4 March 2005
“MP3 players, like Apple’s iPod, in many pockets, audio production software cheap or free, and weblogging an established part of the internet; all the ingredients are there for a new boom in amateur radio. But what to call it? Audioblogging? Podcasting? GuerillaMedia?”
�Ben Hammersley, “Audible Revolution,” The Guardian, 13 February 2004
Podcasting? What the heck is podcasting? It is the streaming of an MP3 or other audio file format to portable players, like Apple’s iPod, either for play immediately or timeshifted for later listening. The quote from the Guardian is the earliest usage that I have found and Hammersley may well have coined it.
The term is a portmanteau of the trade name iPod and broadcasting. Broadcasting itself was once a cutting edge technical term. The verb, to broadcast, dates to 1921, at least in its technical sense. (There is an older sense, dating to 1813, meaning to scatter seed by hand.) It originally referred to the new medium of radio. The noun form, broadcasting, dates to 1922.
Broadcast is, obviously, derived from the roots broad + cast. Both have Germanic roots. Of the two, broad is older, from the Old English br�d, meaning extended in width, wide. The term is found in Old English literature from before 1000. Cast’s appearance in English dates to around 1230, in the form casten and is from the Old Norse kasta. Both the Middle English word and its Norse root mean to throw. So, to broadcast means to spread widely.
Cast is used in a wide number of situations where one throws something. One casts dice when playing craps. You cast a ballot at the polls. One is cast ashore by a wave or one casts bait into the water when fishing. You cast a look, a reflection, a shadow, or a light.
As a root, cast has been a rather productive one in the media business. It gave rise to newscast in 1928, first as a verb meaning to broadcast news content. The noun came a few years later. Telecasting makes its appearance in 1937, distinguishing the new medium of television from radio broadcasts. There is also radiocast, which one would think would be a retronym, but no, it dates to 1931. Also from the 1930s is narrowcast, a transmission intended for a select audience. The next decade brought us simulcasting, which is the simultaneous broadcast of a program on both radio and television. The verb to simulcast dates to 1948.
Cast made the jump to digital content in 1981 with multicast, a transmission over a computer network to a group of users. 1995 brought us webcast, a multicast made over the worldwide web.
All these precursors brought us to podcasting in early 2004.
But none of these should be confused with forecasting. That word is also from cast, but from a different sense of the word. Instead of meaning to throw or spread, this sense of cast means to calculate or reckon and dates to before 1300. So to forecast (1388) is to calculate the future. Forecast has not been as productive as its media cousin. It has only given rise to the seldom used nowcasting (1976), meaning the telling of current conditions, used primarily with weather information.
