Martha Stewart and iHeartPodcasts said on August 25, 2026 that full video episodes of "The Martha Stewart Podcast" would begin appearing on Netflix from Wednesday, August 26, with the cooking series "Martha Cooks" arriving a day earlier, both landing under the exclusive video podcast partnership the two companies have been building out since late 2025.

The announcement, issued from New York via iHeartMedia and carried on the podcast trade site Podnews, adds a recognisable consumer-brand name to a distribution arrangement that has grown quietly across three quarters. It also repeats a pattern that has now held across every video podcast deal iHeartMedia has struck this year: the content terms are specified in detail, and the commercial terms are not specified at all.

Two titles, two dates, one partnership

The mechanics are simple enough. "The Martha Stewart Podcast" moves to Netflix as full video episodes beginning Wednesday, August 26. According to iHeartMedia, the series continues in parallel as an audio podcast distributed by iHeartPodcasts and available through the iHeartRadio app and other podcast applications. Nothing is being withdrawn from the open feed.

"Martha Cooks," described in the announcement as an Emmy-nominated cooking series, launched on Netflix a day earlier, on Tuesday, August 25. That is the same date as the announcement itself, which means the cooking title reached the platform on the day it was disclosed while the podcast followed twenty-four hours later. The release does not explain the staggered timing, nor does it state whether "Martha Cooks" sits inside the same iHeartMedia and Netflix agreement or arrives through a separate arrangement. The document treats the two launches as a single news event without confirming they share a contractual route.

The launch episode of the podcast features Alexis Ohanian, the entrepreneur, investor and Reddit co-founder. According to the announcement, Stewart and Ohanian cover love, ambition, family, pets, investing and life with his wife, Serena Williams. Later episodes are set to feature the author Harlan Coben and the producer and artist benny blanco.

Production credits were disclosed. Christian Martin, Amy Chiaro and Martha Stewart are executive producers of "The Martha Stewart Podcast," and Heather Kirkland is the producer.

Stewart framed the move as a format change rather than a distribution change. "I'm delighted to bring my podcast to Netflix, and with that, introduce the medium of video to the series," she said in the announcement. "Netflix is the perfect partner to share and amplify the thoughtful and informative conversations the show is known for with an even greater audience."

Will Pearson, President of iHeartPodcasts, addressed the reach argument. "Martha is one of the most iconic and influential voices in media, with an extraordinary ability to connect with audiences," Pearson said. "We're thrilled to expand 'The Martha Stewart Podcast' to Netflix, giving even more people the opportunity to experience Martha's signature curiosity, expertise and one-of-a-kind perspective through the candid conversations and insights that have made the podcast so compelling."

What "exclusive" covers, and what it does not

The announcement describes the arrangement as an exclusive video podcast partnership between iHeartMedia and Netflix. Two sentences later it states that all podcasts included in the partnership, "The Martha Stewart Podcast" among them, will continue to be available on iHeartRadio and everywhere podcasts are heard.

Those statements are compatible, but only under a narrow reading. Exclusivity applies to the video rendering of the episodes, not to the underlying show. The audio version travels through the open feed as it always has. That distinction matters commercially, because it means iHeartMedia has not traded away its download base to secure the streaming placement. It has created a second, separately governed copy of the same programme.

The scope of the transfer is broader than new output alone. According to iHeartMedia, the agreement covers all new episodes from participating podcasts along with select library episodes from each series. Back catalogue moving into a subscription streaming environment raises a monetisation question the announcement does not touch. In the open podcast market, older episodes remain commercially live because advertisements can be swapped into them at the moment of download. Inside a streaming application, that mechanism does not exist in the same form.

A slate assembled across three quarters

The Stewart titles do not arrive in isolation. Netflix and iHeartMedia have been extending video podcast distribution incrementally, and the shape of the slate has emerged mostly through earnings disclosure rather than through announcements.

Netflix first disclosed new podcast programming with iHeartMedia in its second quarter 2026 shareholder letter, published in July. On that earnings call, co-chief executive Ted Sarandos told analysts that podcast viewing looked incremental and clustered in daytime hours, a daypart the service has not historically occupied.

iHeartMedia set out its own version three weeks later. Reporting second quarter revenue of $977.2 million on August 10, 2026, the company described itself as the most successful video podcaster on Netflix and named the shows it was extending there: titles from Kate Hudson and Oliver Hudson, from Lele Pons, and from Martha Stewart. The Breakfast Club with Charlamagne, it added, had become a live daily programme on the platform. The August 25 announcement therefore executes something already flagged to investors fifteen days earlier.

The same earnings materials disclosed a parallel deal taking six iHeartMedia titles to Disney+ and Hulu from August 14, 2026, including video episodes of Hey Jonas! and Pod Meets World. iHeartMedia now supplies video podcast content to two of the largest subscription streaming services in the United States.

Netflix's podcast supply is not sourced from one partner. Netflix and Spotify announced a distribution partnership on October 14, 2025 covering 17 podcast properties from Spotify Studios and The Ringer, with video versions appearing on both platforms simultaneously rather than exclusively on either. Neither party disclosed financial terms then either.

Competing services have taken different routes. SiriusXM has favoured exclusivity, securing the MrBallen podcast in a multi-year agreement announced on October 27, 2025 that included advertising sales rights, and later placing video podcasts including Conan O'Brien and Trevor Noah titles inside Tubi. iHeartMedia has favoured breadth, adding platforms without removing the audio feed from any of them, and separately building a creator supply line through a TikTok podcast network of up to 25 shows announced in November 2025.

The economics remain undisclosed

Nothing in the August 25 announcement addresses advertising. It does not state whether "The Martha Stewart Podcast" carries advertising on Netflix's ad-supported tier, who sells that inventory, whether it is available programmatically, or how it is priced.

That silence is consistent. On the August 10 earnings call, chairman and chief executive Bob Pittman offered the only public characterisation of the economics on record, saying that "video comes with a really nice CPM, premium pricing," and noting that production costs stay low relative to full television. He put the audience overlap at "probably less than 5% of the people are video podcast consumers only," describing video as additive to the audio base rather than a substitute for it. No CPM figures, no revenue contribution and no indication of which party sells the streaming inventory appeared in any of the earnings materials.

The gap matters because the advertising formats do not transfer cleanly between environments. A host read delivered inside a video episode is an asset the publisher controls; a fifteen or thirty second spot in a streaming break is an asset the platform controls. Podcasts simulcast on YouTube carried 46% host-read advertisements in the third quarter of 2025 against 35% for audio-only shows, so the format skews toward video rather than away from it. Whether that composition survives inside a subscription service that sells its own inventory through its own stack is unresolved.

Library episodes complicate the question further. An advertisement recorded permanently into an episode, the format the industry calls baked-in, travels with the file wherever it goes. If back catalogue episodes carrying old sponsor reads move onto Netflix, those sponsors receive impressions nobody sold them, in an environment nobody measured for them. If the episodes are re-cut to strip the reads, the publisher absorbs the production cost.

Measurement is the unresolved variable

A video podcast delivered inside a streaming application does not generate a download in the sense podcast rankers count one. That single technical fact sits underneath every deal of this type.

IAB Tech Lab moved on the problem on July 21, 2026, opening version 2.3 of its Podcast Technical Measurement Guidelines for public comment through August 19, 2026. The 32-page draft extends the framework governing download and ad delivery counting to video podcast episodes distributed through open RSS feeds, states explicitly that the rules apply to both audio and video, and replaces the term listener with podcast consumer. Episodes delivered as MP4 files or through segmented streaming formats fall under the same filtering requirements and metric definitions.

That resolves the open-feed case. It does not resolve the case at hand. Episodes streamed inside Netflix do not travel through an open RSS feed and are not delivered by a podcast host's server, which leaves them outside the framework version 2.3 defines. Whether these episodes register in podcast measurement at all, or are reported purely as streaming video views, has not been settled by any standards body or disclosed by either company.

Scale gives the question weight. The June 2026 Podtrac ranker credited iHeartMedia with 150.3 million United States streams and downloads and 29.5 million unique monthly listeners across 945 active shows, first in total downloads for 72 consecutive months. iHeartPodcasts is described in the announcement as the No. 1 podcast publisher globally according to Podtrac. Podcast revenue at the company reached $162.1 million in the second quarter of 2026, up 20.7%. Every episode that migrates to a streaming environment moves audience out of a counted pool into an uncounted one.

The budget question underneath

United States podcast advertising revenue reached $2.9 billion in 2025, a rise of 17.6%, according to the IAB and PwC annual report published on April 16, 2026. That total sits inside a digital market of $294.6 billion, with digital video alone at $78 billion after 25.4% growth. When a podcast moves into a streaming video environment, the question of which budget line pays for it stops being academic.

Netflix's own advertising position sets the other side of the equation. The company put ad-plan reach at 250 million global monthly active viewers at its May 13, 2026 upfront and is tracking toward roughly $3 billion in 2026 advertising revenue, with programmatic buying approaching half of its non-live inventory. A podcast episode inside that environment is competing for the same mid-roll seconds as scripted and live content, priced against television comparables rather than audio ones.

Supply-side data suggests the video podcast inventory pool is larger than the demand for it. Research covering 34,208 video podcasts found 77% carrying no advertising at all. Magellan AI's first quarterly measurement benchmark reported that podcasts distributed with video achieved a 2.49% response rate against 1.39% for RSS-only audio shows. Format performance has been quantified; which specific video shows to buy has not.

Advertiser confidence lags the money in any case. A survey published in July 2026 found podcast adoption among marketing organisations at 44.9%, with 30.1% reporting no plans for the channel.

Why this matters for media buyers

For buyers, the practical content of this announcement is not the celebrity name. It is the accumulation.

Two more titles from a publisher already claiming the largest podcast download base in the United States have moved into a subscription streaming service that sells advertising, without any public statement of who sells the resulting inventory, at what price, through which pipes, or against what measurement. That is now the third such arrangement iHeartMedia has completed in 2026 on the same terms of disclosure, following the Netflix slate flagged in July and the Disney+ and Hulu deal that began on August 14.

Planning consequences follow from the pattern rather than from any single deal. A show that a buyer reached through a podcast line item is increasingly also reachable through a connected television line item, at a different price, sold by a different party, counted by a different system. Where duplication sits between those two buys is not currently visible to anyone outside the two companies. Pittman's sub-5% overlap figure is the only quantification on record, and it came from a company with an interest in the answer.

The reciprocal risk is plain enough. Podcast inventory has historically been priced on scarcity and host relationship. Streaming inventory is priced on impressions and clears programmatically. As more podcast episodes enter the second environment, the pricing logic of the first faces pressure from a market where four demand-side platforms already set most of the terms.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Martha Stewart and iHeartPodcasts, the podcast division of iHeartMedia, Inc. (Nasdaq: IHRT), placing content with Netflix. Will Pearson is President of iHeartPodcasts. Christian Martin, Amy Chiaro and Martha Stewart are executive producers of "The Martha Stewart Podcast," with Heather Kirkland as producer. The launch episode features Alexis Ohanian.

What: Full video episodes of "The Martha Stewart Podcast" arrive on Netflix under the existing iHeartMedia and Netflix exclusive video podcast partnership, covering all new episodes plus select library episodes. The Emmy-nominated cooking series "Martha Cooks" also launches on the platform. The audio podcast continues through iHeartPodcasts, the iHeartRadio app and other podcast applications. No advertising, pricing, sales-representation or measurement terms were disclosed.

When: The announcement was issued on August 25, 2026. "Martha Cooks" became available the same day, Tuesday, August 25. "The Martha Stewart Podcast" began streaming on Wednesday, August 26.

Where: New York, United States. The announcement was distributed via iHeartMedia and carried by the podcast trade publication Podnews. Geographic availability on Netflix was not specified.

Why: iHeartMedia is extending video podcast distribution across subscription streaming services while retaining open-feed audio distribution, adding reach without surrendering its download base. For advertisers and agencies, the accumulation of these deals creates inventory that spans two separately priced, separately sold and separately measured markets, with duplication between them currently invisible outside the contracting parties.