“In the beginning the industry used to say ‘wherever you get your podcasts’, whereas now it should be ‘however you get them’, ” said Sam Oakley, head of digital and social at Goalhanger, the publisher of The Rest is History.

The remark nearly sums up the moment. Podcasts now live across two modes at once – audio and video – reaching overlapping, but not identical, audiences under an increasingly elastic label. Goalhanger’s audience tell that story cleanly: around half of its audience both watches and listens to shows – and 77% consume episodes visually in some form across YouTube and other social platforms like Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. All of that ladders up to scale, said Oakley: roughly 70 million full-length episode views a month across audiences and video for the production outfit’s 14 regular shows. 

Put simply, shows like The Rest is History and The Rest is Football aren’t bound soley for earbuds anymore. They meet people where they are – on the train, on the couch, even in the feed. And the way these episodes get made has shifted to match that reality. 

Rather than simply filming conversations, the team builds visuals into the storytelling itself. On the sports side, The Rest is Football incorporates archival Premier League footage so when the hosts break down a sublime goal or a classic derby moment, viewers see the play unfold. The audio still works on its own, said Oakley, but the production is no longer audio-first with cameras bolted on. It’s moving closer to making television that also travels well in your headphones. 

And it goes beyond layering in visuals. Take Sherlock & Co, its audio drama. An animated pilot has already been produced, a proof of concept that could open the door to more if it resonates once released. 

“We think a lot more now about how we make things watchable,” added Oakley. “Utimaiety, it’s television. That’s what we’re aiming for, whether it’s in the form of streaming or specifically in the form of YouTube in someone’s living room where they’re watching our shows on a big screen in 4K. Not to mention the CPMs and ad dollars that follow that. 

Get that equation right and the rewards are significant. Forecasts, earnings updates and the widening gap between premium video and traditional audio advertising all point in the same direction. And that’s before social video is fully factored in. 

“Video is how advertisers access scale,” said James Chandler, chief strategy officer at IAB U.K. “Advertiser budgets are consolidating, not fragmenting. Brands are making fewer, bigger bets and video is where those bets are being placed. From an agency perspective, video is easy to justify, measure, benchmark and compare. It fits neatly into existing planning frameworks. Audio-only, by contrast, still sits slightly off to the side. It often lives with specialist audio teams rather than central planning, which puts a natural ceiling on how much money flows into it.”

For Goalhanger, that’s less a threat than an entry point, particularly on YouTube where the bulk of its video audience gathers. Viewers typically come in one of three ways: popular moments on Shorts, topic-led breakout videos and full-length episodes on the main channel. Over the course of 2025, that trifecta compounded into serious scale. 

Of the 1.8 billion total views and streams Goalhanger’s shows racked up during the year, about 1.2 billion came via social platforms – the clips, cut downs and feed-native moments doing the heavy lifting. The playbook is still evolving but the aim is clear: short-form video on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok act as shop windows for the long-form shows. 

“Without using the audiences of the hosts professor Hannah Fry and science creator Michael Stevens, we’re getting five million, even 8.7 million views on posts [on Instagram] about The Rest is Science, which sometimes even outperform those from the hosts,” said Oakley.

Proving the path from clip to episode, however, remains difficult. Tracking someone who sees a video on Instagram, Facebook or TikTok and later turns up on Spotify, Apple or YouTube runs into the familiar limits of platform data. Even inside walled gardens the picture is partial. YouTube, for instance, only records the journey if someone watches a Short and immediately clicks through to the longer episode, said Oakley. It misses the more typical pattern – watching a clip, then coming back hours, or days later. It “can’t quite connect those dots, Oakley said.

Still, the broader pattern holds.

“If you zoom out and look at our growth over time from Spotify, Apple and YouTube together alongside our short-form consumption, there’s a correlation,” said Oakely. “They work quite closely in tandem.”

Until they don’t. Oakley and his team are acutely aware that much of the momentum on social media rides on algorithms that can shift without warning, especially as AI-generated video floods feeds and further scrambles the attention economy. 

He added: ”Short-form clips of engaging people talking about a topic in an interesting way hasn’t been compromised yet, but I wonder how the platforms are going to filter their recommendation algorithms to ensure that people still get this thoughtful, intellectual content as well as the engagement-based videos.”

Whatever the algorithm’s weather, Goalhanger’s compass points to TV. That’s where the bigger economies sit – ads, subscriptions and licensing. In fact, the company has already started testing those waters, including a deal to broadcast The Rest is Football during the 2026 Fifa World Cup. More deals could follow, said Oakley, though there’s no fresh slate of deals being discussed. Internally, there’s also been talk of launching a free, ad supporter TV channel. Nothing is imminent but it remains part of the border conversation. 

As Oakley explained: “It’s something that we’ve thought about. But where we’ve grown so quickly recently we decided to remain focused on Spotify, Apple and YouTube. In the future, though, entering the FAST space could be something we consider.”

Piece by piece, Goalhanger sounds less like a podcast shop and more like a modern broadcaster that happens to speak fluent audio. Even the hiring reflects that. The recent addition of an editorial director for written content, particularly newsletters, signals a company building out across formats, not just platforms. 

The move comes following a major rebrand led by Oakley, creative director Allistair Dixon and CMO Stephan Mai.