Spotify has announced that its podcasting platforms — Spotify for Creators and Megaphone — are adopting Apple’s expertise for video streaming, HTTP Live Streaming (HLS). Apple shared in February that it was including assist for HLS to its personal Apple Podcasts app with the discharge of iOS 26.4, so Spotify hopping aboard implies that previously Spotify-exclusive video podcasts will be distributed to Apple’s app.
Apple created the HTTP Reside Streaming protocol years in the past to make video streaming simpler on gadgets just like the iPhone. Switching to the usual additionally gives key advantages to video podcasts, as Apple already outlined in its personal announcement. Podcasts distributed with HLS can swap forwards and backwards between video and audio-only streams and provide offline downloads. Vital for anybody attempting to generate income from their present, HLS additionally helps dynamic advert insertion.
HLS is proprietary tech that is developed by Apple, which implies it is naturally not open in the identical method RSS is, and it may focus energy within the podcast trade in a method it wasn’t earlier than. That attainable damaging comes with a optimistic: it is typically handy for customers when large corporations all agree to make use of the identical commonplace. Microsoft, Google, Twitch and extra use HLS. Including Spotify to that listing shouldn’t be essentially a nasty factor.
Spotify does not have an official timeline for when Spotify for Creators and Megaphone will implement HLS, however did affirm that audio-only RSS podcast feeds can be obtainable for anybody listening by way of an app that does not assist it. Spotify can be opening up who can distribute to Spotify by way of its Distribution API, which is now formally supported by podcast internet hosting platforms Audioboom, Audiomeans, Podigee, Podspace and Libsyn. Supporting the API permits platforms to distribute video content material to Spotify, use the corporate’s video monetization applications and look at its video analytics. Whether or not they’ll provide all of Spotify’s options is as much as them. The corporate says “API companions can select which of those options they’d prefer to assist of their platforms.”
