Apple Podcasts host-read video ads: cut the spot with Sume trim

Apple says its new video podcast experience lets creators dynamically insert video ads, including host-read spots (read 2026-10-02). If your host-read ad is recorded inside a full episode, cut it out as its own file with Sume's video trim using precision: "exact". Sume does not insert ads or deliver to Apple, and Apple's announcement does not give file specs for ad insertion.

What Apple announced

Apple's newsroom post describes video podcasts delivered with HLS in Apple Podcasts. The facts below are as the page states them.

Cutting the spot

Find the spot's start and end times in the episode, for example from the sentence segments that video inspect returns with transcribe: true. Then call POST /v1/video-trim with start and duration or end, and an Idempotency-Key. Source video must be in your workspace on media.sume.com and at most 1800 seconds, so a longer episode needs splitting first.

Why exact precision

exact is the default and re-encodes so the cut starts on the frame you asked for. keyframe is a stream copy that can start one GOP early, which for an ad can leave a fragment of the previous sentence at the start. If you use it, read actual_start_seconds from the result to see where the cut really began.

• Cut from the first word of the ad to the last, with a short margin if you want one.
• Keep audio at keep; a host-read ad is the voice.
• Listen to both ends of the output before you hand it over.

What stays outside Sume

Ad insertion, the ad network and the delivery format are Apple's. Check Apple's Podcasts documentation for what an ad file must be, because the announcement does not say. Sume only prepares a clean cut of the video you already have.