Spotify’s aggressive, multi-year campaign to dominate the global podcasting industry reached its strategic endpoint on Tuesday, as the streaming giant formally adopted Apple’s technology to ensure creators can easily put their videos on Apple Podcasts instead.
The integration of Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) protocol marks a decisive pivot for the Swedish audio company, which spent roughly $1.2 billion acquiring studios like Gimlet Media and The Ringer to build an impenetrable walled garden around spoken-word content. Under the new arrangement, Spotify will streamline that vast proprietary infrastructure to seamlessly deliver its creators’ video files directly into the iOS ecosystem.
By utilizing Apple’s preferred video standards, Spotify creators can now distribute and monetize their content on Apple Podcasts without changing their existing workflows or interacting with Spotify’s consumer app at all.
After spending years trying to force listeners to watch three-hour video interviews in an app designed for background music, we realized the most synergistic path forward was to simply encode the files for Tim Cook and let him host them.
Wall Street analysts responded positively to the cross-platform distribution agreement, noting that Spotify’s decision to surrender the video podcasting medium to the $3.5 trillion iPhone maker will significantly reduce the company’s cloud hosting costs. Shares of Spotify rose 1.2% in early trading as investors praised the firm’s commitment to building a frictionless pipeline for audiences to migrate to a competitor.
Apple executives did not issue a formal press release regarding the integration, though a brief regulatory filing confirmed the company was pleased that Spotify had agreed to do the backend administrative work required to populate Apple Podcasts with fresh video inventory.