Skype shutdowns Skypecasts, personal broadcasting service

Skype shutdowns Skypecasts, personal broadcasting service

by Michael Stroud

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. Explanation 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.”

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.