Skype Shutters Personal Broadcasting Service
Written by Michael Stroud
Unobserved by mainstream journalists, Skype quietly closed its popular Skypecast personal broadcasting service late last month. The decision is setting off howls of protest from loyal users, who are ready to bolt to competitive services.
In a brief missive on Aug. 26 entitled “Goodnight Skypecasts,” Skype announced it was closing the service as of Sept. 1. The program allowed anyone to broadcast to up 100 people, all of whom could join in and comment. While the service only supported audio, video — one of the most-requested features by users — was supposedly in the works as well. Skypecasts covered everything from lonely hearts to computer technology to stuff that’s inscrutable to me because it’s in Arabic.
Skypecasters have been frantically searching for a replacement, most with video, such as Paltalk, OoVoo, TokBox and EkkoTV. But the lion’s shares of them act as little more than video-conferencing services, don’t promote broadcasting, and don’t have Skype’s millions of users to whom they can market.
Skype, a unit of eBay, was vague about why it’s closing down the service.
“What we’ve learned by watching how the product is used and through user feedback is that Skypecasts is not quite measuring up to our high standards and expectations for connecting and delighting our users,” Skype-affiliated blogger Peter Parkes wrote, in announcing the impending demise. An outside spokesman for Skype said the company had no further comment.
Judging from the vitriolic comments to that blog, Skype users were delighted enough by the service to be enraged at its discontinuation. “Utterly dispicable and downright disgusting,” commented ifjadefalls. “This is worst Idea that Skype had,” wrote justinwilliamson3. And mobe3000 called upon Skype users to “join the boycott Skype movement. No Skypecasts, no Skype.”
Meanwhile, in a column about the decision, Andy Abramson of VoIP Watch speculated that eBay was shortsightedly paring Skype down to bare essentials.
In a followup to the angry chorus, Skype-affiliated blogger Parkes wrote that the reason for the shutdown “was simply because we want to focus on making Skype software for Windows, Mac, Linux and mobile phones truly great, and so unfortunately we have to be strict about what we concentrate our efforts on.”
Somehow, that doesn’t seem likely to mollify the critics.
Michael Stroud runs iHollywoodForum, a digital media event and media company in Los Angeles.
Comments (5)
Linkbacks (1)
-
[...] Skype quietly closed its popular Skypecast personal broadcasting service late last month. The decision is setting off howls of protest from loyal users, who are ready to bolt to competitive services. In a brief missive on Aug. 26 entitled “Goodnight Skypecasts,” Skype announced it was closing the service as of Sept. 1. The program allowed anyone to broadcast to up 100 people, all of whom could join in and comment. Full story @ NewTeeVee [...]
Skype shuts down Skypecasts - GigaOM
— 3:37 PM on September 20, 2008
Leave a Reply
Popular
- Tumblr Marriage Proposal: Behind the Scenes of Justin and Marissa's Engagement
- BitTorrent After The Pirate Bay: Do You Still Need Trackers?
- Ten Sites for Free and Legal Torrents
- Nielsen: Facebook Now the No. 3 Video Site
- The Megawoosh Waterslide Viral: How It Was Really Done
- 5 Ways to Test If Your ISP Throttles P2P
Recent
Network
- Get Ready for Flash Player 10.1 to Stream P2P Video to Millions, Swap Files BitTorrent-style [NewTeeVee]
- Green Computing Needs a Data Center Whisperer [GigaOM]
- Pogoplug Updates: Gets File Sync, Extra USB Ports [WebWorkerDaily]
- First Look at Google Chrome OS — Extensions, Options and More [jkOnTheRun]
- 4 Substantial Risks That Google Takes With Chrome OS [OStatic]
- Source Expects Tesla IPO Filing “Any Day,” Tesla Calls it Rumor [Earth2Tech]
© 2009 The GigaOM Network. Marketing consulting by ACS.
Their reason was given in code: “Skypecasts is not quite measuring up to our high standards.”
What does THAT mean, is the question?
My first guess is one word, starting with the letter “p” and ending with the letter “n,” with and “o” and an “r” in the middle.
Anyone who has been shutdown by Skype should feel comfortable coming over to Paltalk.
Paltalk has 4 million unique users and scores of categories from which to choose to broadcast one’s content.
Best of all, it’s a free download, though there is a minimal annual fee to be able to see streaming video.
As way of disclosure, I am Paltalk’s director of news and programming and I host a daily program on Paltalk called News Talk Online, at 5 PM New York time, in Paltalk Studio A in the Radio/TV Section. I’m hoping to see you on line and I and our entire online team stand ready to help you acclimate yourself to Paltalk’s great features.
Paltalk is a wonderful service and highly recommended. Another alternative to Skypecast is BlogTalkRadio which can be found at http://www.blogtalkradio.com.
I am the founder of BTR and we launched our service two years ago. We enable and empower anyone, an individual, corporation or organization to broadcast a live on-line call-in radio show which is archived as a podcast.
Since our launch, we have broadcast more than 130,000 episodes and in August we had more than 3.5 million listeners. Our notable guests have included John McCain, Brad Pitt, Salman Rushdie and hundreds more. In August alone, we live broadcast 15,000 episodes.
We also host online radio shows for many major corporations such as Harper Collins, Pentagon, Sun Microsystems, Golf.com and many more.
Unlike Skype our service requires no download, can have unlimited live listeners and chat participants, is automatically downloaded as a podcast and more. Like Skype the service is free.
We encourage Skypecasters to give us a shot and become part of the BlogTalkRadio community.
Alan Levy
Founder and Ceo.
http://www.blogtalkradio.com
Try out Phweet which enables you to talk just by sharing a URL. Create a Phweet Cafe that mimics what Skypecasts did. Use twitter updates to broadcast who you are in a call with. Come and go as you want. Treat it like a watercooler. Happy to test out with you.
Another alternative is Stickam.com. Its PayPerLive service even lets you charge for your show.