Other forms: broadcasting, broadcasts
To broadcast is to send a programme out to everyone's screens and radios at once. Broadcast live, a radio broadcast, broadcast the match.
One transmitter reaching everybody at once is what makes it broadcasting, as against sending a copy to each viewer, which is what streaming does. The word is agricultural: to broadcast seed is to scatter it widely by hand, and the sense was borrowed for radio in the 1920s.
1verbbroadcastTo send a programme out to everyone at once.
“The final will be broadcast live on television.”
2nounsentA programme sent out.
“We listened to the king's radio broadcast on Christmas Day.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
broadcast is a transmission.
Broad plus cast, first used in the eighteenth century for scattering seed by hand. Radio borrowed it in the 1920s.
From broad + cast. First attested in the mid 18th century, in the agricultural use of spreading seeds.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA