AdsWizz, the advertising technology company owned by SiriusXM, today widened access to its tools for selling ads in video podcasts on Apple Podcasts, opening them to publishers and creators after what it called "early testing with select publishers." The mechanism at the center of the announcement is an audio one. According to AdsWizz, podcasters can carry existing audio advertising campaigns into video episodes by pairing the audio ads with branded companion banners, "without requiring new video ad production." The release names no test publishers, markets, prices or results, and it does not mention the per-impression fee Apple said in February it would charge ad networks for dynamic ads in its video format.

In Short

Apple Podcasts now plays video versions of many shows, and AdsWizz, a SiriusXM company that places ads in podcasts, says more podcasters can now make money from those video episodes through its system. Brands already paying for audio ads in podcasts can have the same ads play in the video version with a branded banner on screen, so nobody has to film a new video ad. What it costs, who tested it and how well it performs were not disclosed.

What AdsWizz announced

The release went out at 11:00 a.m. Eastern time on the investor relations site of Sirius XM Holdings, AdsWizz's parent company. It runs to five paragraphs plus a company description. AdsWizz presents the product as "one unified solution" that combines "greater audience reach, premium advertiser demand, and industry-leading monetization technology." Publishers and creators, according to the company, can now "seamlessly distribute and monetize podcast video on Apple Podcasts, unlocking new revenue opportunities while maintaining control over their content and advertiser relationships."

The verb in the first sentence is "expanded." AdsWizz is not describing a product built from nothing. It is moving a capability that had been running with a limited group of publishers to a wider one. How much wider is left open. The release does not say whether access now covers every publisher that uses AdsWizz, every show hosted on Simplecast, the podcast hosting platform SiriusXM also owns, or a narrower set that has to meet eligibility criteria. Nor does it say when the early testing began.

Three services are bundled into the offer. Podcasters get access to AdsWizz's podcast monetization network for advertiser demand, to dynamic ad insertion, and to measurement. Audience analytics come through Simplecast, which, according to the release, gives creators "visibility into how audiences engage with their content across formats, helping inform their distribution and monetization strategies."

Anne Frisbie, Group Vice President, Global Supply at AdsWizz, framed the product as an extension of what the company already does. "For more than 15 years, AdsWizz has served as an operating system powering the open audio ecosystem, connecting creators and publishers with advertisers at scale," Frisbie said. "With this solution, we are giving podcasters and video-first creators a new way to reach audiences on Apple Podcasts and monetize those audiences. We're also giving advertisers one access point to premium podcast inventory that is easier to buy, with the measurement advertisers expect from digital media."

Her reference to "video-first creators" is worth noting. AdsWizz built its business on audio, from radio streams to podcast downloads. Courting creators whose primary output is video, and who may have no audio advertising history at all, is a different market from the one its tools were designed for.

How an audio-led ad runs in a video episode

AdsWizz describes its approach as helping creators "monetize every moment with an audio-led strategy, regardless of how their content is consumed." In practice, that means the advertising starts from audio, not from video.

Apple's video podcasts run on HLS, the streaming protocol Apple introduced in 2009, which delivers video as short segments listed in text playlists. A listener can move between the audio and video versions of the same episode. That creates a problem for a podcast advertising market whose creative is overwhelmingly audio: a pre-recorded audio spot has nothing to show on screen when the listener is watching.

AdsWizz's answer is the companion banner. According to the release, the system "enables creators to extend existing audio advertising campaigns into video by pairing audio ads with branded companion banners." The audio ad plays, and a branded visual from the same advertiser appears while it does. Companion banners have long been used in streaming audio apps, where a display image accompanies an audio spot on the phone screen. Here, the same pairing fills a video stream.

The release leaves the visual mechanics undescribed. It does not say whether the banner replaces the show's video for the length of the ad, overlays it, or sits elsewhere in the player, whether the banner is static or animated, or whether a viewer can tap it to visit the advertiser. Those details affect what an advertiser is actually buying.

Inserted on request

The second component, dynamic ad insertion, places ads into an episode at the moment it is requested, rather than leaving them baked in at production time. The same episode can therefore carry different ads for different listeners, on different dates, in different places. For a back catalogue of video episodes, it means ads can be sold against old shows long after they were recorded.

The release does not describe how AdsWizz delivers ads into Apple's video stream. HLS allows two broad approaches: ads can be stitched into the stream on the provider's servers, or ad breaks can be marked in the playlist so the player fetches and plays the ads itself, a method known as server-guided ad insertion. Which one AdsWizz uses would determine how ad delivery is counted and verified, and the release is silent on it.

There is also the question of video creative. When Apple announced its HLS video format, it said creators could dynamically insert video ads, including host-read spots, as PPC Land reported at the time. Today's release talks about "dynamic ad insertion" but describes only the audio-plus-banner route. Whether advertisers can also deliver full video spots through AdsWizz into Apple Podcasts is not stated.

Not the first to pair audio with a still image

The approach has a precedent on Apple's platform. On May 18, 2026, the hosting company Flightcast added Apple Podcasts video and HLS publishing for its whole customer base at no extra cost, and said audio ads would display alongside a still image within the video player, so existing programmatic audio campaigns could keep running. What AdsWizz adds is scale on the demand side: a network that, according to SiriusXM, already sells across streaming and podcasting at volume.

Simplecast and the measurement promise

Simplecast is SiriusXM's podcast hosting and analytics platform. SiriusXM announced its acquisition of Simplecast in June 2020, describing it as a podcast management platform, created in 2013, that lets podcasters publish, manage and measure their content. At the time, Simplecast and AdsWizz were to form SiriusXM's publisher solutions business. AdsWizz itself had come to the group earlier: Pandora agreed to buy AdsWizz in March 2018 for $145 million in cash and stock, and SiriusXM acquired Pandora in 2019.

The release promises measurement but does not name a metric, a standard or a third-party verifier. That matters because the industry's counting rules for video podcasts are recent. On September 29, 2026, IAB Tech Lab finalised version 2.3 of its podcast measurement guidelines, which place video episodes delivered as MP4 files or through segmented formats such as HLS under the same measurement principles as audio downloads. Under those rules, a dynamically inserted ad counts only when all of its bytes have been downloaded.

Today's release does not say whether AdsWizz counts its Apple video impressions under version 2.3, whether a banner impression is recorded separately from the audio impression it accompanies, or how a view of a video episode is distinguished from a listen to the audio version. Frisbie's promise of "the measurement advertisers expect from digital media" sets a standard without defining it.

What the release does not say

Several commercial terms that publishers and buyers would need are absent.

Apple's fee. When Apple announced HLS video podcasts on February 16, 2026, it said it would not charge hosting providers or creators for distribution, but would charge participating ad networks an impression-based fee for delivering dynamic ads in HLS video, starting later in 2026. Apple did not publish rates. Today's release does not mention the fee at all. It does not say whether the fee is now in effect, whether AdsWizz absorbs it or passes it on through its revenue split with publishers, or whether an audio ad shown with a banner inside an HLS video stream counts as a dynamic ad in HLS video for fee purposes. For a publisher, that is the difference between gross and net revenue.

The test. No publisher that took part in the early testing is named. Neither the number of shows nor the number of campaigns is given, and no results are reported.

Markets. Apple Podcasts is available in more than 170 countries and regions, according to Apple's February announcement. The release does not say in which of them AdsWizz's video monetization is available.

Prices. There are no rates, floor prices or revenue-share terms, and nothing on whether an audio ad running in a video episode is priced as audio inventory or as video inventory.

Buying routes. Frisbie speaks of "one access point" for advertisers, but the release does not say whether the inventory can be bought programmatically, through which demand-side platforms, or under which deal types.

Where AdsWizz sits among Apple's video partners

Apple named four launch hosting partners when it unveiled the format on February 16: Acast; ART19, an Amazon company; Triton's Omny Studio; and SiriusXM, including SiriusXM Media, AdsWizz and Simplecast. Beta versions of iOS 26.4, iPadOS 26.4 and visionOS 26.4 carried the feature from that day.

Acast moved first in public. On April 30, it activated Apple Podcasts HLS video in Sweden and hired video staff, starting with three launch shows. On May 13, it ran the first video ad campaigns on Apple Podcasts, with State Farm and T-Mobile, and said 117 shows had enabled its HLS integration, with more than 1,000 video episodes published. In August, according to Acast, it removed its waitlist and opened video on Apple Podcasts to every creator on its platform, reporting that shows in its beta which added video saw roughly a 25% increase in weekly sessions.

Spotify, a rival podcast platform, adopted the format for its own hosting arms. On May 14, Spotify's video distribution API went live on five hosting platforms - Libsyn, Podigee, Audioboom, Audiomeans and Podspace - and Spotify said its own Spotify for Creators and Megaphone would support Apple's HLS video technology later in the year, including monetization of video content on Apple Podcasts. Details of that monetization were not disclosed at the time.

SiriusXM's own public account of its progress came at its Built With Audio event in New York on October 6. There, SiriusXM Media described itself as one of the first partners integrated with Apple's podcast video. PPC Land's coverage of that event noted that the claim was accurate on the launch-partner record, but that the first public brand campaigns on the format were Acast's, and that SiriusXM gave no comparable count of shows or campaigns. Today's release puts a date on wider availability. It still gives no such count.

The numbers in the boilerplate

The release opens with two claims about AdsWizz's scale: that it powers "one in four ads across the global open ecosystem" and has monetized "more than 1.3 trillion impressions across streaming and podcasting over the past decade." A footnote attributes both to "SiriusXM's Built with Audio event."

The wording has shifted. At that event, according to PPC Land's October coverage, SiriusXM Media said AdsWizz powers "one in four audio ads across the global open ecosystem." SiriusXM's third-quarter results, published on October 29, used "one in four audio advertisements." Today's release drops the word "audio." Read literally, the new phrasing would claim a quarter of all advertising in that ecosystem, a far larger figure; the footnote points to the same source, which suggests the same audio claim, shortened. The release does not clarify which is meant.

Neither version defines the "global open ecosystem," says whether it excludes walled gardens such as Spotify's own ad stack, or names who measured the share. The 1.3 trillion impressions cover a decade and mix streaming radio with podcasts, so they say little about how much video podcast inventory AdsWizz currently handles.

SiriusXM's podcast growth is slowing

The timing places the announcement against a deceleration. In its third-quarter results on October 29, SiriusXM reported podcast advertising growth of 20%, down from 30% in the second quarter, 37% in the first and nearly 50% a year earlier. Total advertising revenue was $456 million, against $455 million a year before. In the Pandora and Off-platform segment, which houses AdsWizz, advertising revenue rose 1% to $419 million, with programmatic revenue up 21% and technology fees up 11%.

PPC Land estimated, using SiriusXM's own definition of revenue per thousand listener hours, that about $213 million of that segment's advertising came from AdsWizz and other off-platform sources in the quarter, roughly 51% of the total. That is a PPC Land calculation, not a SiriusXM figure. It suggests that AdsWizz and the third-party inventory SiriusXM sells now carry about half of the segment's ad revenue, while Pandora's own audience shrinks.

Video is one of the places SiriusXM is looking for the next leg of podcast growth. In July, it won exclusive ad rights to "The Bald and the Beautiful," covering both the audio and video versions of the show. In April, SiriusXM Media became the exclusive US representative for YouTube's audio-first ad inventory, selling 15- and 30-second audio ads that carry a full-screen companion visual when the screen is active. The template is the same one AdsWizz now applies on Apple: audio creative, with a visual attached, sold into environments where people may be watching. The financial payoff from YouTube is still distant. On its second-quarter call on July 30, SiriusXM placed the deal's meaningful financial contribution in the second half of 2027.

Why this matters for the marketing community

Most video podcasts carry no advertising at all. A MillionPodcasts study covered by PPC Land in August found that only 22.9% of 34,208 active English-language video podcasts showed any evidence of brand activity, even though 89.8% of shows published on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube together. Audience behaviour points the same way. In September, the Video Advertising Bureau cited eMarketer projections that podcasts would take 48% of US digital audio ad spend by 2030, up from 42% in 2026, and reported that 88% of weekly podcast consumers reach shows through video platforms.

The gap between viewing and selling is partly a creative problem. Most podcast campaigns are bought and produced as audio. A product that lets an audio campaign run unchanged in a video episode lowers the cost of entry for advertisers and gives publishers a way to fill video impressions they could not otherwise sell. That is the case AdsWizz is making.

The trade-off is what the viewer sees. A static or branded banner over an audio spot is not a video ad, and the release offers no data on attention, completion or outcomes for the format compared with either audio-only delivery or full video creative. Without that data, buyers have no basis in the release for valuing a banner-plus-audio impression in a video episode differently from an audio impression, and publishers have no basis for expecting video viewing to raise revenue per episode rather than simply preserve it.

Then there is Apple. With Acast, Triton's Omny Studio, ART19, Flightcast, Spotify's hosting arms and now AdsWizz all offering some route to video monetization on Apple Podcasts, hosting providers compete on terms none of them has fully published, and Apple's impression-based fee sits underneath all of them at an undisclosed rate. Whether that fee is in force, and who bears it, will shape how much of the video opportunity reaches creators. Today's release does not answer either question.

Timeline

Summary

Who: AdsWizz Inc., the audio advertising technology subsidiary of Sirius XM Holdings, with SiriusXM's podcast hosting platform Simplecast supplying analytics. Anne Frisbie, Group Vice President, Global Supply at AdsWizz, spoke for the company. The product is aimed at podcast publishers, creators including video-first creators, and advertisers buying podcast inventory.

What: AdsWizz expanded access to its video podcast monetization capabilities for Apple Podcasts to publishers and creators after early testing with unnamed publishers. The offer bundles advertiser demand from AdsWizz's podcast network, dynamic ad insertion and measurement, and lets existing audio campaigns run in video episodes by pairing audio ads with branded companion banners, without new video ad production. No pricing, markets, test results or terms relating to Apple's impression-based fee for ad networks were disclosed.

When: The release was published today, November 4, 2026, at 11:00 a.m. Eastern time. It follows Apple's announcement of HLS video podcasts on February 16, 2026, in which SiriusXM, AdsWizz and Simplecast were named launch partners.

Where: On Apple Podcasts, in video episodes delivered through Apple's HLS format. The release does not name the countries in which the product is available.

Why: Video viewing of podcasts has grown faster than video podcast advertising, and most podcast ad creative is still audio. AdsWizz is offering a way to sell video episodes using audio campaigns advertisers already have, at a time when SiriusXM's podcast advertising growth has slowed from nearly 50% a year earlier to 20% in the third quarter of 2026, and when rival hosts including Acast and Spotify's platforms are building their own routes to the same Apple inventory.