by Tom Webster

In preparation for Podcast Movement NYC next week, Tom Webster shares a small bit of data from The Podcast Landscape 2026 and what it means for how podcasts are consumed.

And with the title of this newsletter, I apologize to the editor of Podnews, James Cridland, who has been the world's principal archivist of lazy "video killed the radio star" headlines. Ooops, I did it again. I've spent this week going through brand-new The Podcast Landscape 2026 data looking for something I could give you before Podcast Movement that wouldn't spoil the keynote, and I found it at the bottom of the device table, where it has been sitting for years, eroding away. Every year we ask everyone who has ever consumed a podcast what device they use most often to do it. Here is what three years of that question look like:

Most-used podcast device, population-weighted (Americans 18+, have ever consumed a podcast):

(SOURCE: The Podcast Landscape 2024, 2025, and 2026)

Three weeks ago I wrote about the CityRadio, and the smart speaker as the cleanest test podcasting ever got of whether it could own a default. As a conduit for podcasting, the smart speaker is objectively a failure. One percent in 2025 and 2026, and if you count the speaker as anyone's second device it gets all the way to three percent, both years, which is roughly the share of people who told us their most-used device was "Other," a category I cannot explain and have stopped trying to. I'm not going to re-argue why the speaker failed; the short version is that voice is the worst interface ever devised for browsing. What I want to discuss this week is where the consumption went instead, because that table has exactly one line that moved north: the Smart TV.

Nine to twelve percent as the most-used device is a real change in a survey of 5,000 people, and it holds up on a wider measure, as well. When you also ask people to name their second-most-used device, and fold the two together, Smart TV is named by 25 percent of podcast consumers, up from 22 percent in 2025. The phone slipped on that same measure, from 80 percent to 78. So the story of the home is not that podcast consumption spread out across the devices in it. It consolidated. Laptops and desktops are declining, tablets are flat (literally, I guess), the smart speaker never really took off, and the points the phone gave up went to the biggest screen in the house. When I wrote about Smart TVs in April of last year I described those consumers as pragmatists who use whatever screen is in front of them. Some of that is still true. But a screen that people increasingly keep choosing three years running is not just the one that happens to be in front of them.

The car makes the same point from the other direction. Sixty-three percent of podcast consumers tell us that having something to listen to in the car is an important benefit of the medium, one of the highest-rated benefits we measure, and five percent use the car's own system as their primary device. The listening happens in the car; it happens on the phone, which rode in with them. The dashboard and the countertop are the two places podcasting should really compete for, the "ambient" contexts where your hands and eyes are busy, and the phone kept both of them without a fight. The one device that has pulled anything away from the phone is the one you use with your hands free and your eyes on the screen, and it is the one that the podcast industry has spent the least time thinking about.

That matters enormously, and it matters differently depending on where you sit. A television is a screen, and a screen means your show can be seen by someone who did not put in earbuds to find it, which is a different transaction than being heard over the dishwasher. An ad on a living room television is heard by whoever is in the room, and as Tamsen and I are now hooked on the official podcast for Lanterns, the room is frequently more than one person. That is the good news about all of this for podcasting, especially for the advertising-supported arm of the medium. It's not all good news, though, but I'll save that for New York next week.

There is a reading of this I find uncomfortable, as someone who came up in audio. In February I asked what a two-people-on-a-couch moment sounds like for audio, and one of my guesses was a smart speaker in the kitchen while two people cooked dinner. The bottom of the table above is the audience answering that question for me, and the answer is that they'd rather have the couch and wait for DoorDash, thanks very much. The smart speaker was a bet that podcasts are a background medium, something you summon with a sentence while you do something else. The television says a growing share of the audience treats them as foreground, something you sit down in front of, possibly next to someone. I don't think that's a hardware story so much as a story about what the audience has decided a podcast is, and that is the one I'll spend most of my half hour on in New York on the 17th. Best be there.

In fact, on that note, five years ago I stood in front of Podcast Movement in Nashville and told the audience that people were increasingly consuming podcasts on YouTube. Some people thought I was crazy, some people thought I was wrong, and some people took it seriously. My job is not to predict the future, but to be a reliable narrator for the present moment, and that was all I was doing in 2021. This year is going to be a very similar experience, and if anything, I expect what I have to share in the keynote to start even more conversations in this industry for many months to come. Truly. Podcast Movement in New York next week is where those conversations are going to start and continue in the hallways, and if you want to be a part of that, you should be there.

Tickets are getting close to sold out, so if you want to be a part of that conversation, you really shouldn't wait. It's under 200 bucks - I can't even get a lobster cappuccino in NY for that!

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