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Podcasting is audio, and sometimes video, published as a series of episodes that people download or stream on their own schedule. What sets it apart from radio is timing. Nothing is tied to a broadcast clock. Someone picks up an episode whenever it suits them, pauses partway through, and comes back to it the next morning.

The word itself is a blend of “iPod” and “broadcast,” coined by journalist Ben Hammersley in a 2004 newspaper piece almost as a throwaway suggestion. The name stuck even as the iPod faded, partly because the underlying idea never depended on any one device. At the technical core sits an RSS feed: a plain text file that lists episodes and points to their audio. Listening software checks that feed, notices new entries, and pulls them down on its own. That open mechanism is why a single show can be heard through dozens of different listening apps without the maker doing anything special for each one.

Formats vary more than newcomers expect. Some shows are two people talking loosely for an hour. Others are tightly scripted narrative documentaries, with sound design, original music, and months of reporting behind a single installment. Interview shows, panel arguments, fiction told like old radio drama, and plain solo monologues all sit under the same heading.

Much of the appeal is intimacy. A voice in the ears, often through headphones, feels closer than a voice from a speaker across the room. Hosts tend to talk as if to one person rather than a crowd, and audiences often describe a long-running show as something near company. That tone, more than any particular subject, is usually what people mean when they say something “sounds like a podcast.”