Continuous Play for Podcasts/iOS9

This may not be be an acceptable solution if you're committed to the native podcast app. But their are third party podcast apps that provide the functionality you seek. For example, the podcast app, Downcast, offers many custom settings. One of those is to NOT automatically advance to the next podcast. Downcast also supports video and audio podcasts. Some third party podcast apps only support audio podcasts.

Hi daveglanz,

I understand that sometimes you would like to only listen to one podcast episode and not go on to the next podcast automatically. The easiest way to achieve this would be to use the sleep timer at the bottom of the now playing screen in the Podcasts app:

Control playback - iPhone

http://help.apple.com/iphone/9/#/iph02f70a98e

The sleep timer will allow you to choose to end the playback when the podcast episode finishes. Thanks for using the Apple Support Communities. Have a good one!

FWIW, I don't believe there is such a global setting.

Sometimes I use this "trick":

One of the settings for each podcast is to choose play order: Newest to Oldest, or Oldest to Newest.

If you have the former selected and you choose to play the oldest episode, playback will stop when that episode finishes, because there is no more "older" episodes.

It’s a great idea. I’ve wondered a long time why the option to simply turn off continuous play is absent from settings.