The short version: a podcast is called a podcast because a British journalist named Ben Hammersley smashed together “iPod” and “broadcast” in a 2004 Guardian article, and the word stuck even though most people listening today have never owned an iPod. It’s a naming accident that got lucky, the same way “hoover” became a verb for vacuuming. The technology it describes has changed completely, the name never did.
Where the word came from
In February 2004, Ben Hammersley wrote a piece for The Guardian about the rise of amateur audio shows being distributed online. He needed a word for it and, half joking, threw out three options: audioblogging, GuerillaMedia, and podcasting. He picked “podcasting” because Apple’s iPod was the dominant way people were listening to downloaded MP3s at the time, and “broadcasting” was the closest existing word for putting audio out into the world. Mash the two together and you get podcasting. The article wasn’t even the main point of the piece, it was a passing suggestion in a list, and it’s the one that survived.
Hammersley wasn’t the technical brain behind the format. That credit mostly goes to Dave Winer, the software developer who added “enclosure” support to RSS feeds so audio files could be attached to a feed the same way a text post could, and Adam Curry, the former MTV VJ who built the first real podcatcher software and is often called the godfather of podcasting for pushing the format into public awareness. Hammersley named the thing. Winer and Curry built the plumbing that made the thing possible. You can read the fuller etymology on Wikipedia’s podcast entry if you want the full paper trail, including the earlier, clunkier names people tried before podcast won out.
Why “broadcast” is a slightly odd choice
Here’s the bit most explainers skip over. Broadcasting, by definition, is a one-to-many transmission happening at the same time for everyone, like radio or live TV. A podcast is the opposite of that. It’s on demand, stored, and pulled down by the listener whenever they fancy it, which technically makes it a “narrowcast” or a download, not a broadcast at all. The word podcast borrowed the prestige and familiarity of broadcasting while describing something that behaves nothing like it. Nobody seemed to mind. Language doesn’t wait for accuracy, it waits for a word that’s easy to say and easy to spell, and podcast ticked both boxes while “asynchronous audio distribution” never stood a chance.
I think about this every time I explain how a podcast works to a client who’s never made one. They usually picture something closer to live radio, a person talking into a mic while an audience listens in real time. I have to walk them back to the actual mechanics: you record it once, it sits on a server, an RSS feed tells apps like Apple Podcasts or Spotify that a new file exists, and the listener’s device fetches it whenever they open the app. No live audience, no broadcast tower, just a very well organised download.
The iPod problem nobody talks about
This is the part that makes the name strange in 2026: most podcasts are no longer listened to on anything remotely related to an iPod. Apple discontinued the iPod entirely in 2022. Spotify overtook Apple Podcasts as the most used podcast app worldwide back in 2021, according to data Spotify itself published, and a huge chunk of podcast consumption now happens on YouTube, where people watch a video of two people talking rather than listening to an audio file at all. Edison Research’s 2024 Infinite Dial report found that video podcasts were the fastest growing format in the US, with a large share of weekly podcast listeners saying they now prefer to watch rather than just listen.
So the word podcast describes a distribution method, RSS feeds pulled onto a portable device, that a growing share of “podcasts” don’t even use anymore. If you upload a video conversation straight to YouTube with no RSS feed behind it, you’re not technically podcasting by the original definition, you’re making a talk show. Almost nobody in the industry enforces that distinction because the word podcast has become shorthand for “long form recorded conversation,” full stop, regardless of the plumbing underneath it. That’s the uncomfortable bit that most articles about this topic gloss over: the name has drifted so far from the original meaning that arguing about the “correct” definition is a bit like arguing that a hamburger needs to contain ham. Nobody’s checking, and nobody cares, and the word still works fine.
A quick story from my own client work
Back in 2015 I had a small business client, a bookkeeper in Surrey, who wanted to start what she kept calling “one of those iPod shows.” She believed you needed an actual iPod to make one, because that’s the word everyone used and nobody had explained the tech to her. I spent about twenty minutes just untangling the name from the process: you need a microphone, some recording software, a hosting platform that generates an RSS feed, and a way to submit that feed to Apple Podcasts and Spotify. That’s it. No iPod required, no studio required, and back then her total setup cost was under 100 pounds for a USB mic and free editing software.
I’ve since been on the other side of that microphone dozens of times, talking about marketing and AI on shows like the UNmiss Podcast, the Marketing Leadership Podcast, and the Expert In Demand Podcast, and the format hasn’t fundamentally changed in ten years even though every piece of software around it has. Same basic idea Hammersley named in 2004: record it once, let people pull it down whenever they want.
Why the name won over its rivals
Before podcast settled in, people tried other names. Audioblogging was one. Some early adopters called it “GuerillaMedia” after Hammersley’s second suggestion. There was also a brief push for “netcast” from people who didn’t want Apple’s trademark baked into the name of an entire medium, since not every listener used an iPod even in 2004. Netcast never caught on because it’s a mouthful and doesn’t roll off the tongue the way podcast does. Podcast won for the same reason “google” beat “search engine query” as a verb: it’s short, it’s got a hard consonant sound that’s satisfying to say, and it fit neatly into headlines. By 2005, the New Oxford American Dictionary named “podcast” its word of the year. By 2006 it was in the dictionary. The word had barely existed for two years before it was considered official English.
Does the name matter for your business?
Honestly, not much, beyond being a fun bit of trivia to drop into a meeting. What matters far more if you’re a business owner thinking about starting one is understanding what a podcast can do for you commercially, not what its name technically implies. I’ve written before about how to start a social media podcast for your business, and the short version is that the format still works brilliantly for building trust with a niche audience, because long form conversation lets people hear how you think, not just what you post. A five minute LinkedIn clip pulled from a thirty minute episode will usually outperform a standalone video you scripted from scratch, purely because it sounds like a real conversation rather than a pitch.
Here’s a concrete number: podcasts with consistent weekly episodes for at least six months see roughly three times the download growth of shows that publish irregularly, according to patterns Buzzsprout and other hosting platforms have reported from their own user data. Consistency beats production value almost every time. I’ve seen shows recorded on a 40 pound Fifine microphone outperform shows recorded in a proper studio, simply because the cheap-mic show published every single Tuesday for a year and the studio show skipped six weeks over the summer.
The bit that still trips people up
People still ask me if you need Apple’s permission to call something a podcast, because the word has “pod” from iPod baked into it. You don’t. Apple never trademarked the generic word “podcast,” Hammersley did the naming and nobody owns it as intellectual property, which is partly why it spread so fast and so freely across every platform, not just Apple’s. That’s rare for a word this closely tied to a specific brand’s product. Compare it to “walkman,” which stayed tied to Sony and never became the generic word for a portable cassette player the way podcast became the generic word for on demand audio shows.
Frequently asked questions
Who coined the word podcast?
Ben Hammersley, a journalist writing for The Guardian, first suggested the word in a February 2004 article, combining “iPod” and “broadcast” as one of three possible names for the emerging format of amateur audio shows.
Does podcast literally mean iPod broadcast?
Yes, that’s exactly where it comes from, though the format has nothing to do with Apple’s iPod anymore since the device was discontinued in 2022 and most listening now happens through apps like Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube on phones and computers.
Why is it called a broadcast if it’s not live?
It’s a slightly loose use of the word, since true broadcasting is live and one to many. A podcast is downloaded or streamed on demand whenever the listener chooses, which technically makes it closer to a narrowcast than a broadcast, but the name stuck anyway because it was catchy and familiar.
Is there a trademark on the word podcast?
No, nobody owns the word podcast as a trademark. Apple never claimed it despite the “pod” reference to iPod, which is part of why the term spread quickly across every hosting platform and app rather than staying locked to one company’s ecosystem.
