Podcasts are easily accessible for anyone with an internet connection and typically offered for free, which makes them particularly popular for mobilizing knowledge. While most listeners use a smartphone, they can also be accessed via desktop computer or downloaded to a media player. They’re also relatively easy to make with only a very small investment in equipment (if a large investment in time). This makes them a low-barrier medium for both creators and consumers.
There are now an estimated 660,000 podcasts in production (that’s a real number, not some comically inflated figure I invented to communicate “a lot”), offering up roughly 28 million individual episodes for your listening enjoyment (again, a real number; yes, someone counted).
– Vulture
Podcasts also provide on-demand entertainment and information in niche areas of interest. I listen to podcasts about Canadian politics, feminism in academia, health policy, historical crime, old Hollywood, and a seemingly endless range of other topics. Podcasting is a medium that particularly fits the interest-driven, highly portable way we like to enjoy media now.
Podcasts are essentially radio on the installment plan, a return to the intimacy, wombed shadows, and pregnant implications of words, sounds, and silences in the theater of the mind.