The entry price on Fox’s answer to Substack is $0.59 per subscriber per month. That is the base rate on Supercast, the subscription platform Red Seat Ventures bought earlier this year, and it now covers newsletters as well as subscriptions and livestreaming. This week Supercast added tools for creators to build free and paid email newsletters and track their performance on a dashboard, with custom pricing available for big networks and media companies.
Red Seat, a Fox company led by Chris Balfe, built its business on a different base than Substack’s: running sales and production services for podcasters whose names carry audiences with them, including Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly and Nancy Grace. The newsletter move, reported by Lucia Moses at Business Insider, is a bet that the boundary between podcasters and writers no longer matters, and that the platform a creator picks is decided by which side of it they started on.
“We want to be a one-stop shop for creators,” Balfe told Business Insider. Substack, he said, “has done a really good job going after written-first creators, and then adding podcasting capability on top of that.” Red Seat is running the play in reverse: “for most of the creators that we work with, their audio and video is their main business. So, let’s add other features like email and livestreaming.”
What the bundle is buying
The demonstration case is comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, host of the live show Kill Tony. Since launching his Kill Tony+ subscription with Red Seat, Hinchcliffe has signed up thousands of people who pay for his uncensored, ad-free show and bonus content, Balfe said. The next planned tier sits at a different price point entirely, built on the willingness of fans to be insulted on camera: “It would be like $10,000 or something like that to roast you,” Balfe said. “We will sell out of these so bad.”
A second early proof came from the audio end of the market: a Supercast livestreaming pilot with This American Life drew more than 1,700 paying audience members.
The deal machine
Red Seat has around 30 shows today and wants roughly 200. “We really want to accelerate our rate of dealmaking,” Balfe said. “I think if we did 10 big deals in the next 12 months, that would be big.” The hunt is focused on sports, lifestyle, entertainment and tech, and the top creator deals generally pay the talent a minimum guarantee against projected sales, meaning Red Seat carries the risk if the projection is wrong.
Balfe pushes back on industry figures like iHeartMedia CEO Bob Pittman, who say podcast distribution deals have become too expensive. His counter-argument is two-part: advertiser demand is strong, and the host’s upside no longer rides on the show alone. On the deals he is doing, the show itself accounts for as little as 60% of revenue, with the rest coming from other projects. He is also pitching YouTubers on what podcast contracts offer that short ad campaigns do not: “We’re trying to do annual deals,” he said. “YouTubers are attracted to that sort of consistency that the podcast business model has allowed.”
The video numbers
The pipeline Balfe is selling presumes the podcast audience keeps becoming a video audience, and the current numbers lean his way. Forty-four percent of US podcast consumers watched a video podcast in the past week, up from 40% in 2025, according to a consumer survey from the trade group Sounds Profitable released this month. Measured differently — on past-12-months use rather than past-week viewing — YouTube is the top podcast platform at 63%, ahead of Spotify at 33%, Netflix at 21% and Apple Podcasts at 15%. Those shares sum to 132%, so the average survey respondent uses more than one platform, and multi-home consumption complicates any “YouTube won” reading. Spotify, for its part, claims video consumption outperforms audio on its own platform, a vendor-reported comparison.
On the buy side, the streamers are already at the table. “I look at the next phase of video opportunities, and we have every streamer that wants our content now: Hulu, Peacock, and Amazon Prime, and Paramount Plus,” Balfe said. “We also have the linear guys that are starting to come to us and say, ‘Actually, what you’re producing looks kind of like a talk show. Maybe we should just put it in late night or daytime.’” Versant’s MS NOW is the cited example of a linear outfit hunting for lower-cost programming to fill its schedule. None of Red Seat’s shows run on Fox’s own linear networks today, though Balfe called that only a matter of time.
The claims here are countable, which makes them testable. Ten big deals in 12 months, against a base of 30 shows, is a two-thirds increase in a single year on a minimum-guarantee cost structure; whether Kill Tony’s $10,000 roast tier actually sells out is a binary outcome; and a Red Seat show appearing on linear television, daytime or late night, either happens or it doesn’t. The next Sounds Profitable survey will say whether the 44% was a step or a plateau.