Smart TV Killed the Smart Speaker Star

This week Tom Webster goes to the bottom of the device table in the brand-new The Podcast Landscape 2026 data and finds a story that has been quietly eroding for years. The smart speaker, once pitched as podcasting's cleanest shot at owning a default, has flatlined at one percent. The device actually climbing is the biggest screen in the house. Smart TV as the most-used way to listen jumped from 8 percent in 2024 to 12 percent in 2026, and folded together with second-most-used it now reaches 25 percent of podcast consumers, while the phone slipped.

Ahead of his keynote at Podcast Movement in New York, Tom gets into what that shift really means:

• why podcast listening in the home is consolidating onto the television rather than spreading across every device in it
• what a screen changes for advertisers when a show can be seen by a whole room instead of heard through one pair of earbuds
• why the car makes the same point from the other direction, and the one context the industry has spent the least time thinking about
• what the move from background to foreground says about what the audience has decided a podcast actually is

A preview of the questions Tom will take to the stage on the 17th.

Read the full issue here.