Spotify and Netflix Form Video Podcast Partnership
Through email correspondence with The Download, Spotify has announced this afternoon that select Spotify Studios and The Ringer video podcast episodes will be made available on Netflix in early 2026. The initial batch includes sports, culture, lifestyle, and true crime podcasts from the two studios, with the plan being to add more podcasts from other genres and studios to Netflix over time.
Discussing Collaboration with LiveRead.io and Companion
Bryan Barletta returns to deep-dive conversations with industry professionals in a new video featuring two companies. The conversation brings together LiveRead.io President Ilyas Frenkel, Director of Operations at Companion Arts Shawya Mogharabi, and Companion General Manager AJ Feliciano. The group discusses how LiveRead.io came to be, how Frenkel first approached Companion, and what the service has done to open up valuable bandwidth as operations folks like Mogharabi have time-intensive tasks taken off their plate.
What Happens When College Students Critique AI-Generated Podcasts by Steven Goldstein
In his Business of Podcasting course at NYU, Goldstein invited Tom Webster as a guest lecturer on the day the class discussed AI podcasts. Each student selected a fully AI-generated podcast from a catalog of around 450 Inception Point AI shows. While podcasts that deliver matter-of-fact information tended to score higher on a 1-5 scale than AI “hosts” trying to emulate conversational tone, students said they’d rather read factual information themselves rather than listen to an AI read a Wikipedia page. Many were prompted for a synthetic experience just from the tell-tale signs of generated artwork used for the podcasts themselves. A core theme throughout the discussion is that of the emotional core of podcasting. Simple information, even if 100% correct, does not an engaging AI podcast make. The students seek connection with another person when choosing podcasts as a medium. For an AI podcast to work, it has a much better chance of being chosen if it is fully transparent about its generated nature instead of attempting to hide that fact. Facts are facts, but it’s the humanity of podcast host voices and their lived experience that keeps audiences coming back.
EU Law 2024/900 – on the transparency and targeting of political advertising.
A new law in the European Union brings political advertisements into sharp focus as it creates new rules designed to allow EU citizens to more easily recognize political ads, understand who’s paying for them, and why that ad has been specifically targeted to them. Podnews’ Jeff Cridland has collected some sources explaining the law in more detail for podcasting. In lieu of building systems to comply, Google, Facebook, and AdsWizz have simply blocked political ads from running in the EU. Likely in part because political ads aren’t as significant an industry as in the U.S., with only $50.5 million USD invested between 2023 and 2025. By comparison, U.S. political ad spend in 2024’s election cycle was just shy of $2 billion.
YouTube Introduces Multimodal Measurement by Laurie Sullivan
The new “brand pulse report” debuted by YouTube now uses Google AI-powered data to evaluate a brand’s presence across the entire YouTube platform. Mentions of the brand in videos, logos, product shots, and video titles are scanned and captured. Total Unique Viewers aims to demonstrate a brand’s audience across YouTube, while “% share of watch time” contextualizes how much they’re talked about within a category.
As for the rest of the news…
- November 5th in New York City Azerion and AudioStack have teamed up to host The Future of Sound & Innovation, a morning event designed to bring industry leaders together.
- Podscribe and Libsyn have a new joint article on the resilience of podcast measurement in a privacy-focused era.
- New Metric Media, known for comedy productions like Letterkenny and its spinoff Shoresy, has acquired Canadian podcast production company Kelly&Kelly, known for comedic podcasts like Broomgate: A Curling Scandal and fictional true crime series This Sounds Serious.
- Italian companies SG Company and MDE have formed podcast production and monetization company Sounds Great.
- Ausha has launched Ausha Academy, a platform for courses helping podcasters. The first course is a free six-part series on podcast search optimization.
- Pierre Bouvard has a new post on Westwood One covering recent Nielsen data re: the power of good creative in ads, and what audio campaigns can do to make sure their creative is “good.”