More people are turning Internet telephony into podcasting—posting digital recordings on websites for downloads over Skype’s peer-to-peer Internet telephony network, according to some websites that report on news and information related to the popular VoiP network service.
These “Skypecasters” are said to be becoming a little more widespread in spite of having high levels of technical knowledge, but one Skypecast instruction site, SkypeJournal, warned that the implications could be very disruptive.
"Many Skypers want to record their Skype conversations and turn them into podcasts," the site said in a posting this week.
Built similarly to peer-to-peer file swap networks like KaZaA and Morpheus, Skype’s infrastructure is considered very amenable to turning Internet telephony into broadcasting systems. In fact, Skype’s infrastructure was developed by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, the masterminds behind the development of the KaZaA network structure.
Skype offers its VoIP software and Internet calls for free, as well as a premium service costing 2 cents a minute to call cell or landline telephones, and claims 29 million registered users for free computer-to-computer Net phone service.
Skypecasters are also reported to be pondering such projects as turning MP3 players into radio stations for Skype users to dial using their Skype lines, and even offering instructions on recording “a personal soap opera” and using Skype to distribute it on a massive scale.
Skype itself has no active input into these experiments with its system and structure, though the Luxembourg-based company makes some source code available to the public and thus encourages developers to experiment.
"We're aware of this and encourage developers to help facilitate it," Skype spokeswoman Kelly Larrabee told reporters. "It's a relatively complicated set-up that requires some technical sophistication and awareness of one's entire hardware and software environment."
