Podcasts had a 1965 ancestor: sales lessons on cassette for the car
In 1965 the scriptwriting firm Storycraft made hour-long audio programmes on then-new Philips cassettes so Westinghouse salespeople could learn while driving. Called Salespoint, it ran for at least a decade. Four decades later the same idea, portable shows delivered straight to listeners, got a name built from iPod and broadcast.
The Guardian columnist Ben Hammersley coined podcasting in an article in February 2004. That September Danny Gregoire used the term on a developers' mailing list, and the former MTV host Adam Curry picked it up. The word came before Apple added podcast features to the iPod or iTunes, and any device that plays media files will do.
The plumbing arrived piece by piece. In September 2000 the MP3 player maker i2Go offered downloadable news stories through MyAudio2Go, which lasted about a year. The following month Tristan Louis proposed attaching sound and video files to RSS feeds, and Dave Winer, one of the format's authors, built it. Curry's Daily Source Code, launched in August 2004, chronicled his life and championed new shows, inspiring a community of early podcasters, and iPodderX that September gave users the first point-and-click podcast app. In June 2005 iTunes 4.9 built podcasts in, and Apple sent cease-and-desist letters to developers using Pod in product names.
Money followed. After London station LBC launched a premium podcast platform in February 2006, the format's commercial promise was widely accepted. Ricky Gervais's show, first given away free, became the world's most popular podcast for years, passing 300 million unique downloads by March 2011; its second series charged 95 pence per half-hour episode and still topped iTunes. Because so much content costs nothing, podcasting is often called a disruptive medium.
Technically, a podcast is a series of files pushed through an RSS feed to subscribers, usually via a hosting service such as Libsyn that passes episodes to Apple, Spotify and YouTube. By 2024 there were over three million shows and nearly 200 million episodes. Video has surged: in 2025 Bloomberg reported a billion people watching podcasts on YouTube each month, which can leave audio-only listeners missing what viewers see.
Source: Podcast
