In just over two weeks, Evolutions by Podcast Movement kicks off for three days at SXSW 2026. The event has no extra badge requirement or separate ticket fee, featuring curated panels, networking, happy hours, and live events with special celebrity guests. All in a 400-person venue (with capacity for 350+ overflow in a neighboring space). SXSW badge holders receive priority access. Pre-registration is live and highly encouraged.
Last week I watched my first podcast on Hulu. Some might quibble with whether or not it was a podcast. I don’t really care about that. It called itself a podcast, and that was good enough for me.
My wife Tamsen and I sat down to check when Paradise was coming back — we’re hooked on it, and I’d just seen Sterling K. Brown starting to promote the new season. We pulled up Hulu, and it wasn’t available yet. What was there was the first episode of a companion podcast, hosted by Brown’s wife, Ryan Michelle Bathé, and featuring Dan Fogelman, who created the show, and James Marsden, who plays the president in all those flashbacks.
So we watched it. Together. On the couch. With our two greyhounds, who I should note did not require an explanation of what a podcast is.
What struck me wasn’t the content, though the content was good. It was how natural the whole thing felt. I was interested in Paradise content, and I was served exactly the content I was in the mood for, on the screen I was already watching, in the context where I would have wanted such a thing. Zero friction. I didn’t go looking for a podcast. The podcast found me, in the right place, at the right time, on the right screen. I didn’t even check whether it was available anywhere else. Why would I?
Here’s the thing, though. At no point in that experience did I listen to anything. I watched a podcast, with my wife, on a television. And I think the language we use for that matters more than we realize.
Not Co-Listening. Co-Consumption
In our latest study, we identified a segment of 560 respondents who say they consume podcasts — audio or video — with others “most of the time” or “always”. The survey itself asks about consumption, which is the right word. But I’ve been calling them “Co-Listeners” in my own shorthand, and I need to stop doing that. It’s a term that carries the medium’s audio-first assumptions right into the description of a behavior that is larger than that. We all do this. I’m going to try to stop.
Because for most of these people, podcasting is visual. 61% spend more than half their podcast time watching video. YouTube is the dominant platform — 38% use it as their primary podcast platform. Smart TVs are the third most-used primary device, at 15%. That’s way higher than the broader podcast audience.
This makes intuitive sense. If you’re consuming a podcast with someone else, you’re probably not sharing earbuds. You’re in a living room. You’re looking at a screen. The shared experience gravitates toward video almost by default.
But here’s where it gets interesting. When you ask this segment what they expect a podcast to be, the answer doesn’t necessarily match their behavior:
Primarily or exclusively video – 15%
Either audio or video – 28%
Usually audio-only, but may be video – 38%
Audio-only – 19%
Even in a segment defined by shared, screen-based consumption, the mental model of what a podcast is still tilts toward audio. Their behavior has outpaced their definition. They’re watching podcasts together on a TV, and they still think of podcasts as something you listen to. The word “co-listening” makes the same mistake. It describes what the medium used to be, not what these people are actually doing.
If you’ve spent any time in audience research, you know that the gap between what people do and what they say they do is where all the interesting stuff lives.
The Clay Is Still Wet
This segment skews new to podcasting. 45% have been consuming podcasts for less than a year. 17% started within the last 30 days. Compare that to the broader podcast audience, where you see a much heavier tilt toward people who’ve been at it for three years or more. And that newness shows up in some telling ways. 67% say they’d be more likely to try a podcast if a company or brand were involved in making it. 54% say AI-generated voices would make them more likely to keep listening, not less.
I know. If you’ve been in podcasting for a while, those numbers make you twitch. But these aren’t the responses of people who’ve spent years developing strong feelings about what podcasting should be. These are people still forming those feelings.
It also raises a question I keep coming back to: how many of these people came to podcasting through podcasting, and how many came through YouTube and discovered that some of what they were already watching happened to be called a podcast? The entry point matters. It shapes what you expect the format to look like, which platform feels like home, and what “good” sounds like.
Or looks like.
How Do We Create This For Audio?
You can look at this segment and see a definitional crisis — “is this even podcasting?” — or you can see a real and growing audience consuming podcast content together, regularly, on the biggest video platform in the world. I know which question I think is more productive.
But here’s the curveball, and where I actually want to land. I’ve spent this whole piece arguing that we should stop calling this “co-listening” — that the old language limits how we think about the behavior. And I stand by that. But I’d be making a different mistake if I walked away from this data thinking the lesson is simply “video wins.”
Because what makes co-consumption work isn’t the screen. It’s the frictionlessness. It’s the context. And it’s the reactivity — two people experiencing something together and having something to talk about. Look at the genre preferences for this segment: comedy at 39%, sports at 34%, and true crime at 31%. Those are reactive genres. Half the fun is the other person’s response. You laugh together, you argue the call together, you say “oh my God, it was the neighbor” together. None of that requires a screen. Video just got there first, because a television in a living room is an obvious shared surface and a pair of earbuds is not.
So the question I keep turning over is: what does a two-people-on-a-couch moment sound like for audio? What’s the audio equivalent of Tamsen and me pulling up Hulu and having a podcast just be there, in the right place, at the right time, requiring zero effort? Is it a smart speaker in the kitchen while two people cook dinner? Is it something playing in the car on a long drive that neither person chose but both react to? Is it a platform feature that doesn’t exist yet?
I don’t have the answer. But I think it’s the right question — because the thing that makes this segment valuable isn’t that they’re watching. It’s that they’re sharing. And if we can build that kind of frictionless, contextual, shared discovery for audio, the clay is still wet enough to shape it.
The greyhounds, for what it’s worth, would prefer audio. Less to look at. More napping.
New Partners
Sounds Profitable exists thanks to the continued support of our amazing partners. Monthly consulting, free tickets to our quarterly events, partner-only webinars, and access to our 1,800+ person slack channel are all benefits of partnering Sounds Profitable.
- Studio71 is a global digital media and entertainment company that partners with top creators and brands to bring bold ideas to life.
Want to learn more about partnership? Hit reply or send us an email!
