To publish a video podcast on Spotify, you must either host your show directly on Spotify for Creators or upload a video file to replace the audio-only version of an episode distributed via your external RSS feed. Once your full video episode is live on the platform, you can manually upload vertical teasers to your profile using Spotify's native Clips feature. However, maximizing your show's reach requires distinguishing between native Spotify features meant to engage existing listeners and external social media clips meant to drive new traffic to your podcast.
Uploading Full Video Episodes to Spotify
Spotify allows creators to publish full-length video episodes regardless of where their RSS feed is hosted. If you use Spotify for Creators (formerly Anchor) as your primary host, you simply upload your .mp4 or .mov file during the episode creation process instead of an audio file.
If you host your podcast on a third-party platform like Buzzsprout, Libsyn, or Captivate, the process requires an extra step. Because most standard RSS feeds do not support large video file pass-through to Spotify, you must manually attach the video to the episode inside the Spotify ecosystem. According to the official documentation on video episodes for podcasts not hosted with Spotify, you can log into your Spotify for Creators dashboard, locate the specific episode synced from your RSS feed, and upload a video file directly to it.
Once processed, this video file replaces the audio-only version for users listening on the Spotify app. Listeners on Apple Podcasts or other directories will continue to receive the standard audio file from your primary host. Ensure your video file matches the exact length of your audio file to prevent chapter markers or dynamic ad insertions from misaligning.
Adding Spotify Clips to Your Show Profile
Beyond full episodes, Spotify provides native tools to highlight short segments of your podcast. The most prominent feature is Clips, which are short, vertical videos designed to introduce your show to new listeners browsing the app.
Unlike social media reels, Spotify Clips have strict limitations. They must be under 30 seconds long, formatted vertically (9:16 aspect ratio), and uploaded directly through the Spotify for Creators dashboard. These clips live on your main show page and can be pinned to the top of your profile. They are not automatically generated from your full episode; you must edit and format these 30-second videos yourself before uploading them.
Additionally, you can utilize Episode Previews. While Clips are standalone videos attached to your show profile, Previews allow you to select a specific, highly engaging segment of your existing episode to play automatically when users scroll through their podcast feeds. This acts as an interactive trailer, giving potential listeners a taste of the interview before they commit to the full runtime.
Distributing Podcast Highlights Beyond Spotify
While native Spotify Clips and Previews are useful for converting users already browsing the Spotify app, they do not help you reach audiences on other platforms. To actively grow your podcast, you need to distribute longer, highly edited vertical videos across TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels.
Social media algorithms favor clips between 30 and 90 seconds that feature strong hooks, dynamic visual pacing, and clear on-screen captions. Instead of limiting yourself to the 30-second cap required by Spotify's native feature, you should develop a workflow to extract multiple standalone stories from a single recording. For a detailed breakdown of this process, you can read How to Cut a 1-Hour Interview Into 15 Viral Clips (Workflow).
The goal of external distribution is to create a funnel. A viral clip on TikTok introduces a new viewer to your guest or topic. The clip's caption or comments direct that viewer to the full video episode on Spotify or YouTube.
Formatting Multi-Speaker Interviews for Vertical Video
One of the biggest challenges in repurposing a traditional video podcast for vertical platforms—and for native Spotify Clips—is aspect ratio conversion. Most podcasts are recorded in a standard 16:9 landscape format. When you simply crop the center of a landscape video to fit a 9:16 vertical screen, you often lose the guest's gestures or cut out the host entirely.
For interviews featuring two or more people, you must stack the speakers vertically. This ensures that both the person asking the question and the person answering are visible simultaneously, which helps retain viewer attention. Manually keyframing and cropping these layouts in traditional editing software is time-consuming, but modern workflows can automate this step. If you regularly record multi-camera or wide-angle interviews, learning How to Use AI Split Screen for Multi-Speaker Podcasts will significantly reduce the time it takes to prepare your files for upload.
Automating Clip Creation with AI
Consistently uploading full video episodes to Spotify and manually extracting highlights for social media requires a streamlined workflow. If you are handling the editing process yourself, leveraging an AI podcast clip maker can eliminate the hours spent scrubbing through long timelines to find usable segments.
Viral Day is an AI clipping platform designed to automate this exact workflow. You can upload source videos up to 10 hours long, and the platform's AI assists in clip selection by analyzing the footage across 18 viral-potential signals. The software includes Prisma multimodal AI, which automatically reframes wide 16:9 video into 9:16 vertical formats, keeping active speakers centered and generating automatic captions.
Once the clips are generated, you can use the built-in professional video editor to apply your brand kit, adjust layouts, and perform bulk edits before exporting in 1080p or optional 4K local exports. You can then take these finalized files and upload the sub-30-second versions as Spotify Clips, while distributing the longer highlights to your social media channels. Viral Day's entry plan starts at $9.99/month and includes 30 hours of video processing.
