The podcasts will reach Youtube music. The head of podcasting YoutubeKai Chuk, announced that plan to add podcasts in the near future as part of the Hot Pod Summit celebrationseeking to turn YouTube’s audio streaming platform into greater competition for Spotify.
YouTube is a multidisciplinary platform. For this reason, many podcasts are distributed through this streaming music service, either because they are produced in other media and later moved there, or vice versa. Until now, it still did not offer said content properly.
On the other hand, background listening will be available for free, so even if you lock your phone while listening to the program you won’t be interrupted. However, the free service will be ad-supported. It will also enable enhanced library tools.
Video and audio podcast fusion
One of the goals is to merge the experience of listening to video and audio podcasts. So if someone is watching a video podcast, they can switch to audio in the middle of an episode to listen on the go.
However, not all video podcasts will be able to switch smoothly. Creators themselves will have access to podcast tools in YouTube Studio, making it easy to set up videos as podcasts.
Since November, YouTube Premium and Music have more than 80 million subscribers globally. That’s a big number, but it still falls short of Spotify, which recently hit 200 million paying subscribers. With this initiative, the platform hopes to continue increasing its data.