Spotify has introduced that its podcasting platforms — Spotify for Creators and Megaphone — are adopting Apple’s expertise for video streaming, HTTP Reside Streaming (HLS). Apple shared in February that it was including help for HLS to its personal Apple Podcasts app with the discharge of iOS 26.4, so Spotify hopping aboard signifies that previously Spotify-exclusive video podcasts could be distributed to Apple’s app.
Apple created the HTTP Reside Streaming protocol years in the past to make video streaming simpler on units just like the iPhone. Switching to the usual additionally presents key advantages to video podcasts, as Apple already outlined in its personal announcement. Podcasts distributed with HLS can change forwards and backwards between video and audio-only streams and supply offline downloads. Essential for anybody attempting to become profitable 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 manner RSS is, and it might focus energy within the podcast business in a manner it wasn’t earlier than. That attainable destructive comes with a constructive: it is usually handy for customers when massive firms all agree to make use of the identical customary. Microsoft, Google, Twitch and extra use HLS. Including Spotify to that checklist will not be essentially a nasty factor.
Spotify would not have an official timeline for when Spotify for Creators and Megaphone will implement HLS, however did verify that audio-only RSS podcast feeds can be accessible for anybody listening by an app that does not help 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 packages and consider its video analytics. Whether or not they’ll supply all of Spotify’s options is as much as them. The corporate says “API companions can select which of those options they’d wish to help of their platforms.”
