Content Creation @ Upfronts
Podcasters were a recurring topic during various upfront presentations last week. On May 11, Amazon unveiled the first podcast of Oprah Winfrey’s multi-year deal, at an upfront that positioned video podcasting as competing for TV budgets instead of complementing them.. YouTube’s Brandcast event focused heavily on creators, with new content from names like Dude Perfect, Alex Cooper, and Trevor Noah. While YouTube isn’t directly producing the roughly 20 announced shows, it has a team that will match brands with creators on sizable deals. For the future of creation, YouTube, the BBC, and the National Film and Television School have allied to launch a multi-city training program aiming to foster the next generation of content creators.
AI can make podcasts. But can it make anyone care? by Steven Goldstein
Amplifi Media founder Steven Goldstein shares the results of a test run with his Business of Podcasting class at NYU. Using the class as a focus group, Goldstein had students choose AI-generated podcasts on topics they really cared about and rank them on a scale of one to five. Overall, gen-AI podcasts scored 2.3 out of five. The strongest shows benefited from structure, efficiency, and narrow utility. While AI hosts came off as flat and robotic, the class found them useful in focused, bite-sized formats such as a weather update or product summary. Goldstein cautions against lumping all “AI podcasts” into one category, since there’s a fundamental difference between an automated voice delivering information in a useful context and a synthesized voice emulating a true crime podcast with flat, monotone descriptions of grisly murder scenes. Trust and authenticity are foundational to podcasting, and industry-wide disclosure of AI-generated content could help audiences maintain that trust and know what they’re getting before they hit play.
Video-first podcast hosting, distribution, and analytics platform Flightcast has launched support for video on Apple Podcasts and HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) video publishing. With the update, Flightcast users can publish video directly to Apple Podcasts without changing the normal Flightcast upload workflow. The update includes pre-processing for all existing episodes, meaning back catalogs will be submitted and available on Apple Podcasts “with a single click.”
As for the rest of the news…
- Todd Pringle has been announced as Libsyn’s new Vice President of Product.
- According to Podnews, Crossed Wires has partnered with SXSW London to create the Podcasting Track stage, set for June 3, 2026.
- U.K. broadcaster Sky News is set to launch a premium podcast subscription bundle powered by Supporting Cast.
- Podscribe has expanded its incrementality measurement for audio advertisers, including synthetic control groups, ghost holdouts, and randomized user-level holdout testing.
- Tom Webster appears on this morning’s episode of PodBiz to discuss what podcast metrics actually matter.
- Magellan AI has published the Q1 2026 edition of its Australian podcast advertising benchmarks, built from 9,968 podcast episodes.
Ad Results Media has a new blog examining how audio branding became “the connective tissue of the modern media mix.”
