[cxr]

> then some podcasting services (looking at you, Spotify and others...) decided to force us to use our browser or some app instead of giving us the freedom to download files for offline use

Podcasts are pretty simple, and those services you're talking about aren't podcasts—nor is anything else that keeps you from downloading files like that (say, for transcoding and then dumping into/onto your player to listen to it how you want). It's not even as if insisting that people not say "podcast" when talking about something that clearly isn't one leaves us without a way to talk about them.

In the first place, "podcast" is not a genre label. There are tons of (actual) podcasts that don't follow the unscripted-banter-plus-question-and-answer/interview format.

And in the second place, all those things that do stop you from downloading them? Yeah, we have a word you can use already: they're just "shows".