TechCrunch has news of a new service that Skype will offer – Skypecasts which will be a free service that allows ‘live, moderated Skype conversations of up to 100 people. The host may controls mute, eject and “microphone pass”. Skypecasts may be prescheduled and promoted via html snippets’.
I can see lots of possibilities for bloggers with a service like that. For starters it could be very useful for us at b5 to get all our bloggers on the one call for communication and community building but it could also be an interesting way to do live podcastlike gatherings. It’d also be a worthwhile service for people doing online courses if they could make it password protected in some way so that only paying listeners could access the call.
I have a problem with Skype: I live in dubai, and Skype is not allowed here. You can’t even see the home page.
There’s another way to go about things. I run a weekly radio show for cat lovers called RadioMeow and I use Skype to let people call in to the show live; conferencing them in to the current show.
While the show is in progress, I take the audio output of the show and send it through WinAmp to a ShoutCast server running on my dedicated server. This allows me to broadcast the show in progress to people that have common media players like iTunes, Yahoo! Music Engine, WinAmp, Windows Media Player and others. I only have a handful of listeners right now, but this setup could service thousands of listeners since my ShoutCast server is running on a box that has a 100 megabits per second uplink. Relay servers could easily be added to bump that figure up even more.
Pros & Cons: This setup allows me to reach far more listeners than the 5 to 10 limit that a Skype conference call allows. The downside is that there is a 45 second time delay on the ShoutCast server stream. That is, people listening to the show “passively” are hearing audio that happened 45 seconds in the past. But ShoutCast is free and unless you’re running an interactive business meeting or a learning class, I can’t see needing 100 people to all talk together at once.
Having said that, I will personally use the Skypecast service myself because I think it’s a great idea. But for reaching large audiences for a live Web radio show, or having business meeting where only a few people talk to a large group, ShoutCast is free and does the job well.
You can see my setup at http://www.RadioMeow.com/
The first podcast version of the show should be up in a few hours and there’s a live show tonight if anyone wants to see how it all works (5/3/2006 – 9:00 PM EST or GMT – 4 for international folk)..
Wow… Staff meetings will get easier at b5!
[…] First heard from Darren Rowse at ProBlogger. […]
We already had one of our blog readers suggest we do a big Q&A skype session. I’m intrigued, but a bit skeptical of the logistics.
You’ve just given me a great idea for KMM, Darren – thanx!
We already had one of our blog readers suggest we do a big Q&A skype session. I’m intrigued, but a bit skeptical of the logistics.