Short answers, pulled from the story.
The word podcast first appeared in print on the 1st of February 2004. Ben Hammersley wrote an article for The Guardian newspaper that week while searching for a name to describe digital audio files available for download.
Ben Hammersley coined the term podcast by combining the words iPod and broadcast into a single portmanteau on the 1st of February 2004. Danny Gregoire introduced the term to the audioblogging community later that September before Adam Curry adopted the phrase from a message sent to the iPodder-dev mailing list.
Apple launched iTunes 4.9 in June 2005 to add formal support directly into the music player. This update removed the need for separate applications by allowing users to subscribe to feeds and receive new episodes automatically without clicking each file individually.
Personal Audio filed a patent on podcasting in 2009 claiming an invention from 1996 and sued high-profile podcasters including The Adam Carolla Show and HowStuffWorks in February 2013. Adam Carolla settled with Personal Audio on the 18th of August 2014 before the USPTO invalidated five provisions of the patent on the 10th of April 2015.
The number of Chinese podcast listeners exceeded 220 million in 2023. India emerged as the third-largest listening market after China and the United States with over 57.6 million listeners while Bloomberg reported a billion people watched video podcasts on YouTube every month in 2025.