Industry data ยท October 5, 2026
A steady audience is changing where and how it watches. Here is what the new numbers ask of the way you record an interview.
Sounds Profitable published the first installment of The Podcast Landscape 2026 on 1 October 2026, based on a nationally representative survey of 5,473 US adults. Reach is steady: 74 percent of US adults have consumed a podcast, 55 percent in the past month and 39 percent in the past week. What moved is not how many people arrive but where and in what form they stay.
Two movements stand out. Video keeps taking a larger share of the format, and the platforms people name have shifted away from podcast-native apps. In its first year carrying podcasts, Netflix was named by 21 percent of podcast consumers as a platform they used in the past 12 months.
| Measure | 2025 | 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Podcast consumers who watched a video podcast in the past week | 40% | 44% |
| Podcast consumers who never watched a video podcast | 14% | 10% |
| Consumers who expect podcasts to be audio only | 21% | 17% |
| Consumers who at least occasionally listen or watch with others | 37% | 40% |
| Consumers who name a podcast-native app as their most used platform | 19% | 15% |
| Consumers who began consuming podcasts within the past year | 28% | 34% |
Every line points the same way: the medium is still a podcast, but its consumption is increasingly visual and increasingly shared. Sounds Profitable reports that 83 percent of consumers now believe video can be part of the format, while only 17 percent still expect podcasts to be audio only.
The most surprising number is about place, not format. YouTube is the most used podcast platform overall at 40 percent, and among podcast consumers who watch on a smart TV, 71 percent name YouTube as their most used podcast app, followed by Netflix at 12 percent.
Sounds Profitable lists the platforms people used in the past 12 months as YouTube at 63 percent, Spotify at 33 percent and Netflix at 21 percent, ahead of Apple Podcasts at 15 percent. Only 5 percent call Netflix their most used platform, which is what a platform in its first year looks like. Apple Podcasts also lost share as a most used platform, from 11 percent to 8 percent.
For a host this is less a reason to chase a viral moment than to give a returning audience something complete. When an episode ships as both a listening version and a watching version, one recording reaches the people in the car and the people on the sofa.
A video-forward audience adds pressure to a decision made before editing starts: what actually gets recorded. A stream capture keeps whatever the call delivered, compressed for the connection and scaled to the window, so the file on disk is the version the network allowed rather than the version the room produced.
Airtape records each participant locally in the browser and keeps audio and video as separate tracks per person. Because the recording happens on each participant's own machine, a weak connection can interrupt the call without defining the stored file. After the session the host downloads the individual tracks and builds the audio episode and the video cut from one source.
Write down whether the episode ships as audio, as video or as both, and who uploads where. That answer sets how carefully the session is framed.
Camera framing, microphone choice and room noise are cheap to fix before the recording and expensive to fix afterwards.
A second take costs the guest twice the attention. Capture the source properly and let editing do the rest.
In a local recording workflow a session is complete only when each participant's track has been stored.
Keep an untouched copy of the source before editing, publishing or transcoding adds another generation.
Airtape's Free plan includes two recording hours per month, two participants in total and seven days of storage. For a show that now publishes audio and video, that storage window is the constraint to plan around: a session is safe once its tracks are downloaded, not when the call ends.
Sounds Profitable's The Podcast Landscape 2026 is based on a nationally representative survey of 5,473 US adults. It reports that 74 percent have consumed a podcast, 55 percent in the past month and 39 percent in the past week.
As a distribution platform, yes. Sounds Profitable reports that 21 percent of podcast consumers used Netflix for podcasts in its first year, making it the third most-named platform behind YouTube and Spotify. Only 5 percent call it their most used platform.
No, but the audience increasingly expects the option. In the 2026 study 44 percent of podcast consumers watched a video podcast in the past week, up from 40 percent, and 83 percent say video can be part of the format. An audio-only feed still works.
A local recording keeps each participant's audio and video as separate tracks at the quality the device captured, instead of the compressed stream that survived the call. That is what lets you cut both the audio episode and the video version from one session.
