Spotify is pushing its video podcasts onto Twitch. First up is Ringer Wise Guys, a sports betting show from The Ringer, the sports media company Bill Simmons founded and Spotify bought in 2020.
The Ringer’s Twitch account sat dormant for roughly eight years before the new broadcasts revived it. Simmons says every episode will stream live there. The episodes stay available on the other podcast platforms.
Twitch offers another audience for podcasts
Gaming and livestreaming still define Twitch, but the platform keeps pushing past those categories. Talk shows and podcasts remain a sliver of what happens there, under 1% of the live audience, according to Stream Charts.
The tooling for long-form programming is already in place. Twitch runs livestream chat, an ad system and playback on phones and other screens.
Other public figures got there first. Keke Palmer runs a talk show on the platform, and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani uses it to talk to constituents.
The Ringer leads Spotify’s Twitch experiment
The Ringer already anchors Spotify’s effort to put video programming on other companies’ platforms. Some of its shows were part of the Spotify slate that landed on Netflix.
Twitch adds another door, and a younger one. Spotify keeps feeding the same episodes to the usual podcast apps rather than locking the show behind a single platform.
The lesson here isn’t about Twitch. One finished episode now runs on a podcast feed, a video app and a live platform at the same time, and only one of those comes with a chat room attached.