A few days ago, Skype decided that it would discontinue its free Skypecasting service. There were actually two versions of Skypecasting; public and hidden. The public version was a spammy service where any idiot could create a voice chatline and invite other idiots to join. The "hidden" version was entirely different; more like a regular conferencing system where you set up a time, topic and joining link which you then could offer to individuals directly.

I disliked the public version intensely, mainly because the content was uninteresting and of low quality, but the "hidden" version was a very acceptable way to handle large scale conferencing.

A few months ago, we did some head-to-head comparisons of various conferencing tools that one can use with Skype (Calliflower, Skypecast, HiDef, and regular Skype multiparty calling). In terms of voice quality, our conclusion was that Skypecast ranked highly in that list). In terms of features and ease of setup (hidden Skypecast), it ranked poorly but that was highly subjective, platform dependent, and certainly correctable with software upgrades. In other words, Skypecast was competitive in the emerging VOIP conferencing market.

Skype says that the decision to terminate was based on the fact that they didn't know how to make Skypecasting viable economically. I hope that this is not the case, for it would suggest that they did not appreciate the existing quaities of their own product, or the many ways that it could have been improved, or the many ways they might have monetized it.