With Netflix now streaming original podcasts and Apple announcing a “category-leading video expertise” on its app this spring, the which means of the phrase “podcast” has grown more and more diffuse.
It was a lot simpler to pin down in the course of the medium’s mid-aughts infancy. Again then, a podcast was merely asynchronous discuss radio—the pure subsequent step after transferring from terrestrial radio, to satellite tv for pc platforms like SiriusXM, to a brand new and purely digital format that could possibly be downloaded and consumed on demand.
Within the years since, the definition has vastly expanded. Primarily, any type of episodic audio or video content material that entails individuals talking into microphones can now be thought of a podcast. We’ve drifted so distant from the unique context and definition of the phrase that maybe it’s time for semantics to catch up.
“The consumption is transferring increasingly towards video-based podcasts,” says Jonathan Miller, a former Fox digital media and NBA government and present CEO of Built-in Media Co. “In some unspecified time in the future, there must be a brand new identify. However it’s not going to occur simply.”
Pivoting to video
Initially coined in early 2004 by British journalist Ben Hammersley, the phrase “podcast” was an ingenious flip of phrase on the time. The punny portmanteau succinctly describes the then-emergent format of a broadcast that emanates from one’s iPod.
The one downside? That title assumed a world by which iPods hung round for the lengthy haul, slightly than getting into obsolescence simply three years later with the invention of the iPhone. (The iPod finally remained in circulation for an additional 15 years, till Apple ceased manufacturing them in 2022.)
Anybody on the youthful finish of the prime podcasting demographic of 18 to 34 years previous has doubtless by no means used an iPod, and would possibly regard one with the identical anthropological curiosity they might a VCR or rotary cellphone.
If the podcast’s outdated nominal inspiration weren’t sufficient cause for a rebrand, although, the recognition of video could also be what cinches it.
As increasingly podcasters have began placing their reveals on digital camera, YouTube has grow to be the highest podcast platform within the U.S., with over 1 billion active users logging on for them every month.
In the meantime, Apple’s audio-only app loses a little more of its market share yearly, going from 15.7% of month-to-month podcast listeners’ desire in 2022 to 11.3% in 2025.
Maybe the corporate’s forthcoming video expertise will assist Apple regain a few of that floor—if Netflix and its rivals all inevitably throwing their hats within the ring doesn’t erode that quantity additional.
But when a podcast is not one thing audiences hear however watch, is it even the identical medium?
“What we’re witnessing isn’t a departure from podcasting—it’s an evolution,” says Matt Sandler, common supervisor of creator providers at Amazon. “The content material itself has advanced from interviews into ensemble conversations, documentary-style storytelling, stay experiences, and hybrid reveals that blur the strains between what we’ve historically seen on social [media], podcasts, and TV. Because of this, podcasts have naturally moved from audio-only experiences to screens.”
As well-liked because the video format is getting, not everybody sees it as a full business takeover. “I don’t see a pivot to video however an addition,” says Adam Curry, the previous MTV VJ whose early adoption of podcasting earned him the nickname “The Podfather.”
In fact, the addition of video to an audio format has at all times been disruptive, to say the least.
The revolution is not going to be podcasted
Earlier than it grew to become often known as tv, one of many invention’s builders, Charles Francis Jenkins, dubbed it “radiovision.” There will need to have been little or no doubt among the many public about which expertise TV was meant to switch.
The introduction of TV solved the issue of how boring and undynamic it will need to have been to collect one’s household round a radio and hearken to Fibber McGee and Molly on a Thursday night time. It created a stunning new galaxy of programming potentialities that revolutionized present enterprise, and nearly each different form of enterprise.
TV clearly didn’t kill radio, however it drastically diminished radio’s enchantment and shortly supplanted it as the highest possibility for residence leisure.
Among the many causes radio has flourished properly past TV’s invention is as a result of individuals additionally wished to be entertained outdoors the house. It turned on the market had been many conditions the place the dynamism of a visible element proved pointless—whereas driving, working, or shoveling snow, as an illustration.
The principle distinction between the rise of video podcasts and the rise of tv is that, in contrast to the medium that TV disrupted, podcasts had been initially made exactly for such moments of divided consideration. Individuals largely devour them whereas their eyes are centered elsewhere.
The truth is, in accordance with a YouGov survey from 2023, the topmost well-liked podcast-consuming conditions are whereas doing chores, commuting, or figuring out.
“I would like one thing I can hear to love an audiobook after I’m driving, driving the subway, or strolling within the park,” says Dave Winer, a software program developer, author, and pioneering podcaster.
Although it’s technically attainable to observe a long-form podcast whereas doing all these issues, it’s not precisely sensible.
Nonetheless, the medium is now in a bizarre straddling second by which many podcasters haven’t but discovered for which of their viewers’s senses they’re primarily creating content material.
It’s now fairly frequent for the hosts of a podcast to pantomime actions, make faces and hand gestures, or make use of another visible help that provokes an in-studio giggle, adopted by a reflexive rationalization to “our listeners” about what simply occurred on-screen.
Will they ultimately cease explaining? Or will they as an alternative cease enjoying to the digital camera?
Both manner, it is perhaps useful to know that not as many individuals could also be watching podcasts because it appears. In keeping with Triton Digital’s annual podcasting report, solely 7% of audiences solely watch their favourite podcasts, whereas 13% solely hearken to them, and the remaining 80% now alternate between the 2 choices.
These outcomes trace at an epidemic of video podcasts enjoying inside listeners’ jean pockets as they go about their enterprise.
Perhaps not for lengthy, although.
What’s in a reputation
Whichever manner individuals favor to devour video podcasts, the recognition of those reveals has huge enterprise implications.
Because the current cancellations of each Kelly Clarkson‘s and Sherri Shepherd‘s TV reveals point out, podcasts are coming for daytime TV. They’re additionally coming for the ailing late-night TV business, and another talky TV format that would technically be made with a tiny crew and no union involvement. (After launching with out union protection and incurring some blowback, Netflix’s The Pete Davidson Present has since signed with SAG-AFTRA.)
“Speak tv is about to grow to be a spinoff of video podcasting,” Built-in Media’s Miller says.
Fewer conventional discuss present choices will inevitably imply extra video podcasts with high-wattage friends, like Amy Poehler’s Good Hang and Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang’s Las Culturistas. Meaning extra individuals will doubtless begin consuming their podcasts on sensible TVs whereas curled up on the sofa with a second display screen.
In a situation the place that mode of consuming podcasts turns into extra dominant, the phrase podcast will really feel much more dissonant than it does now.
A part of the rationale any medium wants a definitive identify is to quantify viewers consumption for advertisers. As an business, video podcasts are actually roughly on the level the place streaming sequence had been at a few decade in the past, when it was nonetheless frequent to name them TV reveals.
Nielsen struggled to regulate its language when TV moved to streaming, and stays caught in a swamp of acronyms like SVOD (subscription video on demand), OTT (over-the-top), and CTV (related TV) content material.
Holding the podcast label would cleanly delineate reveals just like the Kelce brothers’ New Heights and Alex Cooper’s Name Her Daddy for the remaining years of linear tv.
But when the phrase had been to get replaced, what would we begin calling podcasts as an alternative?
“We’d name it ‘social media TV,’” says Henry Jenkins, a media research professor on the USC Annenberg College for Communication and Journalism. “The format is an extended and largely unedited dialogue in comparison with what’s attainable through broadcasting. It’s consumed asynchronously. Each of those overlap with podcasts as we have now understood them.”
However with video, the medium is now one more step faraway from that authentic which means, provides Jenkins. “What I like about ‘social media TV’ is that it conveys the hybrid nature of this new format. I a lot favor understanding it as one thing new than to permit it to outline what podcasting turns into.”
Miller thinks a possible linguistic change is perhaps easier, although.
“What a podcast actually refers to is a unit of one thing—one pod is one episode,” he says. “So possibly, on the finish of the day, they merely grow to be often known as ‘episodes.’”
Simply because video podcasts have grow to be the dominant industrial format, although—to the purpose of probably redefining the medium—doesn’t imply the unique format is on its manner out.
“If podcasting turns into video, and audio podcasting disappears . . . we’ll simply boot up podcasting once more with a distinct identify,” Winer says.
However don’t be shocked if the phrase sticks round because the business evolves round it. “We nonetheless use paper clip icons to connect a file, and a floppy disc icon to avoid wasting one thing,” Curry notes.
Equally, there’s a cause why iPhones nonetheless have the phrase cellphone in them, though making cellphone calls is now among the many system’s extra marginal features. Generally, phrases proceed to outlive lengthy after the concept impressed them turns into redundant. One such phrase, which initially referred to sowing seeds by scattering them over a large space, is “broadcast.”
