This article was published in conjunction with the 2025 Awful Announcing Sports Podcast Power List. To read more about the sports podcast and digital video space and the people guiding it right now, click here.
In this day and age, it seems as if every former athlete or sports media personality has their own podcast. The audio format has taken on a life of its own as a dominant form of communication, storytelling, and even reporting.
But podcasts are not a monolith. And even this industry that has taken over so much of our media consumption is still evolving. And if anything, it’s moving more and more towards something that couldn’t have been imagined when the podcast boom first began.
Television.
Naturally, podcasts have made a sizable impact on the audio industry. But pick your favorite sports podcaster, and the odds are that in 2025, they have a video version, either on YouTube or another platform, to go with it.
Go up and down the podcast listings, and you’ll see that pretty much all of the top podcasts are enjoyed in audio or video form, from Pardon My Take to The Bill Simmons Show to New Heights with Jason and Travis Kelce to Pablo Torre Finds Out.
Part of it is the natural evolution and popularity of the medium, but another part is the shifting habits of sports fans.
YouTube itself (not YouTube TV, mind you, but the actual video platform) is the top media distributor in the country. It’s ahead of Disney, ahead of Netflix, ahead of NBC Universal, and all of their other competitors. If you’re a podcast and you’re not on YouTube, you are frankly missing a huge chunk of audience potential — and one of the only means for discoverability in 2025. And that doesn’t count just sports fans, but all media consumers. When we think of the top streaming platforms, usually, we’re not thinking about the one that started it all. But YouTube is seeing itself more in line with platforms like Netflix, Disney+, and other streaming competitors. That’s why its deal to stream an exclusive NFL game earlier this season was such a big deal for the platform.
All the major sports podcasts are doing bonkers numbers on YouTube. So other streaming platforms have caught on by saying, “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.”
It’s why the Netflix deal with Spotify to air some of its major sports podcasts on their platform stands as a watershed moment. It’s the first time we’ve seen a mega media company partner with podcasts specifically for video on a significant scale. Now the likes of Bill Simmons and Zach Lowe will be seen right beside K-Pop Demon Hunters and Stranger Things.
Other platforms have indeed made similar deals, although perhaps not quite to that extent. Amazon Prime Video airs each New Heights episode. Fox Sports’ morning lineup was overhauled in favor of Wake Up Barstool, an effectively live podcast that airs on television. ESPN has gotten into the act with The Mina Kimes Show with Lenny and Kevin Clark’s This is Football making their way to television. And ESPN’s licensing deal with The Pat McAfee Show is one that broke the mold for what is possible in the industry, although it’s hard to fit McAfee’s show in any box.
Now that the dam has burst on this front, it’s not hard to see other major podcasts inking similar deals and starting to fill out airtime in network lineups. Fox Sports already has a deal with Barstool to air a morning show each and every weekday. We all know about its struggles with ratings, so why not try to do something with the hugely successful Pardon My Take instead of reinventing the wheel? How long until the influential Pablo Torre Finds Out finds a television or streaming home?
The next frontier for these top sports podcasts may just be finding a regular spot not only on YouTube but also on other linear and streaming platforms. With the media universe more fragmented than ever, it’s great for these podcasts to find audiences in all corners of the marketplace. And it makes sense for media distributors as well. Podcasts don’t have a big budget to produce. And they don’t need to to succeed. It’s more about the personalities and the content. But they can be valuable resources for filling hours on a schedule or diversifying options for sports fans to consume.
At Fox News, former ESPNer Will Cain hosts a midday show that looks a lot like a podcast. They also acquired Red Seat Ventures, a podcast company. Traditional television is circling the podcast space, but hasn’t gone all-in just yet.
The one thing holding many hosts in the industry back from these deals is the risk of going behind a paywall. Not everyone is big enough to break down that door the way Joe Rogan did at Spotify. Pat McAfee was unique because he negotiated the continual live airing of his show on YouTube, rather than placing it exclusively on cable. Most networks want to be the sole distributor, which likely explains why we haven’t seen more copycats.
In many ways, the proliferation of sports podcasts on television shows that what’s old is new again. Media companies have been turning audio content into television content for years. The early part of the 2000s was filled with radio simulcasts on television, with Mike & Mike leading the way.
Maybe those old forms of media aren’t dead; they’re just being reimagined for modern times.
About Matt Yoder