This is such a cool initiative.
We started with a scenario: imagine you’re walking home from work, listening to your favorite podcast. At one point, you get curious about who’s speaking and what the guests look like. You pull out your phone and click “switch to video version” in your podcast player.
For HLS video to become mainstream in open podcasting, we need podcast apps to adopt the standard.
In particular, having Apple Podcasts adopt HLS video would legitimize the standard and likely trigger widespread adoption across the entire podcast ecosystem.