The 'HBO of podcasting' finally emerges

For the past few years, podcasting (at least backstage) has been in a bit of a rut. The audience keeps growing, people are listening longer, and many creators are making great work. But the business side has felt stalled. The industry remains tethered to an ad-heavy model that frustrates buyers, sellers, and creators in equal measure.

This coming year, something is going to crack. 2026 is the year the long-promised “HBO of podcasting” finally begins to take shape.

For more than a decade, “the HBO of podcasting” has been the podcast industry’s favorite mirage: part inspiration, part aspiration, part marketing shorthand, part journalistic crutch. Alex Blumberg actually said it out loud in Gimlet’s early days, a perfectly earnest founder’s spell meant to conjure prestige and budget. I used a version of it myself around the same time while building Audible Originals, mostly as a way to signal ambition in a language press and investors already understood. After that, the phrase took on a life of its own: Wondery’s Hernan Lopez embraced it, Dax Shepard later repeated it, and Luminary practically built its launch pitch around the promise. But for every founder who invoked HBO directly, there were a dozen writers who applied the label from the outside (sometimes admiringly, sometimes skeptically) whenever a company tried to build something with polish, purpose, and often a subscription price or different business model. In the end, the phrase became less a prophecy and more a cultural reflex, the thing everyone kept reaching for whenever podcasting tried to describe its grown-up self.

But for all that puffery, none of the efforts I mentioned actually pulled it off. There were fits and starts — and a few had a good year or two. But no one nailed it in a sustained (and sustainable) way.

HBO itself didn’t know what it was building until it was in the middle of building it. Read Felix Gillette and John Koblin’s terrific book It’s Not TV and the accidental nature of HBO’s “prestige” legacy becomes clear. Before it became the cathedral of “peak TV,” HBO spent decades trying everything: movies, boxing, family programming, stand-up specials, erotic late-night documentaries, Def Comedy Jam, G-String Divas, and whatever else the 1980s and 1990s produced. They weren’t chasing a brand. They were chasing survival. They believed a lucrative niche existed somewhere (and were determined enough to keep experimenting until they found it).

Many outside the podcast world remain baffled by podcasting’s growing pains. How can something growing this much, this beloved, this stable still not have a business model that produces predictable profit? Meanwhile, people in other media sectors would gladly trade for podcasting’s problems.

2026 is the year podcasting finally gets tired of its own problems. Like HBO four decades ago— battered, frustrated, but still oddly optimistic — some company, network, or distributor will decide that riding the slow, cautious conveyor belt toward mediocrity is no longer acceptable. Someone will try something genuinely different. Not another celebrity-first land grab, not a half-hearted paywall, not a warehouse of content licenses. Something with clear intention. Something with a point of view.

For the past few years, I have told producers, hosts, executives (basically anyone willing to listen) that this period of frustration has a purpose. It is teaching podcasting how it does not want to live. Some will keep trudging along, but someone with influence and resources will break formation this year and take a real shot at building something distinct and valuable.

And here is the harder truth: success will not come from nostalgia for what HBO once was or from repeating the same old metaphors. It will come from someone refusing to settle for the version of podcasting we have now and insisting on the version we have not tried yet.

The “HBO of podcasting” will not arrive because someone declares it. It will arrive because someone finally decides to build it.