With Netflix now streaming original podcasts and Apple announcing a “category-leading video experience” on its app this spring, the meaning of the word “podcast” has grown increasingly diffuse.

It was much easier to pin down during the medium’s mid-aughts infancy. Back then, a podcast was simply asynchronous talk radio—the natural next step after moving from terrestrial radio, to satellite platforms like SiriusXM, to a new and purely digital format that could be downloaded and consumed on demand. 

In the years since, the definition has vastly expanded. Essentially, any form of episodic audio or video content that involves people speaking into microphones can now be considered a podcast. We’ve drifted so far away from the original context and definition of the word that perhaps it’s time for semantics to catch up.

“The consumption is moving more and more toward video-based podcasts,” says Jonathan Miller, a former Fox digital media and NBA executive and current CEO of Integrated Media Co. “At some point, there needs to be a new name. But it’s not going to happen easily.”

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Pivoting to video

Originally coined in early 2004 by British journalist Ben Hammersley, the word “podcast” was an ingenious turn of phrase at the time. The punny portmanteau succinctly describes the then-emergent format of a broadcast that emanates from one’s iPod. 

The only problem? That title assumed a world in which iPods hung around for the long haul, rather than entering obsolescence just three years later with the invention of the iPhone. (The iPod ultimately remained in circulation for another 15 years, until Apple ceased manufacturing them in 2022.) 

Anyone on the younger end of the prime podcasting demographic of 18 to 34 years old has likely never used an iPod, and might regard one with the same anthropological curiosity they would a VCR or rotary phone.

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