Along with books, theatrical works, and video games, podcasts have established themselves over the last decade as a source of inspiration for film or television adaptations.
Its serial, episodic, original scripted or unscripted nature has made the medium a source of ready-made narrative material from which to draw for new audiovisual productions more and more frequently.
Apple, for instance, approached Futuro Studios in 2022, signing an agreement with the purpose of increasing the production of original podcasts with the goal of their eventual rendering into TV products for Apple TV+ and on-demand services.
With an ever-increasing offer of compelling content to use, production companies had to consider new perspectives to adapt pre-existing works to the small and big screen.
For other types of products, such as novels or plays, production studios usually acquire all rights and ownership interests, financial and creative, thus ending any involvement of the original creator of the work. Negotiations for the acquisition of rights to podcasts are conducted differently, since there is often a more complex web of ownership. The original creator of the series frequently retains the ownership rights to some extent even with the recordings being produced and held by companies such as NPR or Vox or networks such as Wondery or streaming platforms. In this chain of negotiations, the creator of the podcast often has more influence in the negotiation of rights and in the creative decision concerning the adaptation of the product.
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