It’s that time of year when a few thousand bloggers and pundits offer up predictions for the year ahead. I don’t do it. In July 2004, I would never have been able to predict podcasting, which started gaining visibility the following month. These days, making predictions is just an opportunity to look stupid. You’ll either miss the boat entirely or foresee the obvious (e.g., a sharp rise in vidcasting).

Take, for example, Skypecasting Television. Never heard of it? Me neither, until yesterday. It’s another introduction into the channel space I never would have been able to predict. Here’s the lowdown:

Skypecasting TV taps into Skype or Yahoo! Messenger to rebroadcast video over the net. TV networks should worry: It gets around the current limitations that keep people in Europe from watching the latest season of shows like “24.” (According to Neville Hobson, viewers in The Netherlands are a season behind the U.S.) In other words, it’s a new salvo in the control vs. open-access battle between consumers and mainstream media.

From a business communication standpoint, it could be a way to deliver video content to target audiences without the expense usually associated with such an effort. I say “could be” because I’m still trying to wrap my mind around the concept. It works with a bit of freeweare called Splitcam. According to a post by Davis Freeberg, “Splitcam can split a video file into 64 different channels that internet users could then stream over the net.” It works over Skype (with its new video enhancement) and Yahoo! Messenger (which has had video capability for a long time now).

P2P networks let you download video and watch at your leisure, so Freeberg doesn’t see it gaining too much traction with the general public. But for organizations that want to present something to a small audience at a designated time, it could be a solution that provides better quality than streaming and much lower cost than closed-circuit TV. It could even work inside a firewall on an intranet.

Freeberg was quoting a post from Andy Abromson, at VOIP Watch (interestingly, I saw this post yesterday but it seems to be gone today—fortunately, I can quote it from Freeberg’s write-up):

Basically when you add in encryption that Skype already has it becomes impossible to know what’s going through the pipe. That means someone in London could in effect Skypecast English Premiere League Football to an ex-pat in the USA. Vice versa someone here in the USA could Skypecast NBA basketball, which has rights deals in other parts of the world, virtually anywhere.

For Hollywood this is akin to Kazaa or LimeWire in many ways. But much worse. First Skype makes things easy. Like a Mac almost. So with TV shows seen at least one year behind in foreign markets the Skypecasting market could blow holes in that approach very quickly. Given the growth of broadband around the world Skype could become the illegal distribution pipe with a technology like the one described by Stuart, or someone else’s. Now with Video and codecs geared for it already resident in Skype, the issue is no longer if, but when.

Freeberg likes the idea of watching the East Coast broadcast of a TV show like Survivor three hours earlier than he’d get it on the West Coast. As a business communicator, I’m more interested in the potential for communicators.

But who would have predicted this a month ago?