Nearly Half of UK Podcast Consumers Now Watch on Smart TVs, New Research from Signal Hill Insights and FlightStory Reveals

The living room has become the new frontier for podcasting. That is the central finding of “Podcasts in the Living Room,” a new Pulse Report published today by Signal Hill Insights and global media company FlightStory - home to some of the world’s biggest podcasts, including Steven Bartlett’s The Diary of a CEO, Paul C. Brunson’s We Need to Talk, and Davina McCall’s Begin Again - surveying 1,003 monthly podcast consumers aged 18+ in the UK.

The research delivers a comprehensive picture of how UK audiences are consuming video podcasts, and the results challenge fundamental assumptions about where and how people listen.

Video Podcasts Are Now the Default in the UK

The UK is a global leader in video podcasts, with 84% of monthly consumers watching them, surpassing the US (62%) and Canada (75%) (sources below). 

The Smart TV: Podcasting’s Biggest Untapped Screen

The report highlights the Smart TV’s rise as a podcast platform. With 74% of UK households owning a Smart TV, 45% of monthly UK podcast consumers now use it to watch podcasts, making it the second most popular device after smartphones (80%). Smart TVs even surpass both tablets and computers (44% each). 

FlightStory’s own YouTube viewership data, published alongside the survey findings, validates this at scale:

• The Diary of a CEO accumulated over 1.6 million hours of watch time on Smart TVs alone (29.1% of total viewing), from a total of 5.5 million hours across all devices

• We Need to Talk generated 87,337 TV hours out of 270,567 total hours (32.3% on Smart TV)

• Across all Flight Story content, Smart TV is the #2 consumption device, matching the national survey findings 

Prime Time, Premium Experience

Video podcasting is a prime-time habit (54% of monthly viewers watch 19:00-23:00), competing directly with linear TV and streaming. 44% of viewers watch with someone else, meaning headline audience figures may significantly undercount actual reach.

What drives that engagement? Authenticity: 39% of video podcast consumers rank seeing hosts and guests interact as the single most valuable on-screen element, above set design, graphics, or production values.

Paul Riismandel, President of Signal Hill Insights, comments, “The data tells a clear story: podcasts have entered the living room and they are here to stay. This is no longer an emerging trend, it is a fundamental shift in how UK audiences are spending their evenings.”

Lily Taurau, Group Business Director at Flight Story, shares, “For years, the planning assumption for podcasts was simple: one listener, one pair of headphones, one commute. Our newly revealed data, in partnership with Signal Hill Insights, confirms that picture no longer holds. UK audiences are watching video podcasts on their Smart TVs at 7pm with their families, competing directly with linear TV in prime time, and that has real implications for how brands should be showing up. The brands and agencies that move first will be the ones best positioned to claim genuinely new white space."

To read the complete Podcasts in the Living Room report, please visit here.

About the Research

“Podcasts in the Living Room” is based on a nationally representative online survey of 1,003 monthly podcast consumers aged 18+ in the United Kingdom, conducted between 3 and 9 March 2026. The Pulse Report was commissioned jointly by Signal Hill Insights and Flight Story. Supplementary consumption data is drawn from Flight Story’s YouTube channel analytics for the same period.

Sources: The Canadian Podcast Listener 2025; The Podcast Landscape (U.S.) 2025