Sponsored by Magellan AI. Happy holidays from the team at Magellan AI In Germany, Hypecast - which makes software for corporate podcasts - looked back at its year, noting in an email that the company started 2025 saying "we will have to be laser-focused to not get distracted from all the things happening around us" - advice perhaps we could all gain from for next year. The company opened a podcast studio in Berlin in 2025, will expand to video next year, and gave us the present nobody else did: a decent picture for the top of today's newsletter! Fröhliche Weihnachten! Amplifi Media's Steven Goldstein suggests that 2026 is a new era in podcasting - the year of liquid content, "defined by how audiences behave—not by how the industry wishes they would". USA Today covers "how to find your next favorite podcast". "Look at the charts," try the recommendations", and "ask AI" are in their list; the example app used is Spotify. > > > Read more of today’s podcast industry news stories on the Podnews website: and get our free daily newsletter.Classifieds - your job or ad hereYour setup's better. Your data should be too. — You invested in quality gear. Add quality analytics that show real listener engagement across Apple & Spotify. Second-by-second. Free for podcasts under 1k listeners/mo.Gold supporters: Buzzsprout, Mowpod, Mamamia, PodMatch, Sounds Profitable, The $100 MBA, The Podglomerate, Cloud10, Podscribe, Companion Arts, Steve Lack: Audio, PAVE Studios, audioBoom, SALT, Audiohook,