A Novel Form of Capture: Podcasts, Platform Capitalism, and the Intensification of the Sport Media Complex

This article posits the sport podcast as a novel form of audience capture that represents a spatial, temporal, and sensory intensification of the sport media complex. It contributes to emerging understandings of the kinds of discourse, value, and experience being produced through platform media and its convergence with late capitalism, and in lineage with scholarship on how communications technology creates, accumulates through, and affects audiences. By bringing together industry reports, advertisements, excerpts from sport podcasts, and examples offered by podcast hosts and contributors, we analyze how the techno-experiential dimensions of the podcast, and the affective resonance and preexisting audience offered by sports fans, have made sport podcasts a highly valued new media form for audio advertisers, producers, and listeners.