The strikes are over — cue the rewatch podcasts

The end of the SAG-AFTRA strike means that popular rewatch podcasts like The Always Sunny Podcast and Fake Doctors, Real Friends with Zach and Donald can return.

by Ariel Shapiro

Nov 10, 2023, 8:15 PM UTC

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images

After four (!!) months, the SAG-AFTRA strike has ended. There is a lot to unpack about the contract, but I will let the showbiz experts (read: not me) handle that. For our purposes, there are a few key ways podcasting is affected.

The most immediate impact will be on the rewatch podcasts, which can finally resume business as normal. As Amrita Khalid reported this summer, TV rewatch podcasts hosted by shows’ former cast members counted as “promotion” and were therefore struck. After a long lull, we can expect a deluge of rewatch content in the coming weeks. (Christy Carlson Romano, for one, is very excited.)

These shows, many of which regularly rank in the top podcasts on Spotify and Apple, handled the strike in a number of different ways. The Always Sunny Podcast simply has not published an episode since the strike began. Office Ladies banked a number of episodes and managed to publish right to the end of the strike, adding a disclaimer at the beginning of every episode that the recording took place pre-strike. Fake Doctors, Real Friends with Zach and Donald refrained from recapping past Scrubs episodes and instead focused on interviews. It is also only fitting that It’s Not Only Football: Friday Night Lights and Beyond got derailed by the strike, much like its show of origin, and had to pivot to everyday chat until the season ended in September. I hope for me and the other FNL girlies that it comes back.

Rewatch shows aside, actors can now promote their upcoming shows and movies on podcasts. They never stopped appearing on celebrity chat shows in the past four months, but the end of the strike means they have greater incentive to do the podcast circuit.

One other thing on my mind is how this affects actor participation in audio projects. Since I got back, I had been hearing from agents and producers that, unable to work in their normal fashion, actors were pursuing voice-over work more than usual. I’ll be curious to see if that sticks now that film and TV are back on the table.

Lightning Round

iHeartMedia released its third quarter earnings yesterday and reported that its podcasting arm performed better than traditional radio. Podcasting revenue grew 13 percent year over year, while iHeart’s broadcast segment was down 5 percent. Podcasting now accounts for more than a tenth of the company’s overall business.
Audacy, which owns Cadence13 and Pineapple Street Studios, also reported quarterly earnings yesterday. Although the company does not break out its podcast revenue as clearly as iHeart, it did report a 3.3 percent increase year over year in its digital segment, outperforming the company overall, which saw a 5.6 percent decline year over year.
NPR and Edison Research released their annual report on spoken word audio. Among the findings were that 48 percent of Americans ages 13 and older listen to spoken word content daily, up from 46 percent last year. Plus, the study also found that while listening at home is split pretty evenly between radio and podcasts, podcasts still only account for 19 percent of in-car listening, compared to 62 percent for radio.
Podnews reports that YouTube Music is rolling out a functionality for Android and the web that will allow users to manually add RSS feeds. This probably does not have mass appeal beyond really devoted podcast listeners, but it does bridge the gap until YouTube Music supports RSS ingestion of podcasts on a larger scale.
Grammy nominations are out, including its (few) spoken word categories. The comedy category is the usual suspects (Dave Chappelle, Sarah Silverman, etc.), but I do love that the audiobook narration category has created a scenario where Bernie Sanders is competing with William Shatner, who is competing with Meryl Streep, who is also up against Michelle Obama. I also reiterate my assertion from last year that we deserve a podcast Grammy category.
Speaking of the former first family, former President Barack Obama has been making the podcast rounds in commemoration of the 15th anniversary of his first election. He appeared on Pod Save America, where he notably broke with the Biden administration on the Israel-Hamas war. Somewhat less controversially, he appeared on The Verge’s Decoder podcast (disclosure: we’re part of The Verge, too) to discuss tech issues such as AI regulation, copyright, and free speech.