Netflix aren’t making podcasts, they’re making cheap TV
This was originally published in my Prime Lenses Newsletter. You can sign-up for a weekly update to your inbox here.
It’s generally agreed that in modern business, the measure of success is growth. X% every month, quarter, year, creating revenue and passing a return on to your investors. If that works, it creates a problem for future you because sooner or later everyone who wants your service or widget has bought your service or widget, so you’re forced to do something else.
Diversification! A pivot, maybe an upgrade or enhancement. When they reach this point, some find themselves doing something they’re not as well suited to in an attempt to break out for oceans blue, while others stick to what they know and make a version that’s cheaper and arbitrarily limited so as to attract folks who didn’t want to spend so much in the first place, while taking care not to annoy early adopters who paid full price.
Before you know it, you’re in a room with a whiteboard covered in jargon and three letter acronyms. From humble beginnings you need 5, 10, 100 people all running around moving features and widgets from here to there. This pressure similarly applies to creators who have to make their writing, pictures or podcasts into multimedia channels, newsletters and Patreon exclusives that attract new audience members and retain existing ones. All of which brings me to Netflix.
As a solo creator and team of one, I don’t have a lot of pressure on me to grow. I want the podcast to be a success, I want people to listen to it and enjoy it, I want to make a living at it, but I don’t have to get on investor calls each quarter to talk about how I’m going to achieve constant growth.
I chose this path because it avoids some of the busy work of quarterly reporting to bosses but then along came Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters to remind me of this world and ruin my day. I was fine with them buying Warner Bros, I never liked Batman that much anyway, and I wasn’t going to launch a stealth startup to make movies or a home streaming service. Their turf was their own.
Sadly, my decision to stay out of their way if they stay out of mine has been thrown back in my face. You see, they’ve launched “Podcasts” on Netflix and have made such a splash about it that I’m forced to have feelings on the matter.
A mix of existing shows and new ones are now available on millions of TV screens around the world. The problem is though, despite what the website says, they’re not podcasts. If you want a nice potted history of the medium, The Verge made a really good podcast about this in 2024, an episode titled “They’re called Podcasts”. Podcasts rose out of blogging, which led to experiments with Audio Blogs in the mid 2000s, landing us at Joe Rogan in 2026. The bottom line is that whatever they were called, and wherever they were hosted, the audio files were shared using an open standard called RSS. Anyone skilled in the art could write a program that would check these feeds for changes and as new episodes came out they were downloaded to your computer and then latterly your phone. Two decades later, Podcasts and emailare about the last remaining technologies that aren’t gated/ controlled by the tech giants in some way. There are big beasts in podcsting for sure, but the big 5 have largely ingested the medium and made it available to their customers as opposed to feeling the need to get really stuck into it and ruin it in a 90s Microsoft “Embrace and Extend” kind of way. Spotify tried this about a decade ago but largely fumbled the ball, giving a lot of money to Joe Rogan, buying Gimlet Media and getting not a lot in return. The biggest shows that really expanded the reach of podcasts beyond nerds like me were well produced and well funded but available everywhere.
So now, along comes Netflix, making podcasts that aren’t really podcasts. There’s no audio only option, you can’t listen with your phone locked in your pocket, and if you would like to listen in your normal podcast player you’re out of luck. That’s because while the source shows in some cases are existing podcasts, these are TV shows. Moving wallpaper designed to be on in the background while you cook dinner, play videogames, hang out, do whatever.
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I have some sympathy for Netflix and their need to ever expand into new areas. At their scale, everyone wants to be the one-stop-shop for all your entertainment needs because it’s only that scale that can sustain the monster they have created. I’m sure on a whiteboard somewhere at Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo, execs have discussed bringing podcasts to their platforms and what it could do for daily actives and subscriptions. Podcasts become just another thing that will keep you in their app for longer than someone else’s as they chase growth and retention.
But we need accessible spaces to make small things and conduct experiments. On a related note, I’m releasing an episode today with Christelle Enquist of The RAW Society talking about the RAW Photo Fest, May 7 - 10 on the Spanish island of Menorca. She and Jorge aren’t putting this on because they want it to be the next Glastonbury. They’re doing it because it should exist and they have members who would be enriched creatively by being around other artists and photographers.
Podcasts as a medium can probably survive this latest gold rush, and I wish everyone getting to make TV while calling it a podcast every success. If you can get that money, take that money and make what you want to make. Some of the shows that come out of this will be really good, there’ll be interesting conversations, we might even get some great things in future because this big corporate experiment brought folks together. It’s likely that in the end contracts expire and shows are re-released publicly later. I don’t think you get a break out success story like “Serial” when you’re behind a pay wall but I could be wrong.
There might be a better way though and Netflix is one of the few who could execute on it. If it really mattered to them, if they really loved the medium, they could create a great audio experience in their app. Or heck, let’s pretend it’s the early 2010s and make a separate Netflix Podcast app. That would at least show us that they mean it, like they’ve done with some theatrical releases of films to earn credibility in Hollywood.
Make the shows available externally on the open platform that made podcasts a success, compete on the basis of product, use them as an attractor to your subscription service. Don’t lock them up inside the Netflix app, because all that says to me is that you don’t believe in it, and that the people you’ve paid to come over don’t either. They saw what happened to Rogan on Spotify, they’re not daft. This is a pay day, and you’re just using the word podcast to try and get some buzz and as a mechanism to justify lower production costs and expectations on chat shows. The medium deserves better.