflix, all of which have already embraced the format. YouTube introduced final 12 months that it has greater than 1 billion monthly active viewers of podcast content material. Spotify mentioned final November that it has half one million video podcasts, which almost 400 million customers have watched. As for Netflix, the streaming big has partnered with iHeartMedia and Spotify to convey 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 look at 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 Providers, in a press launch. “At this time 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 hearken to or watch podcasts.”
Whereas the brand new video expertise will formally launch within the spring, the replace is offered to check beginning this week as a part of betas for iOS 26.4, iPadOS 26.4, and visionOS 26.4.
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