broadcaster

The person in front of the microphone or camera. The word reaches wider than presenter: it can name anyone whose job is making broadcasts, though in practice it usually means someone who presents news or documentaries. It readily takes words of standing and specialty, as in a veteran broadcaster or a sports broadcaster.

News writing often uses it as a stand-in for a network's name. A 2017 BBC report on ESPN, having named the company, calls it simply "the broadcaster" and avoids repeating the name. The word covers both public-service bodies funded by license fees or taxes and commercial networks funded mostly by advertising. That is why it so often takes a qualifier: public broadcaster, commercial broadcaster.

The broadcasting sense at its most literal is the hardware itself. The word is broadcast, in its sense of transmitting a signal, plus the agent suffix -er, and here the agent is a machine rather than a person or a company. Its power output and assigned frequency decide how far it reaches. In most sentences about stations the word will mean the organization instead, so let the context make the equipment clear.

Networking borrowed the word for a device that sends data to every node in a segment at once, rather than to a single addressed recipient. That all-at-once behavior is also its risk: when too many frames go out to everyone, a broadcast storm can choke the network's throughput. Keep it distinct from the audio and video transmitter, which carries programs to listeners and viewers.

The farm machine that does mechanically what the hand-sower once did by arm: it flings seed, granular fertilizer or lime outward across a field. Its rival is the seed drill, which sets seed into prepared holes in the soil. A broadcaster covers ground faster, but each seed lands less precisely. Choosing between the two means trading speed against placement.