It'd be nice to have some sort of vu meter or glow to indicate who's talking like in a regular chat.

I'd have to agree. Without it, we're back 6+ years of technology to the old Roger Wilco days.

I agree. I'd like to see this feature, too.

Regarding the 'talking indicator' idea: The old VoxChat from about 10 years ago was a short-term runaway success and had both a key strength and a key weakness worth noting here (because I think it's really important for Skypecasts to succeed):

the key strength is that they relied on 'push-to-talk': some people moan about push-to-talk buttons but it can be made very simple with a 'sticky key' (that the moderator can override), and has the great advantage of making the 'talking indicator' trivial to implement; for very large discussion rooms, it is also a great way to observe the ebb-and-flow of the discussion, since you always know who is talking

the key weakness that ultimately killed them was sound-card dependency and lots of audio debugging nightmares... which nowadays are mostly resolved on modern machines.. moreover Skype has made it a lot simpler for people to test and setup! The reason I mention this weakness is that you just need be careful that every Skypecast isn't 'sunk' by poor audio, intrusive lurkers, lots of background noise because of too many people speaking at once,etc.: *MOST* of these problems can be eliminated by switching to a push-to-talk style.... which is why I mention it...

at the very least, push-to-talk ought to be a moderator option when the Skypecast is created! Anyway, congratulations to the team for some great stuff!!
-Marc

*MOST* of these problems can be eliminated by switching to a push-to-talk style.... which is why I mention it...

oops forgot to say the obvious, namely I'm assuming a similar interface deals with the queuing system, i.e. push-to-raise-hand-THEN-talk-if-moderator-grants-it.

Although you can already 'request to speak' right now, I think the problem is simply that too many open mics leads to a very poor end-user experience, no matter what clever audio tricks are deployed by Skype.

Push-to-queue = push-to-talk (when granted) solves a lot of these problems