Signal Hill Data Shows Apple Podcasts Faces Three-Step Challenge Before Video Push Moves the Market

Mar 30, 2026

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Podwires Rundown: Apple’s HLS video podcast announcement landed with considerable industry fanfare. The data says, ‘Pump the brakes.’ Signal Hill Insights has analysed the demographics of Apple Podcasts users, their usage patterns, and the necessary changes for Apple’s video campaign to significantly impact the market. The answer is a three-step climb that gets steeper at every rung. Apple isn’t wrong to invest here. But the gap between the announcement and the impact is wider than the press release suggests.

Source note: This piece draws from an analysis by Matt Hird, VP of Research at Signal Hill Insights, published on the Signal Hill Insights blog. Data sources include the Triton Digital/Signal Hill Insights Demos+ survey for the U.S. and the Canadian Podcast Listener 2025 study. Signal Hill is a podcast research firm with commercial research relationships across the industry—flag accordingly—but its underlying survey methodology is among the more rigors in the space.

The Key Points

Apple Podcasts is now the primary platform for just over 1-in-10 monthly podcast consumers in Canada and the United States, down from 18% in both markets in 2021—a significant share decline that Apple’s video features will need to reverse, not just complement.
Video consumption accounts for 45–52% of time spent with podcasts in North America on average, but that average obscures wide variation: French Canadians watch 59.4% of their podcast time, Spanish-speaking Americans watch 49.9%, and the mix shifts dramatically by show type and time of day.
Apple Podcasts’ primary users in Canada spend only 28% of their podcast time watching—compared to 52% of all podcast consumers—meaning Apple’s most loyal audience is its most audio-entrenched, and converting them to video behaviour is the first and most difficult step.
85% of Apple Podcasts’ primary users in Canada use YouTube at least once a week, and 53% use it daily—creating a real risk that any successful conversion of Apple users to video podcast consumption simply redirects them towards YouTube rather than retaining them on Apple.
New podcast listeners are considerably less likely to use Apple Podcasts as their primary platform than those who started in 2021 or earlier, with multi-content platforms like Spotify and YouTube proving more effective at onboarding new consumers.

Why It Matters
Apple’s HLS announcement is a genuine technical improvement for the subset of users watching video through Apple Podcasts. The problem is that subset is small, audio-skewed, and already spending most of their video time on YouTube. For Apple’s video push to drive meaningful market impact—not just better experience for existing users—it needs to simultaneously convert its current audio-first user base to video behaviour, reverse its platform share decline, and retain those video converts against the gravitational pull of YouTube. Each of those is a significant lift on its own. Accomplishing all three simultaneously, without a visible marketing investment or content exclusivity play, is a challenging task. The feature is real. The market impact is not yet.

The Big Picture

For podcasters: The show-level data buried in this analysis is the most actionable finding. Even among top-ten podcasts, the audio-to-video ratio varies dramatically—from a roughly even split at the top to a 59% audio majority at number ten. Understand the consumption habits of your own audience before spending money on video production for the distribution of Apple Podcasts. Apple’s improvements benefit creators whose audiences are already video-inclined on that platform. For everyone else, the ROI calculation hasn’t changed much.

For podcast producers: The multi-platform consumption reality—Apple primary users are also on YouTube daily—means production decisions need to account for audience behavior that doesn’t stay neatly inside any one platform’s ecosystem. Producing video for Apple Podcasts while ignoring YouTube optimisation is producing for the smaller audience. The two platforms are not either/or for most listeners; they’re both/and. Workflow and resource allocation should reflect that.

For the industry: The deeper story here is platform diversity versus consolidation. Signal Hill’s Hird frames Apple’s video push as a step towards supporting ecosystem diversity rather than accelerating consolidation – and that framing is worth taking seriously. A healthier podcast ecosystem has multiple viable platforms competing for listener attention. Apple retaining or growing its share is strategically valuable for the industry even if the near-term numbers are modest. The alternative—YouTube and Spotify continuing to absorb share while Apple retreats—concentrates platform power in ways the industry should not be comfortable with. Apple’s video investment, however imperfect in execution, is at least movement in the right direction.