Disney+ and Hulu will stream PAVE Studios true crime podcasts a day before every other app
From Tuesday 20 October, the true crime video podcast Clues will appear on Disney+ and Hulu a full day before it reaches Spotify, YouTube or any other podcast app. A second show, Mother Knows Murder with Niecy Nash and her daughter Dia Nash, follows on 9 November under the same terms. Both come from PAVE Studios, the Los Angeles company founded by Parcast creator Max Cutler, which announced the deal on 15 October.
On its own this is a two-show licensing deal. What makes it bigger is who is on the other side of the table. Disney said on 22 September that its podcast library on Disney+ and Hulu would double within a couple of months, and PAVE is a new supplier for that expansion, alongside the iHeartMedia and Headgum shows already on the services. Netflix has spent a year building a video podcast catalog through Spotify and iHeartMedia. Disney is now doing the same, and it is paying for exclusive windows to do it.
What has been confirmed
According to the PAVE Studios release, Clues is hosted by Kaelyn Moore and covers notorious crimes and forensic breakthroughs. It won a Webby Award in 2026 and is a Crime House original, Crime House being the true crime brand inside PAVE. New episodes will stream weekly on Disney+ and Hulu from 20 October, each one arriving a day before it is published to other podcast platforms. PAVE describes this as the first time its video podcasts have been distributed on a major streaming service.
Mother Knows Murder is a new weekly show. Niecy Nash, whose credits include Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, The Rookie: Feds and Claws, and her daughter, the actress Dia Nash, watch television together each week and then work through a real case. It premieres on Disney+ and Hulu on 9 November, again one day ahead of other platforms. Deadline and Podnews both reported the deal on 16 October without any financial terms, and PAVE has not disclosed any.
Moore is already on the other big streamer. Last Trace with Kaelyn Moore, a weekly Netflix true crime video podcast, premiered on Monday 28 September, and she told TheWrap that Netflix made the offer the day after she gave birth. She also hosts Heart Starts Pounding, and now has a show on each of the two biggest streamers in the same month.
What the companies have said
Max Cutler, PAVE’s founder and chief executive, called the deal proof of Crime House’s creator-led model and said Disney is “the first of many places we expect these stories to go.” Moore said Clues was “developed with a streaming audience in mind from day one,” with production quality and storytelling meant to sit alongside other premium content on the services. Disney itself has not issued a separate statement about the PAVE shows, and nobody has said whether the arrangement is a flat licence fee, a revenue share, or whether Disney sells advertising inside the episodes.
Disney has, however, explained its wider plan. In its 22 September post the company said it started with companion podcasts for its own series, that 90 percent of viewers who streamed the Tell Me Lies companion podcast went on to watch every episode of the third season, and that it is now adding licensed comedy, true crime, rewatch, news and sports shows. It also said some licensed shows, starting with two from Headgum, would premiere exclusively on Disney+ and Hulu before reaching other platforms. The PAVE deal fits that template exactly.
The template has a short history. Hulu’s first podcast licence, announced on 5 February 2026, gave it We’re Here to Help from Headgum a day before each episode hit YouTube. On 10 August Disney+ and Hulu signed six iHeartPodcasts titles, led by Hey Jonas!, with Lauren Tempest of Disney saying podcasts had become one of the fastest growing ways for audiences to connect with its titles.
How the mechanics change for a podcast studio
The important word in every one of these deals is “window”, not “exclusive”. Clues stays on YouTube, Spotify and the open RSS feed. What Disney buys is 24 hours of first access plus the show’s presence inside an app that most people open to watch television, not to find podcasts. For PAVE the audio and YouTube advertising stays where it was, and the streaming money, whatever its structure, comes on top. Our reading is that this is why a studio with no outside investors is willing to sign: it gives something small away and keeps its existing revenue intact.
For Disney the economics look different. A companion podcast is cheap and sells more of its own shows. A licensed true crime show has to justify itself as a reason to open the app on a Tuesday. The 90 percent figure Disney published is about companion content, and the likely test for Clues is whether a true crime audience that already watches Moore on YouTube will move part of that viewing to Hulu for a one-day head start. That is a question nobody can answer until Disney shares viewing data, and so far it has shared none for any licensed podcast.
There is also a personal thread worth noting. Cutler founded Parcast in 2016 and sold it to Spotify in 2019, where he became head of talk creator content before leaving in 2023 and launching PAVE in April 2024. Two Parcast-era shows, Conspiracy Theories and Serial Killers, were in the first batch of Spotify titles Netflix added in early 2026. His old company’s shows are on Netflix and his new company’s shows are on Disney+, a measure of how few people have built true crime video at scale. Readers looking for more in the genre can start with our guide to the best true crime podcasts.
What it means for listeners and creators
For a Disney+ or Hulu subscriber in the United States, the practical change is small: a true crime show appears in the app a day early, in video, without a separate subscription. PAVE has not said which countries the shows will be available in, and Disney’s earlier licensed titles have been US-first, so international subscribers should not assume they will see Clues on 20 October. Audio listeners lose nothing, since the regular feed carries on a day later.
For creators the signal is that there are now at least three streaming buyers for a video podcast, and that two of them, Netflix and Disney, have shown they will license from an independent studio and not only from Spotify or iHeartMedia. That points to a market in which a show with strong video production and a clear genre, true crime above all, can sell a window without leaving the open ecozystem. It also points to a problem: a window deal is only worth what the streamer pays for it, and none of these companies has published a number.
Sounds Profitable’s Podcast Landscape 2026 found that Netflix had already become the third most common place Americans say they meet podcasts, behind YouTube and Spotify and ahead of Apple. The likely effect, in our view, is a split in the video podcast business: a short list of shows with streaming windows and a premium ad rate, and everything else competing on YouTube alone.
Where this goes from here
Disney said its podcast library would double in a couple of months, and the PAVE shows are two of the titles making that happen. Cutler’s “first of many places” line is a plain statement that PAVE is shopping its catalog to other platforms too, and with Crime House, OpenMind and the history brand Rewind launched in April 2026, it has more to sell. Apple’s plan to add video to Podcasts Subscriptions, which we covered in September, adds a fourth place a studio could place a window, although Apple has given no launch date.
The dates to watch are 20 October, when Clues goes live and Disney gets its first read on a licensed true crime show, and 9 November, when Mother Knows Murder tests whether a brand new show can launch on a streamer and a podcast feed at the same time. What nobody has confirmed yet is whether Disney will ever report how many people watched. Until it does, every deal like this one will be judged on what the studio says, and studios tend to say it went well.
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