Spotify Partner Program in 35 new countries: trailer clips

If your podcast is in one of the 35 newly added Spotify Partner Program regions, the entry bar is three episodes online, 2,000 consumption hours and 1,000 engaged audience members in the last 30 days. Sume cannot raise those numbers for you, but it can cut the short trailer and episode clips that give new listeners a reason to press play, one video trim call per clip.

The program facts below come from TechCrunch's report on the expansion (read 2026-10-02). The Sume facts come from the docs pages linked in each section. Sume does not upload to Spotify, does not read your Spotify analytics, and does not decide eligibility; it only produces files you then publish yourself.

What did Spotify actually announce?

TechCrunch reports that Spotify is extending its podcast monetization program to 35 regions this fall, including Italy, Spain, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Poland, Chile, the Dominican Republic and the Bahamas, its largest geographic rollout for the program. Creators earn from video and audio impressions from Premium subscribers, plus ad revenue from free listeners. The article also quotes the rule that podcasters can distribute their shows on other platforms and keep all the revenue they earn from sponsorships.

It reports that payouts to shows have risen by more than a third since January 2026 and that video podcast consumption is up 140% since the feature launched in 2022.

Where do short clips help a show reach 2,000 hours?

Consumption hours come from people finishing episodes, not from clips. A clip's job is to send a cold viewer to the full episode, so cut it to a self-contained moment and end on the show name, not on a cliffhanger you cannot pay off.

A practical plan for a new show with its first three episodes: one 30 to 60 second trailer per episode, plus one longer highlight from the best episode. That is four trim jobs. At the public rate of $0.02 per job in the video trim docs (confirm live in GET /v1/catalog), the four cuts cost $0.08 in total, before any captions.

How do I cut a trailer from an episode with Sume?

Video trim takes one workspace media.sume.com clip, a start, and exactly one of end or duration, and returns a new MP4 with only that range. The source must be imported first with POST /v1/media-imports, and an Idempotency-Key header is required. Sources can be up to 1800 seconds, outputs up to 900 seconds, and the default precision is exact, a frame-accurate re-encode.

This example cuts 45 seconds starting at the 12:30 mark of an episode video:

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/video-trim \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: ep01-trailer-v1" \
  -d '{
    "video_url": "https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_demo/episode-01.mp4",
    "start": 750,
    "duration": 45
  }'

What about episodes longer than the 1,800 second source cap?

A full hour of video is 3,600 seconds, so it is over the 1800 second source limit that trim, audio detach and timeline renders share. Split the file before you import it, or use the audio-only version of the show for the trailer. The existing guide hour-long podcast video to clips walks through the split.

If you want burned-in captions on the trailer for sound-off autoplay, run video captions on the trimmed MP4. A standalone caption job is $0.20 for videos up to 60 seconds under the current fixed estimate, so keep trailers at or under a minute.

What does this not do?

For the clip format itself, see Spotify clips, 60 to 90 seconds and Spotify video podcast specs. Track a job with the polling steps in Jobs and results.

• It does not submit anything to Spotify, Apple or any host; you upload the files yourself.
• It does not check whether you meet the 2,000 hour or 1,000 engaged audience thresholds.
• It does not edit the program terms: read Spotify's own partner program page before you plan around revenue, because this post relies on a news report of the expansion.
• Clip quality is only as good as the moment you pick; Sume cuts at the seconds you give it.