Picture Credit: Netflix
In case it’s not been clear so far in 2026: Netflix wants to be your go-to destination not just for prestige TV and blockbuster movies, but for your daily podcast fix. Welcome to Netflix’s “Podcast Era.”
Since quietly rolling out in the United States at the top of the year and then slowly internationally beginning in late February, Netflix has gone all-in on the format and continues to invest through to the tailend of this year. As of our latest tracking, the streamer has quickly grown to roughly 60 video podcasts onto the platform in the US as of the time of publishing with many dropping new episodes on a regular cadence whether it’s daily, a few every week or or one or two a month.
They’ve signed a massive joint $100 million deal with Spotify for Jay Shetty’s On Purpose, and loaded up on library titles from The Ringer, Barstool, and iHeartMedia. Those partnerships are in addition to their home grown titles and companion podcasts to its own movies and series. That’s in addition to trades carrying exclusive stories today for Good Mythical Morning joining the lineup beginning in September and Deadline carrying the news that celebrity chef Nick DiGiovanni is bringing his catalog over as well as a new podcast. Heartstopper is the next Netflix IP to get the podcast treatment.
Ahead of Netflix releasing its next Engagement Report which should provide some real insight into what’s working and probably far more likely, what’s not, I have to ask: Is this actually a good idea, or just another classic Netflix phase of trying to find a new avenue for engagement or subscribers, expanding aggressively and then cutting back the second data (which there’s a distinct lack of so far) doesn’t stack up?
Let’s break down what’s working, what’s completely broken, and whether this podcast experiment will actually survive.
The Strategy: Why Netflix Needs You to Listen
To understand why Netflix is suddenly cramming The Breakfast Club (which switched from a podcast format on Netflix to daily live stream) next to Bridgerton, you have to look at the graveyard of Netflix talk shows.
For a decade, Netflix tried and failed to replicate the late-night format. Chelsea Handler, Joel McHale, Michelle Wolf, Hasan Minhaj—all cancelled. In a recent interview with Prof G Markets, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos finally admitted what we all knew: the classic format is dead. “We tried talk shows over and over again, and I think the format itself has kind of given way to podcasting,” Sarandos noted, pointing out that audiences today want either a massive CGI spectacle or a deeply intimate, unpolished chat. “They really want to hear this long, freeform interview with their no makeup and guard down.”
Scott Galloway put it in another way (perhaps somewhat facetiously): “Podcasts are essentially 80% of a television show for 10% of the price.” For a company that is desperately trying to scale a highly lucrative, ad-supported tier and have its users consume more minutes and hours, on paper, video podcasts offer hundreds of hours of cheap, low-risk ad inventory.
Ted Sarandos on the Prof G Markets podcast
The best insight into consumption so far has come from Ted on two occassion where he’s stated that the format unlock the “dead” hours. Netflix engagement traditionally spikes at 8 PM. They want you opening the app at 8 AM on the train, or at 1 PM at the gym. “What we’re seeing in the very early days that’s very promising is that people are watching, and they’re watching during the day where streaming usually doesn’t take place much,” Sarandos revealed.
Is Anything Working? Live Sports and Mega-Celebrities
The Engagement Reports should provide a real glimpse into which of these podcasts are working and whether they’re actually generating much substantial viewing hours because thus far, it’s hard to tell if anythings working with one major exception.
That’s because bar one title, not one of these new podcasts have cracked the Daily Top 10s in any country. We tried using Google Trends and Wikipedia to see if there was any noticeable uptick in activity but data was inconclusive or even showed declines in interest.
Then came the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
In June, The Rest is Football (hosted by Gary Lineker, Alan Shearer, and Micah Richards) finally broke into the Netflix Top 10 charts and has consistently done so throughout the World Cup. Peaking at #2 overall in the UK and charting high in Ireland and Iceland, it proved that event-driven content can actually work in this format. The show was dropping at 6 AM BST to capture the morning commute, perfectly validating Sarandos’s daytime-viewing theory.
Picture Credit: Netflix
What’s Absolutely Broken: A UI Nightmare
But here is where I have to be super critical. If Netflix wants to be a daily podcast player, they have have to acknowledge that their app is infinitely inferior to YouTube and Spotify where the vast majority of podcast listening/watching takes place. Right now, shoehorning a completely different medium into an interface designed for television and movies is causing a particularly miserable user experience.
They’ve introduced new rows which does help, highlighting episode content but overall the experience is not great.
Here’s a good example. I just saw a clip on social media of The Ringer’s The Star Wars movie draft on TikTok. I want to watch that episode. On Spotify and YouTube I could search for that episodes title as I roughly know what it’s going to be. On Netflix, it didn’t even return The Big Picture in the search results so I manually have to retype that. Then, because there’s over 50 episodes, I have to track down roughly when that episode dropped and scroll down parsing out the episodes (with episodes dating back to April still stating that they’re “New”) to eventually find it.
Here are the glaring issues Netflix needs to address yesterday:
- The “Continue Watching” Pollution: This is my biggest pet peeve right now. If I click on a two-hour episode of The Bill Simmons Podcast just to hear a five-minute segment about a recent movie, that massive thumbnail is now permanently lodged at the front of my “Continue Watching” row, pushing my actual TV binges off the screen. Netflix desperately needs a dedicated “Continue Listening” row. Keep them separate.
- The Screen-Lock Problem: Netflix wants us to listen on the commute, but if you lock your phone screen, the app just stops. Users are begging for a basic “Lock Screen/Background Audio” toggle. I shouldn’t have to drain my phone battery rendering 4K video in my pocket just to listen and then if I my trousers too much it ends up shutting the app down entirely. I suspect there maybe some devil in the details on the contracts of some of these why they can’t be audio only but podcasts have to have the option.
- Search Dilution: The main search bar is broken. If you search for an actor now, you have to wade through dozens of individual podcast episodes where that actor is merely mentioned in the description before finding their actual movies. Netflix needs a dedicated search bar inside each podcast’s landing page or have a seperate row within the search page that specifically lists podcast episodes which match.
- Smarter Downloads and Notifications: Not only would it be good to have intelligent, audio-only mobile downloads because the app is currently eating up gigabytes of local storage by downloading massive video files for daily shows. It’d also be nice to be able to actually subscribe to one of these shows and get notified of new episodes either with Netflix’s notification bell (which could do with a rework but that’s for another day) or some kind of push notification/email setup.
Finally, unlike Netflix’s main catalog, which is widely available in multiple languages whether that’s subtitles or dubbing, podcasts are exclusively, for the most part, in English. A potential barrier for these crossing borders quite like Netflix’s main catalog, one of its biggest strengths over the past decade.
An Inevitable Reckoning Incoming? Throwing Content at the Wall
If you’ve been reading What’s on Netflix for a while, you know exactly what phase we are in. Netflix is in its “Golden Age” of a new initiative—the phase where they throw massive amounts of money and content at the wall to see what sticks.
We saw it with Interactive Specials (Bandersnatch, Trivia Quest), which were quietly wiped from the platform earlier this year. We saw it with Netflix Animation in the early 2020s, before the 2022 subscriber correction led to ruthless department gutting and many shows and movies canceled entirely. We saw it with Netflix Games, where they built a AAA PC studio (“Team Blue”) only to unceremoniously shut it down a few years later and even a retreat from mobile games to more casual experiences on its own platform or mobile. We’ve even seen it to an extent with Netflix’s TUDUM blog where it went all in on bizarre features to now becoming an SEO blog (without a functional seach box, by the way) where they just ribbit press releases.
To that extent, I suspect Netflix is giving this podcast division a quiet ticking clock. Licensing these shows isn’t cheap. If these video podcasts don’t start driving measurable ad revenue or subscriber retention within the next 18 to 24 months, you can bet your subscription fee that these deals will quietly expire, and the “Podcast Hub” will be downsize significantly..
To that extent, podcasts have already gone through this kind of golden era and recession already. During the pandemic “Golden Age” of podcasting (roughly 2019 to 2022), audio was considered a gold rush. Spotify alone spent over a billion dollars acquiring studios like Gimlet Media and The Ringer, and handing out massive exclusive contracts to names like Meghan Markle and the Obamas. But by 2023 and 2024, the bubble officially burst. According to industry analysis and reports from outlets like Talking Points Memo, the industry saw a severe and rapid contraction. Ad revenues plummeted, and Hollywood cooled on buying up podcast IP. To that end, Netflix is providing a second wind to companies and podcasters here but will it actually last this time around?
That massive data dump will be a good litmus test. We’ll finally know if millions of people are actually watching The Breakfast Club on their TVs, or if Netflix’s podcast era is just another expensive, fleeting experiment. For me, it feels like this podcast push 2-3 years ago would’ve been a welcome addition but when Netflix’s engagement is under intense scrutiny, particularly after the Warner Bros. deal fell through and Netflix is hunting for growth narratives, is such an emphasis on low hanging fruit like this worthwhile? Not sure.
