Spotify is bringing a Ringer video podcast to Twitch. Heres why.

Spotify has spent years trying to turn its app into a place where people watch podcasts. But its latest move sends one of its own video shows somewhere else.

The Ringer, a sports and podcasting website owned by Spotify, has started live-streaming Ringer Wise Guys, the newly renamed version of The Ringer Gambling Show, on Twitch. The sports betting show aired its first episode on Amazon-owned Twitch on Monday, Aug. 10, according to The Ankler, which first reported the move.

The show features "Cousin Sal" Iacono, Joe House, Raheem Palmer, Anthony Dabbundo, and Tate Frazier. Ringer founder Bill Simmons confirmed on X that every episode will stream live on Twitch while remaining available on podcast platforms.

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The move also revives a Ringer Twitch account that had been dormant for roughly eight years. The company briefly used the channel for staff gaming streams in 2018, before Spotify acquired The Ringer in 2020.

Importantly, Ringer Wise Guys is not abandoning YouTube. The Ringer's own show page says viewers can catch new episodes on Twitch, YouTube, and podcast feeds on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. The Twitch streams give the show another live distribution point rather than replacing Google's video giant.

Why bring a podcast to Twitch?

Twitch is not exactly overflowing with podcasts — its Talk Shows & Podcasts category currently accounts for less than 1 percent of the platform's live audience.

Still, Twitch offers a young audience and a viewing experience built around live participation. Nearly 70 percent of its viewers are between 18 and 34, making it a potentially useful match for a show centered on sports and gambling.

The format fits, too. A sports betting show can react to breaking news, debate picks, and take cues from viewers in the chat. Its four-day-a-week schedule gives The Ringer repeated opportunities to make the podcast feel like a live appointment instead of another full-length video dropped into a feed.

Noah Malale, Spotify's director of originals partnerships and new initiatives, told The Ankler that Spotify has always wanted to "meet fans where they are," adding that Simmons and The Ringer have long sought to stay at the forefront of new media.

The Ringer is not the first company to see Twitch as a home for talk programming. Twitch launched a Sports Accelerator Program in 2021 specifically for sports podcasts, talk shows, reaction streams, watch-alongs, and similar formats. Some ESPN radio affiliates also stream on the platform, actor Keke Palmer launched the live talk show Keke Live earlier this year, and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani made Twitch the interactive center of his recurring Talk With the People series. Mamdani's show is simulcast across several platforms, but audience questions come through Twitch chat.

These examples show what Twitch can offer podcasters: a place to record episodes live, interact with viewers in real time, and build a community of new fans before distributing the finished show across YouTube, Spotify, and traditional podcast feeds.

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Twitch has been building beyond gaming

Twitch is still best known for gaming, but its recent product changes are designed to make a wider range of live content easier to find, watch, share, and monetize.

As Mashable previously reported last year, Twitch began developing vertical and dual-format streams to improve viewing on phones. The feature rolled out more broadly in June, allowing creators to broadcast horizontal and vertical versions simultaneously. Twitch says 70 percent of new viewers now arrive on mobile, and the system also produces both formats for clips and video-on-demand uploads.

The company's redesigned mobile app opens to a personalized feed of live streams and includes a separate feed for clips. Twitch has also introduced collaborative tools such as Stream Together and Shared Chat, which allow creators to combine broadcasts and their communities. Those features could be useful for multi-host podcasts, guest interviews, and live crossover episodes.

Twitch has been broadening its business tools at the same time. It has expanded access to subscriptions and Bits, worked on matching creators with sponsors, improved its clipping tools, and tested new ad formats, including ads that appear when a viewer pauses a stream. That gives a podcast several ways to earn beyond the ads inserted into its traditional audio feed.

The strategy is not limited to Twitch. Its parent company, Amazon, restructured Wondery last year to place greater emphasis on creator-led, video-integrated podcasts such as New Heights and Armchair Expert. Amazon moved Wondery's narrative shows to Audible and put its creator-focused operation into a new services group designed to help shows earn across multiple channels, Reuters reported.

That makes Twitch both a partner and a competitor for Spotify. It offers Spotify access to a live audience while sitting inside another tech giant's expanding podcast operation.

Spotify's podcast strategy has changed

Spotify arrived at this moment after its own podcast reset. Beginning in 2019, it spent heavily to acquire podcast companies including Gimlet Media, Anchor, and Parcast, followed by The Ringer in 2020. It also paid for major exclusives, with The Joe Rogan Experience being a prime example.

The company later began moving away from that expensive, tightly controlled approach. In 2023, Spotify eliminated roughly 200 podcast jobs and folded Gimlet and Parcast into Spotify Studios. In its announcement about the reorganization, Spotify said it would concentrate on creator partnerships, loyal audiences, "always-on" programming, advertising, and a higher-margin podcast business.

A year later, Spotify renewed its deal with Joe Rogan but ended the show's exclusivity, allowing full episodes to return to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and other services. That was an early sign that Spotify could make money from a show without keeping every listener inside Spotify.

The Ringer has become central to the next version of that strategy. In Oct. 2025, Spotify launched its first free, ad-supported streaming television channel with Samsung TV Plus, offering Ringer video podcasts around the clock. That same month, Spotify and Netflix announced a distribution deal for shows including The Bill Simmons Podcast, The Rewatchables, and several of The Ringer's sports podcasts.

The Netflix arrangement limits full YouTube distribution for some participating shows, while Ringer Wise Guys is still publishing on YouTube. In other words, Spotify is not following one rule for every podcast. It is testing different combinations of reach, exclusivity, licensing, advertising, and platform fit.

At the same time, Spotify continues to invest in making its own app a video destination. The company lowered the requirements for video podcasters to join its Partner Program, built tools that let creators replace and measure sponsorships, and introduced a Distribution API that lets publishers post and monetize video on Spotify without changing hosting providers. In May, Spotify said more than 500 million users had streamed a video podcast, an increase of nearly 50 percent year over year.

Spotify has been adding video tools on the music side as well, including direct uploads, editorial pitching, and charts for music videos, part of a broader effort Mashable recently examined. The app may have started with audio, but Spotify is now competing for more of the time people spend looking at a screen.

There are more players in this game

Watching a podcast has become nearly as common as listening to one. Edison Research found that 82 percent of weekly podcast consumers watched video podcasts in the third quarter of 2025, compared with 78 percent who listened to audio-only shows.

YouTube remains the enormous obstacle facing everyone else. The platform says podcast content attracts more than 1 billion monthly active viewers. Netflix has built out a growing podcast slate, while Disney+ and Hulu recently struck their own video podcast deal with iHeartMedia. Spotify, meanwhile, has tried to improve video inside its app and distribute its shows onto some of those same services.

Twitch is nowhere near YouTube's scale in podcasting, and one Ringer show hardly constitutes a sweeping Spotify rollout. Still, the experiment crystallizes several trends reshaping the industry: video replacing audio as the default format for many major shows, tech companies favoring creator-led programming over expensive narrative productions, and podcasts migrating to whatever platform offers the right audience or format.

For Ringer Wise Guys, that now means Spotify, YouTube, podcast apps, and Twitch. The podcast wars have officially escaped the podcast app.